Manifesto for a Modern Management: The Importance of Play
Mark Dodgson
Management, as it is commonly practiced and taught today, is not fit for purpose. More appropriate for a previous age, it fails to deal with the problems of a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) and where the ubiquity, connectivity and speed of adoption of digital technologies profoundly affects everyone. At this time, there is little point in strategies as plans and standardised management toolkits believed to be applicable in all circumstances. Instead, managers need to be continually attuned to and prepared for innovation and change and this can be achieved by increased playfulness.
Play is an organization’s adaptive wildcard in a turbulent world. It is characterised by learning and adapting, exploring and experimenting, and is stimulated when people express their freedom by pursuing new ideas and having fun at work. Play is natural, easy and enjoyable, and while it encourages collaborative team work it can also enhance competitiveness and stretch people to do things they might not imagined themselves capable. It is encouraged by workplaces that encourage interactions and serendipitous connections, are visually stimulating, and full of artefacts and tools that promote conversations. Playfulness requires cultures that support play, organizational processes that encourage and connect thinking, playing and doing, and personal behaviours that support play by displaying craft, grace, fortitude and ambition.
Cultures
Culture is the “way we do things around here”: embedded and shared beliefs that guide decisions and practices. It is more important in determining outcomes than strategy, and most effective in present times when it stimulates and rewards play in an organization. As children we learn through play, and the same applies to organizations. Ideas about the ‘learning organization’ have periodically received much attention, but they have not linked learning and play, and how the former is encouraged by the latter. Learning occurs naturally through repetition - doing existing things leads to continual improvements - and this is relatively automatic. Organizations learn to do new things and by reflecting on how to learn more effectively in the future, and such innovation, change and adaptation is likely to be challenging. Surrounded by VUCA and rapid technological changes, the only sustainable means of survival is to have options for different futures, and these are created and realised through an organization’s ability to learn and play.
Organizations often struggle to play and learn to do new things because of the organizational permafrost and innovation antibodies within them. The former is the layer of management and supervisors deeply wedded to existing practices. Their careers have depended on allegiance to, and current incentives and rewards are directed towards the maintenance of, the status quo. The latter is the plethora of policies and procedures that standardize, homogenize and regulate organizational behaviour: “we can’t do that, it hasn’t been done before”. “Hell”, said Edison, “there are no rules, here. We’re trying to achieve something”. Bureaucratic structures and processes can be helpful, but not if they abhor precedents and preclude time and resources being applied to exploring novelty and playfulness.
Leaders provide antidotes to these obstacles by continually reaffirming the importance of learning and innovation, and using Napoleon’s views on the role of the leader, by describing reality and providing hope. The reality to be described is VUCA and digital disruption, and the consequence of not responding to it is bankruptcy and redundancy. Hope is provided by giving people permission to get excited. Leaders tell those with energy and ideas that it is ok to circumvent the permafrost and fight the antibodies; that they have such people’s backs. They explain and demonstrate that it is ok to have tried and failed (though not repetitively), that risk is tolerated and if you are an innovative organization you will experience failure. They will go so far as to say if you are not regularly failing, you are not trying hard enough. And leaders will ensure that, in a VUCA world, failure is simply an opportunity to pivot in new directions.
As well as promoting competition, a playful culture is a collaborative culture. It is one where it is recognized that the majority of helpful answers to problems lie outside of the organization, and that siloes within the organization are anathema to innovation. In collaborative cultures trust is extended to trustworthy people and organizations, reducing the costs of transactions and enhancing the effectiveness of communications and exchanges. Innovation occurs when people and organizations with different backgrounds play together.
Processes
Organizational processes for innovation and change involve encouraging and connecting thinking, playing and doing. Thinking involves searching for new ideas, internally and externally and in combination of them both. Thinking requires bold and imaginative quests for knowledge that are both wide and deep, and the ability to combine the insights of those with compendious understanding of specific fields with generalists skilled at seeing connections between areas of expertise: joining “I”-shaped and “T”-shaped people. It involves exploring in novel and uncomfortable domains, and the creative abrasion between people with different ideas and experiences. It can be disciplined and structured or intuitive and emergent, guided by deductive or inductive reasoning, and involves people from all disciplinary, professional and skilled backgrounds.
Playful processes prototype, test and tinker with ideas, assess their merit and shape their eventual form. They connect thinking with doing, and turn options into realities. Playing involves selecting from within a broader population of ideas those that best address real problems and realise the opportunities to add value for customers and clients. Organizations, if their people are any good, will usually have more ideas than they have the scope to deal with, and their selection processes help make choices about what to do and what not to do, not simply on the basis of dispassionate data, but through the iterative and emergent interactions between what is possible and what is needed.
