Play hard, have fun...& be creative!!

I’m not one for New Year resolutions, so this is more of a philosophy and an approach that I will be using this year.

My thoughts materialised over the festive season whilst having time to reflect on what had been a very positive and productive second half of 2014. You will of course have heard the term in business “Work hard, play hard”, well in just two weeks during last summer I changed my opinion of this ideal.

Here’s my story…

Last year I went on holiday with my family (my wife, our two children and my parents), something that we had not done for a year or so due to me setting up my business and lack of any serious funds.

We had two weeks away on the idyllic Isle of Wight staying in a self catering (Wi-Fi enabled) cottage and can honestly say this was one of the best holidays that I have ever had. What is more, the rest of the family were in agreement and still talking about it over Christmas dinner. There were many factors that made it so great, but I mostly attribute the huge amounts of fun we had to the creativity, energy and enthusiasm of my two children.

For weeks prior to the holiday they had shut themselves away and had been designing what we were soon to find out was called The Isle of Wight Challenge. I had not seen them so excited about going on holiday for years, not since they were very young (they are now aged 14 and 11 years respectively).

The challenge they created was in fact a series of 10 games that we would play once a day (designed that way to have two rest days and the two days spent travelling) over the two weeks and would bring the family together as a unit, like never before. We were paired off prior to the holiday and were asked to create some team names. So, my father and I became team Dad’s Athletic, my wife and my mother teamed up to become Mum’s United and the two children Small and Mighty. This was a fun exercise in itself and enabled us to already be engaged with the challenge before we had even set foot on the island.

Game one was Tie ‘Em and played against the clock with each team taking it in turn and involved one member from the team sorting pairs of socks before passing them to the other team member. Sounds easy right? Of course not, the socks were all mixed up and some of them contained foreign objects (hair clips, hair bands and such like…all my daughters obviously), which needed removing before the pairing process. The socks then required depositing in the finishing receptacle (an empty waste bin) by the second team member. Once all three teams had taken a turn and times recorded, the winners were the team who recorded the quickest time…simple!!

What followed next was also great fun and where the full extent of the children’s creativity really shone through. Simply put, we had an Olympic style award ceremony with gold, sliver and bronze medals (all hand made) awarded to the theme tune of the winning team (which was “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen for Dad’s Athletic...of course).

As the days slowly rolled on and we competed and completed the various challenges, the excitement and enthusiasm for the games grew and truly became something to look forward to each day. Amazingly simple games such as Chinese Card Pass (pictured: a game played with chopsticks, a playing card and a stopwatch) and Stack ‘Em High (a stacking game with Jenga style wooden blocks) were played and award ceremonies held. Sometimes to the amusement of the neighbours if we were outside, or passers by due to the front door being ajar on a warm summers evening.

So, where am I going with this? How will it improve my team’s productivity, where does this fit with my business development plans and how will this improve my creativity?

Well the first thing to say is that I returned from the holiday completely re-energised and with my creative juices well and truly topped up. I have subsequently been able to apply some of the things my children reminded me of (and some new things that I learned) to my own way of working and have deployed them during my business practices. I have been encouraging workshop participants to be playful and have fun and had one group making paper aeroplanes and building spaghetti towers during a particularly engaging and interactive session. Playing and having fun together (everyone does this as a child naturally) is an important part of the creative process, without which totally new ideas cannot be generated and solutions to challenging problems cannot be found. On top of that, when we laugh and have fun the body releases endorphins, which are a natural stimulant and make us feel good…not a bad thing at all.

Amazingly, you don’t need technology to have fun (that will burst a few people’s bubble) either. At the start of the story I mentioned we stayed in a cottage with Wi-Fi on the island and I counted that we had at least 10 Wi-Fi enabled devices (the usual smartphones, iPads and Kindles etc.) with us. Not once during the all the challenges did we use, or even need to use, any of these devices. In fact, the children even took an old stopwatch with them to use on the challenges and resisted the temptation to use the clock, stopwatch and/or countdown timer that will be on nearly every one of the devices we had at our disposal.

Keeping things simple, having good forward planning and using all available resources were my key takeaways from the whole challenge, all of which are very much prevalent in the overall creative process. Not forgetting of course the competitive nature of the experience, the tokens and rewards for our efforts, which is something that people who appreciate Gamification methodology will know all about.

My recommendations…

Playing and having fun together is such a simple and rewarding thing to do and I would encourage you to find a way to re-introduce playful activities into your daily work and family lives. The approach should be simple and collaborative…after all, half the fun is generating ideas with someone else in the first place!!

Please feel free to use our game examples, or create and prototype some of your own.

Alternatively if you would like help with designing some, or delivering a playful and thought provoking creative session, then feel free to connect and we can discuss this with you.

Play hard, have fun…and be creative!!

Mark