Playful Leadership is... at the PLA meeting November 2022

We had one of our biannual Playful Learning Association meetings last week in Huddersfield and I did a "Playful Leadership is..." exercise, so sharing the results here for convenience!

One group stamped a "headline" thing about Playful Leadership on one side of the card, then a separate group used that as a prompt for more detail on the other side. (Limited time, space, materials for the "headline" phrase or word, more time and space to write on the back!)

All the cards can be seen in a Google Photos album, but I've also tried to transcribe the text below

Playful Leadership is:	Explanation:
Subversive	It may subvert roles And structures And expectations And processes And boundaries And relations And pedagogy And play
Dangerous	So run, hide, tell
Projecting play into work	Focusses on the playful aspect of work Has a strong intent Projecting = role modelling
Egalitarian	Power balances, mutual respect between leader and team – creates space for creativity. Everyone takes ownership for the direction. Choose your own adventure (but how does this work to … illegible)
A state of mind	A Playful Attitude. Agency – you choose to. You have to want to be playful. Persuasion – changing the state of mind of others.
Messyness	Messy talk creates opportunity for emerging ideas. (Article was referenced in explanation for messy talk)
Creating space	A chance to breathe, pause, & reflect. Mindfully, socially, and bodily.
Set of symbols – multiple ?, !, &, #	Questioning, inclusive, and staying sharp.
The witches brew in the cauldron of knowledge	“Add some spice” to existing practice. Stirring up habits and stagnant practice.
The unexpected	Who is it unexpected for? Facilitator needs to be comfortable. Breaks auto pilot of bad teaching. Unexpected changes in boundaries / changes who is “in charge”?
Striking a pose.	Being unashamed of your authentic self (ridicule is nothing to be scared of)
Boring (also included stamps of ice creams and flying hearts)	About making the boring not boring. Because ice cream makes everything not boring. The BORING button.
Inclusion	Everyone is invited and involved in the play.

The last round I added an extra limiter for, which they struggled with more, limiting the cards to a particular aspect of playful leadership, either Staff Development, Recruitment, or Performance Management:

Playful Leadership (in recruitment) is.. NEW	Eyes Perspectives Backgrounds Creative approaches Challenges Possibilities
Playful Leadership (in recruitment) is.. RO(U)LE BREAKING	The power of playfulness is to disrupt, transform, add ambiguity to rules/roles – thus breaking standards. Emphasising the boundary breaking in recruitment processes exploring rules/roles as dynamic / flexible.
Playful Leadership (in recruitment) is.. CREATIVE ASSESSMENT	Introducing exciting / fun / collaborative / interactive tasks to assess key competencies for role. Setting expectations that unexpected / imaginative / unique responses are valued. Encouraging different behaviours to be demonstrated. [Is it exclusionary to those less playful?]
Playful Leadership (in Performance Management) is.. CORE CONDITIONS (making sense of things, Rogers)	Go back in time and fix the things you didn’t get right the first time. (Note – this was verbally explained that they were playing with the idea of Steve Rogers in the Avengers films.)
Playful Leadership (in Performance Management) is.. STORY	Their career path is their own story. Every story has a beginning and an end. Where the person is now, where they want to be / should be. Performance management is how to get there – see other card! (Note – this refers to “collective imagination card)
Playful Leadership (in Performance Management) is.. COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION	Joint negotiating on the persons destination and steps to get there – see also: STORY
Playful Leadership (in Staff Development) is… Symbols only for this one, mustache, kitten/dog faces, ice cream	Shrug Stamp.
Playful Leadership (in Staff Development) is… Symbols only for this one, 2 mustaches with a question mark in the middle.	Interactively differently. Even during Movember.

The core of Playful Leadership?

Photo from https://foto.wuestenigel.com/the-word-leadership-with-construction-workers-on-white-background/ under a CC-BY licence 

I think I’m finally starting to get my head around what I mean when I think of “Playful Leadership”*.

First of all, it’s not about playing ourselves as “leaders”, it’s not about making others play either, but more about setting environments, structures, enablers, that mean that other people are free to feel more playful, so that play may emerge naturally in them, when it makes sense to do so. A working definition for me (which will change over time, I’m sure!) might be:

Playful Leadership is not primarily playing ourselves, but growing playfulness in others.

We can play of course, but I'd say it doesn't have to be the centre of what we do - the important bit is enabling play to emerge in others, the focus is on them, not ourselves. Not everything we do needs to include aspects of play, but I think it’s important that what we do doesn’t kill play. We don’t need to create games or play activities that our teams, or followers, or employees are encouraged to do, we need to enable play to emerge and encourage it to flourish. So it’s definitely not about what a friend (Hi Mathias!) called “Playwashing”, which at it’s worst might drag employees to social events, or promote companies as playful because they have a table tennis table in reception, while expecting them to work ridiculously long hours, try to meet unrealistic targets, and be vulnerable to being fired if they disagree with the boss. It’s more about creating places of psychological safety, teams where you can trust your colleagues and boss, where you can experiment and fail safely, be creative, play to your strengths, be silly at times, have fun, feel like you (as part of a team) have strong elements of control over your work, and generally be in a place where play will naturally tend to emerge (and be valued).

