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Why Play Matters: The Case for Play in Organizational Transformation
Why Play Matters: The Case for Play in Organizational Transformation
Play and learning are critical to the process of organizational transformation. Although most people see play almost entirely in terms of recreation, this is just one aspect of play. This paper presents play as a form of metacommunication. From this perspective play is a means of: recuperation, reinforcement, testing and developing survival skills, and promoting creativity. Play potentially affects organizational behavior in three important ways: as an opportunity to learn and source of learning, as a rich source of innovation and as a potential source of critical feedback. It can also be a useful indicator of the health of an organizational system (Kristberg, 1985; Bradshaw, 1988).
Play has the most utility in situations where survival is threatened, as well as those featuring high levels of stress, uncertainty and chaos. —These attributes are common in transformational change (second order change) because it has diffuse effects on the whole organization and is nonlinear and relatively unpredictable. Less complex forms of organizational change such as organizational transition, process improvement and business process reengineering (BPR) are typically simpler and more manageable. They are characterized by change in one dimension, whereas transformation is multi-dimensional. Organizational transformation is not just about changes in behavior associated with a particular unit or workflow, rather it involves changes in fundamental assumptions of how things work, values (particularly about means), and habits of thought. Second-order change requires a change in worldview, not just behavior (Levy, 1986).
Play is an important aspect of learning in organizational transformations because this type of change requires people to adapt to survive. Healthy companies are open systems. That is to say that they interact with their environments. As with all open systems, raw materials and energy come into the organization from the environment, transformed within the organization, and are returned to the environment as a product or service. Aside from raw materials for transformation, information is a basic input for providing signals to the system about its environment and about its own functioning in relation to that environment. Negative feedback is the most basic kind of information a system can receive. It tells the system about deviations from its planned course and is necessary for self-correction. Unfortunately, there is no way to reasonably set and follow a prescribed plan for organizational transformation. Unexpected things happen. There are unintended consequences. Second order change is inherently chaotic and messy. It cannot be ‘engineered' or directed in a neat linear fashion because it is a nonlinear process in which a small change in one area can force major unpredictable changes in other areas.
Simple forms of change are often mislabeled for transformational change; and sometimes what is thought to be first order change is actually second order change. For example, the National Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPACT) unexpectedly induced second order change in a regional utility by effectively forcing it to compete in the national energy market. The Act plunged the utility into the world of retail sales with extraterritorial companies such as the Enron Corporation (US Energy Information Administration, 2011). In response, its structure and its policies had to be configured to allow competitors to rent its transmission lines so as to avoid giving an advantage to its own salespeople when selling power contracts. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) required that the transmission-related functions operations of the company had to be separated from its marketing functions to prevent marketers from having an unfair advantage by giving them access to critical information about energy and transmission system capacity. This change not only disrupted its operations, but also the professional and social relationships of employees who were used to working together collaboratively. They now had to limit personal interactions with each other and treat former colleagues in the same way they treated external customers.
This case illustrates an important between transformational change and other forms of organizational change. Transformation is typically a change in context (entry into a competitive environment, or a change in strategic direction or mission), while most organizational change is merely about content or discrete changes (Levy, 1986). Changes in content might include the streamlining of a specific process or the restructuring of a part of an organization. It is relatively straight forward, linear and manageable. What the utility experienced was a change in context--its competitive environment changed; and whether it recognized it or not, so did its identity. The organization had to change how it was perceived and to develop new strategies and modes of operation to adapt to new regulatory requirements, new competitors, and new customers. The organization had to create a sales force, had to see itself as a competitor on a national level, and had to adjust to not only transmitting its own electrical energy to customers, but also selling access to others for their transmissions. These changes produced far more than just changes of behavior they ultimately caused a change in being. The utility was no longer primarily an engineering company generating and transmitting wholesale power to retailers, it was now a utility selling power directly to public and private utilities. It was also now part of national electrical transmission grid selling access to its rapacious power marketers like Enron. Parts of the organization that once worked seamlessly now were required to wall themselves off from each other. The number and size of administered contracts increased radically. The people designated the "best and the brightest" were no longer the systems engineers like before the EPACT. Now they were the account executives. The change in the organization involved acquiring a new worldview. Pressure for changes in practice, attitudes, and values started the day the EPACT was implemented.
The massive changes that occur in organizations involved in transformation cause chaos and confusion in frontline employees. Adjusting successfully requires employees to pay attention to new things, acquire new information, and apply a different logic and on throughout the organization. Members of these organizations do not just change what they do in order to survive--they have to change how they think and act, as well as the nature of their relationships. Their work identities also change.
