Hide or seek?

If you search online for the ‘benefits of play’ you’ll be presented with pages and pages of results about its importance… in children: in child development. In socialising and building confidence and developing motor skills. And we know this. We’re pretty comfortable with the idea of kids and play. But then we seem to forget the huge benefits that we know creativity, experimentation, role play, sharing and compromising and cooperating bring, when we apply the same principles to adults.

The internet is jumping with wise words about play, and so I won’t waste the opportunity to repeat them: “Play is the highest form of research” said Albert Einstein, apparently. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing,” chimes George Bernard Shaw.

Play, by definition, is hard to define. As much as anything, because it’s not focused on an end goal – and this is key. It’s purposeless – all-consuming.

In our productivity-driven culture, is play seen as unproductive?

“We’re channelled into more structured directions as an adult,” says Dr Alyea Sandovar, gamification expert and co-founder of the Playful Creative Summit. “Part of it begins with school, and then also work. We’re pushed towards a certain way to be a functional adult on the planet to survive and be successful. The way those social structures are set up removes play as part of the equation – people are conditioned out of their innate playfulness. When adults play, we’re more likely to sit down and watch TV, grab a wine or a beer. We still socialise, but except for the occasional karaoke or game nights – it sort of gets erased because of our social structures.”

Alyea’s relationship with play goes back to summer holidays with her grandma in the Colombian city of Medellin. “She would always play a game with us – we’d have to solve puzzles or answer questions before our afternoon snack, and we’d win a piece of fruit. I was a terrible student, but began to realise that I was smart, through playing her games.” Play has much to teach us about ourselves.

Working as a clinical psychologist in California, Alyea later began to cook and play games with her clients, which transformed her experience of the practice.

Riff

There are lots of things we do as adults which riff on things we’ve played at as kids, from board games and sport to crafting and dancing – but our tendency to focus on their benefits can take them away from the play realm.

On some level at least, we’re coming round to the idea. Adult colouring books have exploded in lockdown – a distraction; a focus and a creative pursuit. Jigsaws have boomed. There’s an element of lockdown living that has stripped things back to the basics – the small interventions that keep us sane and make us happier.

But play continues to have huge advantages for us as adults. It does a stack of tangible things, from relieving stress by flooding our bodies with endorphins; improving brain function and preventing memory problems, to boosting creativity; improving and deepening our connections with others, teaching us to cooperate, and keeps us feeling young. And if they all sound far too benefit-focused to genuinely classify as playful, then that’s just my adult brain trying to square the circle and show you how productive it can make you.

And doesn’t that dexterity (physical and mental) – that capacity to learn and explore – sound exactly like the sort of thing we need? It’s almost like play is an in-built way of exploring new things, and doing things differently.

As adults, we pursue the holy grail of creativity. But most of us wouldn’t step beyond it to play. Would we? David Chislett is Alyea’s co-founder at the Playful Creative Summit. “You can’t be playful without being creative,” he says. “You need to let go of certainty – play is very non-goal directed. It’s hard to decide where one starts and the other one ends…” But we need it. Perhaps now more than ever.

“If you look at what is happening to our work – the rate of change is fuelled by technology and the polarisation of our world – versus our ability to adapt and change and grow,” he says. “We struggle with this fundamental ability to change without creativity. We need to create something, otherwise how do we know what we want to change into? We’ve been trying to make human beings behave like machines and run on limited lines and make binary decisions – and this is payback. People are amazed when you make choices that aren’t binary – they don’t understand it. Our capacity for dealing with ambitious and complex situations has been stunted by the way we are educated and socialised,” he says.

Plenty would agree with his sentiments on the polarisation we see around us, whether polical or environmental. (And then some others would disagree). So have we lost our ability to question; to explore? Or, even, to empathise, happy with the absolutely certainty of our opinions?

“We all need to be better at being comfortable with being uncomfortable. With being outside our comfort zones,” says Muyiwa Fasakin. He is an advisory board member for the UN World Creativity and Innovation Day and founder of World Change Summit, specialising in business creativity.