There are probably 3 areas to think about around Playful Leadership.

The first area covers types of playful behaviours that emerge in a team that bring the sort of benefits that we’d expect (increased creativity, better productivity, better mental health, etc., etc.) that lots of people have written about. If we expect them to happen, we’ll probably recognise things as play in here, friendly challenges, humour, people going off to a yoga class together, whatever play the team feels happy with emerging that we can recognise, support, help to grow… but probably not initiate too many of them.

The second area are things we can do that help that playfulness to emerge in teams – which might not look like play in themselves. Things like helping make shared team values explicit (and acted on), setting clear boundaries (this is what the organisation expects, so use those as “constraints” to work within), making physical and virtual workspaces conducive to great teambuilding / working. Sometimes these things will look like the opposite of play (e.g. dealing with “underperformance”), but as long as they are done in a positive, enabling way, they aren’t – e.g. NOT having frank, serious discussions with a member of staff who is letting the team down in some way would damage playfulness.

The third area are things that are explicitly anti-play – disablers, rather than enablers. We should avoid doing them, but probably also need to watch out for them and to try and protect our teams from them as much as we can. Bullying, controlling behaviour, unnecessary secrecy, favouritism (the list could go on…) would tend to kill the environment needed for a team to feel playful, and for us all to feel the benefits that happen when play emerges from that. As a playful leader, as well as avoiding these behaviours ourselves, to some extent we often have to act as a shield from others “anti-play” behaviours, which can make us feel anything but playful ourselves.

I’ll hopefully develop this more in the near future, digging deeper into the 3 areas above, perhaps with examples of what playful leader type behaviour might look like in different situations? I’ll also link it to some more leadership models that are out there already that have aspects of psychological safety, perhaps some elements of playfulness about them too, but which don’t really focus on play or playfulness at their core.

 

 *It could, I suppose, also be playful management, but “management” tends to have strong implicit aspects of control, of direct line management against targets, etc. I believe there should be a strong leadership aspect to management, but “management” isn’t necessarily leadership. So I’m using “leadership” here, which can include (to me) positive, people-centred management, but isn’t exclusively that.

Playful leadership and performance issues

 Just a quick, half formed idea…

How do we deal with performance issues with staff if we’re trying to be a playful leader or manager? Can we be playful?

This could be seen as boundary setting, defining the edges of the magic circle, the constraints, the rules that everyone agrees to, that then allows play to happen elsewhere.

It doesn’t have to be unplayful to tell people they aren’t performing how we’d like, it can be this that ALLOWS play to continue rather than being stopped by the person who doesn’t do what the team wants or expects?  As long as they operate within a playful environment to ‘improve’, then it fits the overal playful approach perhaps?

It might even be that pointing out the rules, the expectations of other players, help people to realise that they’d be better off playing elsewhere, and that should be seen as fine too? We shouldn’t have to desire playing with the same group of people all the time, and as long as people are supported, it’s fine for some to want to go and work elsewhere with a new bunch of players, as long as it’s a positive choice, not a negative one?

EDITED from here on...

I'm aware this is very vague, so I've added a quick video below that might confuse things even more, but probably suggests where I'm going with any playful leadership model. 

1) An environment / community / workplace where we're doing very obviously playful things and you can see play happening.

2) A set of behaviours that we should be avoiding as they are antithetical to play

3) What I was trying to say above, which is a set of behaviours and tools that don't look like play, but are required in our toolkit to support the play in happening.

Which I (probably quite confusingly) show in the video below using paper, a sharpies, some playpeople, all together showing the boat of play (1) being hammered by bad weather (2) and supported by a body of water / behaviours (3).

Playful Management, players, and NPCs

Following on from some ponderings about Playful Leadership the other day, and a subtle but important realisation I had... I was thinking about how that came out in my management style and why I sometimes restricted reportees a lot more than at other times.

Most of the time I tend to be quite open and flexible in how I manage people - I give them lots of freedom to do things the way they feel is best. 

In terms of play, I try to set (as clearly as I can), the winning conditions - or at least the end point - of the game.

There are some rules that always exist around the workplace, both explicitly laid out, and implicit in the culture we try to inculcate, but I try to give a lot of flexibility in how they play that game. I try to support them in "winning" (or at least finishing) the game, or the task I've set them, but I'm rarely explicit in how they should do that. 

So I'm often more of a coach and expert advisor than anything else - I try to help people develop the skills to complete tasks in the way that they think is best, pointing out rules of the game they may have missed or mis-interpreted, but rarely telling them what move to make next.