Doing is about applying new ideas, making them useful in practice. Innovations are but ideas with potential until they are turned into practical applications and changes. Here, preparations are needed for operations, production and delivery, for maintenance and after-sales service, and for data on performance to feed back into subsequent generations of innovations. The capacity to do has to inform the process of play to ensure that what is being designed can be made and delivered at an acceptable price. Do involves the propagation of the best ideas.
Digital technologies – “innovation technologies” – connect and intensify the think, play, do process. Failing quickly and cheaply is easier in bits than in atoms, and if the whole innovation process has a common digital platform, there is the opportunity for better integration between all the organizational contributors to change. Digital technologies allow for the testing, prototyping and fooling around with ideas, speedily and without cost or harm, to see which have the greatest currency.
A think, play, do process is enhanced and informed by digital technologies but not mastered by them. The whole range of innovation technologies – such as design tools, robots, AI, and machine learning – are important contributors, but still adjuncts, to the imagination, creativity, intuition, and gut feelings of experienced and knowledgeable people. Machines can learn and perform extraordinarily complex tasks well, but they cannot replicate the magic of seeing in the mind’s eye, feel the motivating excitement of success and anguish of failure, and experience the freedom, fun and joy of play.
Behaviours
A number of personal behaviours encourage play. These include grace, which essentially is an absence of hubris, a belief that no-one has all the answers and everyone has something to contribute. Grace builds empathy and loyalty with colleagues, stakeholders, clients and audiences through personal generosity and warmth. Grace inspires, influences and animates the managerial behaviours necessary to survive the modern world. It involves:
Being respectful, trusting, encouraging and collaborative.
Displaying modesty and avoiding hubris.
Accepting constructive criticism.
Recognizing personal shortcomings and celebrating the abilities of others.
Crediting success to joint efforts, but taking responsibility for failure.
Craft is the ability to apply a novel idea and mould an answer to a problem when everything surrounding managers is complex and uncertain. Craft combines and balances the playfulness of experiment and intuition with the seriousness of expectation and intent. It is applied to the development of new products and services, solving organizational or business problems, and applied to tangible and intangible concerns. It is a skill and also a behaviour: one that continually seeks stylish outcomes and elegant solutions to problems. Craft frames, shapes and fashions managerial behaviour. It involves:
Expressing our creativity and utilizing our experience and knowledge towards outcomes that are rewarding for us and pleasing to others.
Having the occasion and tools to combine different abilities and perspectives and utilize and develop our skills.
Engaging with problems that interest us and are pleasurable in their solution and meaningful in their results.
Claiming with justification that what we do is a source of pride.
Fortitude is the resilience managers develop against the inevitable knocks they receive when they’re trying to change things, and the patience, energy and tenacity they have to maintain when things get difficult. Fortitude maintains, sustains and upholds the capacity to continuously adapt and learn and provides the ability to negotiate VUCA and digital disruption. It involves:
Moving the point at which we give up on schemes, and continuing further than we have in the past when things aren’t going so well.
Coping and adjusting when efforts turn out in unexpected ways.
Seeing failures as opportunities to learn and improve.
Ambition: the efforts to meet the expectations people have of themselves, including to achieve particular productive aims, such as solving a problem, building a product or a company, satiating their curiosity, or contributing to the society of which they are a part. It reflects the appreciation that making money for money’s sake is shallow in its own right and true rewards come when managers combine personal advance with improvements in the communities of which they are a part. The pursuit of social advance is a better motivator than pursuit of profit. Passions are better aroused when one gives back and aims to leave a proud legacy. Ambition motivates, encourages and adds reasons for playful learning. It involves:
Making sure our motivations and efforts, and those for whom we work, match our expectations of ourselves and what we want from life.
Having the right balance in our working life between its rewards in salary and status, and its contribution to family, community, and society.
Recognizing the great rewards that come from giving back to the societies and communities of which we are a part.
Organizations with playful cultures encourage these behaviours and may present them themselves: they can display resilience and fortitude and have ambitions for social progress.
This approach to management does not deny the importance of discipline and efficiency, but contends that these should not have the ubiquitous currency that they had in the more predictable and stable industrial age. Repetition and compliance is conducted far more effectively by machines than people. The philosophy and language of management in the modern age should also be about playfulness, organizational slack, the freedom to explore and experiment, tolerance of failure, and perhaps most important of all, especially as Millennials come to dominate the workforce, fun.
[i] The origin of many of these ideas can be found in two key publications: Dodgson, M., Gann, D. and Salter, A. (2005), Think, Play, Do: Innovation and Organization, Oxford, Oxford University Press and Dodgson, M. and Gann, D. The Playful Entrepreneur: How to Adapt and Thrive in Uncertain Times, M. Dodgson and D. Gann, Yale University Press, 2018.