“We must have a childlike mindset to be in the journey of creativity,” he says. “The moment you stop learning, you start dying; you stop growing. Learning affects your growth or movement in life. The problem is that, when you get to a particular age, you think you know many things, but it’s a lie. Children can be very curious – they want to know, because they know that they don’t know.

If you don’t have the childlike mind, you won’t know as much as you need to know in this world.” Between 50% and 60% of people reduce how often they ask ‘why?’ as they grow, he estimates. “But the truth is, we don’t really know as much as we think we know.”

Light up the brain

Dr Stuart Brown is the founder of the National Institute for Play and author of the book Play. He’s spent decades studying play, in everyone from prisoners and Nobel Prize winners to artists and business leaders, showing that play is anything but trivial. He doesn’t agree with theories that play is a rehearsal for adult life – it has a biological place, he says, which is just as significant to our functioning as our sleep, dreams and nutrition. “It’s hugely important in learning and crafting the brain – not just something you do in your spare time.”

Dr Brown agrees that play is the means by which we prepare for the unexpected, and find new solutions. “Play is practical,” he says in his 2009 Ted talk. “It encourages problem solving” that is born of our natural curiosity and thirst for exploration – and play creates the opportunity for safe exploration. “Nothing lights up the brain like play,” he says, noting how it helps develop our contextual memory. “It could also be pretty important for our survival,” he adds, citing a study where rats who’d learnt to play came out of hiding from a threatening situation. Those that didn’t stayed hidden and starved.

Sometimes it is the lightness of play – precisely its purposeless-ness – that succeeds. “Play and laughter are universal, they’re so natural to us. We learn by playing. Laughter and play are so spontaneous – even without understanding the same language,” says Juan David Garzon, a Utrecht-based music educator. His aim is to facilitate social change, inclusion and intercultural communication through improvisation, sound and play. Moving to Germany, he learnt German alongside refugees from the Middle East, through songs and making music, with the help of local children. “It took down the barrier of the teacher and the student.” he says, “We were all learning and getting to discover this new culture.”

“Music can be a way to establish bonds,” he insists. “Bringing people together to sing together is a special power… how many voices can keep one note sustained? Different actors of the choir can breathe and come back to the note. It’s a sustained effort that only happens through collective activity. It’s an example of the same thing happening at a society level. Everyone needs to breathe and you all play your part, rejoining when you’re ready. It’s a great metaphor for conflict and strife.”

His work with Musicians without Borders in El Salvador is part of training process for school music teachers. Juan and his colleagues are working with more than 100 teachers on peace-building through music, supporting communities that have endured armed conflict or other manifestations of violence, organised crime gangs and generalised aggression. “Music can be used to take control of the nervous system, and how you react to this vortex of violence that is going on,” he says. It’s not just a generalised ‘feelgood’ reaction – although we get that too. It’s our body’s physiological response.

Juan says that adults differ from culture to culture in their approach to play and new learning journeys. “It really is a cultural thing. Some cultures are more open to problem solving and creativity. Many cultures are encouraged to always follow the same route from A to B to connect the dots and resolve the problem. We Colombians have a saying – ‘let’s find the curve of the stick. It means that you have to follow and adapt to the imperfection of the stick. When you don’t know what you’re facing, we just follow the curve and adapt to the situation. Maybe we’re more inclined to test and to fail and to succeed? Other cultures I’ve worked with feel more comfortable when they can follow steps, because they’ve already discovered and tested them and these steps work. Stepping out of that is for many people very challenging. I think they love me because of that. They just think that I’m this weird animal,” he laughs. “But play is irresistible. You can’t avoid it for too long.”

Failure is instructive

I’m at pains not to take the ‘fun’ element out of play, or make it too ‘productive’. But its impact on the way we think and interact has a host of benefits for us as adults.

Muyiwa teaches creative intelligence to students in Nigeria. “I don’t really teach creativity,” he says, “but help people discover the creativity in them and bring it out… develop it. Because it’s there doesn’t mean that it’s functional – if you don’t engage your creativity, it won’t be functional.