Sometimes, however, I have to interfere a lot more - I have to be very explicit about what they can and can't do, about the approaches they should take to a particular tasks. I wonder if this is when I see the task in certain ways - when the person I manage isn't one of the main characters (even though they may think they are), but more of an NPC. They need to follow a much restricted path than normal, as it's about aiding the main characters arc, not theirs! It's my job as the manager to see these intersecting priorities, tasks, games(!), that are going on and try to make sure that members of our team play the appropriate role. To also see whether they are on a huge group quest, where we need to balance lots of demands, or in a little mini game to the side that is largely just about them.

That's hard on them sometimes - it's my job to have the overview, to see how things fit together, but some people will always see themselves as the main character, never the supporting one, or even the NPC. They can find it hard to see the bigger picture, as it's not really their role to do that, and feel like I'm imposing strange ways of doing things. Worse still, they can feel like I'm too vague sometimes, and too restrictive in others, but not understand why that is. 

They might also feel I'm being unfair when I point out "rules of the game they may have missed or mis-interpreted" (see above), as they are rules they don't recognise, and might not agree with.

I'm not 100% what I've said above in this post is true (for me), I'm just working things out as I type this, but I think there is an element of truth in it at least. This means I probably need to be more explicit in setting out when we set off on tasks and projects, the amount of freedom they have and why. Whether they are the main character, or a supporting one (or even an NPC) - but not using that language of course! 

It's complicated as well by the fact that they can be the main character, freely skipping across the countryside, doing things as they feel is best, and not realise they've stepped into a minefield - they were fine up to that point, but as soon as they've gone into dangerous ground, I need to be more explicit about what they do next. They'll resent this - why shouldn't they skip across the lovely grass? They may object to me telling them the exact path to take next - after all, they haven't been blown up yet! But as the manager, it's up to me to recognise the risks and have the tools to extract us all as safely as possible. Again, I need to consider how I flag these things up effectively, how do I interfere when I need to, without killing the playfulness and freedom that they'll normally have?

Playful Leadership Vague Thoughts

   

 (This is a CC-0 image that came up in a quick search for "playful leadership" - don't know about you lot, but it doesn't look that playful to me!)

For several years I’ve tried to pin down what I mean by playful leadership, and I haven’t been able to do it. I’ve also been struggling to be playful recently, probably not helped by living through a global pandemic, which hasn’t particularly helped me articulate what I mean when I think of playful leadership.

I’ve read lots of leadership and management books and articles, as well as plenty of stuff on play and games. Sometimes I feel like I’m starting to get somewhere, when an idea or model triggers a small “a-ha” moment, but then I fail to pull it together into any sort of coherent whole.

Part of this could be the temptation to pin these things down into neat models, or a clear set of steps (“5 steps to playful leadership!”), which we can follow and magically become a “playful leader”. None of these models, or steps, or whatever I found seemed quite right to me, even when I found several that seemed to touch on play – they’d sometimes have play as an important element, but perhaps not quite at their core, or reflecting how I felt about play and leadership. I also struggled to mash some of these different leadership models together, as I couldn’t successfully pull out their more playful aspects to form any sort of coherent whole.

Then, while in a very low mood and generally struggling, I had an important realisation. What I think of as playful leadership is really about encouraging a playful mindset in others. It helps if I play too, but I don’t need to all the time – the important thing is that I can enable others to play.

One of the components of my management style at work that is quite important to me is (trying to) protect colleagues from institutional politics, from micro-management of others, from unnecessary blame and retribution when things go wrong. In effect, these are also ways I try to gently shift the workplace culture towards giving permission to try things and fail. To play with different ways of doing things, knowing that they will be allowed (encouraged) to do so, and that as long as they don’t cause harm, it doesn’t matter if there is no immediate benefit either – as they can learn from that experience and try something else next time that might work better.

So my evolving understanding of my particular flavour of playful leadership probably has something like this at its core:

Helping others to be more playful.

The bits that stood out for my in other play and management texts, probably did so as they were potential enablers for that to happen. It’s ok that none of them were complete answers for me, and may even have been contradictory. But all of them could be tools that help take me part-way to being a playful leader – as it’s not a set way for me to act, but the impact I have on others.

I don’t need a 7 step method, or 4 zones of playful leadership, or anything else that pretends to be a complete answer. What I need is a clear idea of what I’m trying to achieve, and then a kit bag full of possible tools to help.

I don’t need a routeplan and detailed map to follow the “right” path. I need a compass, maybe a vague map, a penknife, a change of clothes, etc., so that we can find a good enough route that depends on the people present at the time, where they need to get to, and have some help for the challenges we need to overcome together. It doesn’t matter which things we need from that kit bag, or the exact route, just that we have a selection of tools that are available to use if we need to.

So what sort of things do we need in our kit bag? What goodies can help to enable a playful attitude, so I can be my sort of playful leader? I’ll have to start thinking in that way over the next few months and see if I can pull something useful together!