He encourages businesses to ‘inject some creativity’ into their work in order to thrive. “You can’t be an inventor or innovator without creativity,” he insists. “Creativity is a necessary condition. But there are many reasons why people aren’t creative.” He lists a few:

1. Fear of failure as we grow from childhood to adulthood

2. People don’t want to make mistakes – “but if you doubled the rate at which you make mistakes and fail, you will arrive at creativity faster. Failure is instructive.”

3. We’re not curious. We don’t ask questions. People are satisfied with what is brought to them. “You can’t be creative if you’re used to minding your own business,” he says.

4. We don’t want to take risks, asking ourselves ‘what it if doesn’t come out well?’, instead of asking the reverse

Recognising our ability to do things differently is the thing that drives us forward – to pivot, innovate and, ultimately, to survive. “When you engage creativity you will make more profits,” he says. “It makes you relevant and distinctive – it gives you your competitive advantage.” If you’re struggling to engage your inner creative, he suggests a few questions to ask yourself. “‘How can I be creative?’ is not the question. You ARE creative – you should be asking yourself how can you engage the creativity?” Secondly, he suggests, “ask yourself ‘what can I do differently?’ – it’s not about what you do, it’s about how you sell it. Success in business comes from how, not what.”

This is where the Covid-19 pandemic has challenged us – in our capacity to cope with uncertainty. But has also brought unexpected and inspirational change. “Whether people like it or not, it’s moved them forward. It’s supposed to be a negative event, but it has pushed people forward – some didn’t want to move,” says Muyiwa.

Immediate context of the pandemic aside, David insists that it’s this mental agility that prepares us for life in the modern world. “Really, we need to let the machines do what we’ve been trying to do for last 100 years so that we can be fantastically creative and innovative across the board,” he argues. “We have an embarrassment of riches with regards to information – never in the history of humankind have we had so much information to make use of… But we’re unable to escape our confirmation bias because we’re not schooled in how to think. We’re schooled in how to select the right answer.

“I liken it to quantum physics versus Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics sees the world as a series of discrete things which act upon each other – cause and effect – whereas quantum physics is open ended. Everything is intertwined and we can’t separate one thing without impacting on the rest. And we’re locked in the Newtonian mindset. We can’t affect things without impacting the rest – we’re not exempt from those rules.”

(I bet you didn’t think you’d be reading about Newtonian versus quantum physics in a story about play?)

Nonetheless, says David. “Technology has changed everything except our approach, so we’re getting the same results, magnified by the use of technology. Let’s change the way we think so we can change the way we act and technology can make the world a better place.”

Creative change

And now, we have a decision to make. Everyone I speak to on the subject illustrates the transformative ability of creativity and play. So do we race to get back to ‘normal’ – to how things were? Or do we use our ability to explore, learn, challenge, share and emphasise to create something new? Something better? Because – productivity alert – you should never waste a crisis, we’re told.

“The possibility for change is there,” admits Alyea. “So much of the narrative of the last year or so has been our desire to change things.” There’s a recognition that the rules and structures we live by no longer work, for so many people. “Play helps us create a new story, or find a new way of creating new rules, that is different,” she says.

Has our time alone given us the opportunity to imagine a different way – as we did as children? “People have had to be isolated, forcing them to focus on things that matter, instead of things that were maybe superficial,” she says. “On the other hand, we need to find ways to continue to connect. We really do need human connection – it’s fine to have a connection over the phone or Zoom but we need physical bodies and human connection too. Finding ways to be playful with others is so important and we shouldn’t dismiss that. Any way in which it’s possible to get together and be playful is important.”

To that end, Alyea and David have been running a series of monthly playful creative pop-ups. “I didn’t realise how powerful it would be for people this year,” she admits. “But it’s shown me again the power of playfulness and creativity and how much people really need it.”

And we do need it. Not just to escape the uncomfortable, uncertain world we’re in. But because our world is uncomfortable and uncertain. We need tools to learn new ways to face the world. “Play and laughter are really natural to us humans.” says Juan. “Mammals from all species learn. Maybe we hide or discourage or cover some responses with other behaviours – but it’s always possible to bring back with the right environment. A safe space.” After all, learning to play could be the most important work we ever do.

Find out more about the Playful Creative Summit here: https://wciw.org/events/the-playful-creative-summit/