Culture and Play
Play is a cultural activity. It is a recreational and self-expressive aspect of cultural and personal behavior with important communicative, creative, esthetic, integrative, and therapeutic functions. Its degree of structuring varies widely from highly patterned and conventionalized arts and sports to experimental problem solving (Keesing, 1960; Schultz and Lavenda, 1995). It can be used as an assessment or diagnostic tool because different cultures play differently.
The book that popularized the applicability of anthropology to business, Corporate Cultures, presented play as "the creative side of corporate life [that] releases tension and encourages innovation" (Deal and Kennedy, 1982:62). The authors explained that, "despite the fact that it has no real purpose and no rules, play in its various forms (jokes, teasing, brainstorming, and strategizing) bonds people together, reduces conflict, and creates new visions and cultural values. By encouraging experimentation, it can help regenerate the culture" (Deal and Kennedy, 1982:62).
Play and Innovation
Play in the workplace is typically thought of in terms of recreation (e.g., games, banter, and joking), but play has always been associated with work. Work enables people to survive by providing them with a means of acquiring sustenance; and survival is one of the major forces that shape culture. Play has traditionally trained people in activities necessary for survival: fighting, hunting or running away when pursued. Today's work is the modern version of hunting and gathering; and just as in the past, playful exploration of the environment aids learning and allows for the development of behavioral versatility. Play also requires cooperation, which is of tremendous selective value.
The change and innovation resulting from play promotes adaptation. From an organizational development perspective, play is a critical means of experimentation and providing feedback about performance. If we think of play as a generalized form of behavioral openness, it is possible to clearly see its connection to learning and innovation. Play, then, is the ability "to do the same thing in different ways or different things in the same way" (Schultz and Lavenda, 1995:482). It requires a social context in which people can do more than just think or talk about doing things differently, they must be able to do things differently without fear of repudiation or punishment. Play is a way of organizing activities in which the ends and the means are altered (Schulz and Lavenda, 1995).
The experimentation aspect of play supports innovation in transformation as Deal and Kennedy (1982) suggest. It is one of the many educational benefits of play that include: providing a meaningful context for learning concepts and skills; making learning fun and enjoyable; allowing adults to extend learning; providing opportunities for collaborative learning with supervisors and peers; allowing for the practice of skills; and most importantly, encouraging adults to experiment and take risks.
In healthy organizations, the trial and error associated with figuring out what to do, how to do it, and when to do it is play. It is not play in a recreational sense, but it is play as a form of experimentation that produces creativity. Creativity is critically important when confronted by new situations and problems. Creative analysis and problem solving is required. People have o use their imagination, social cognition, empathy and perspective taking to adapt to the new internal concerns and environmental challenges posed by second order change.
Play as Feedback
Play is often a means of reinforcing and maintaining social bonds in social groups. The joking or teasing within social groups is often informative in transformation initiatives. Listening to people's talk in established groups can be very useful. Many people in the midst of chaos and confusion bond with each other by expressing their common pain and commiserating. They may do this directly (not play) or indirectly through jokes, satire, caricatures, and unfaltering mimicry. Jokes about people (especially put downs) in the organization, about the effects of external forces, or about a current situation can reveal a lot about an organization. Part of the significance of jokes is that they are necessarily based on common understandings.
Verbal play in the form of joke telling and teasing can support or thwart organizational change. People making fun of their circumstances and the behaviors of colleagues and leaders often reveal interesting perspectives of the change situation. Jokes, caricatures and ‘humorous' comments can tell an observer how well change is proceeding, at least with regard to a specific social group.
Play as Indicators of Health
Dysfunctional systems are closed systems. Their most conspicuous features are isolation and stability because they have limited interaction with other systems or the external environment (Kristberg, 1985; Bradshaw, 1988). The connections, structures and relationships of closed systems are fixed and rigid, which is why its process patterns (e.g., work flows and information exchanges) remain essentially the same. Change is strongly resisted in unhealthy organizations.
The presence or absence of play is a strong indicator of the emotional health of the organization. An unhealthy system is so serious and chaotic that its members tend not to play. The inability to have fun is typically linked to the need for control; it's hard to have fun when you're trying to control everything.
In a really unhealthy system survival becomes paramount. People do not chance expressing thoughts that are not held by the people in power. They rarely vocalize their dissatisfaction and, in fact, learn to keep secrets and avoid problems. When confronted with an issue of importance but marked with uncertainty about the best way to address it, they move the problem up the organization. Taking action in these organizations or being isolated from the group threaten survival. The safest course is to be quiet and avoid risk, thus short-circuiting any possibility to learn, individually and organizationally.
Even the people in power do not feel free to play; they do not feel safe enough to play. Joking and teasing about the wrong thing can unleash an unexpected backlash. They have more to lose from being inappropriate than lower level employees, so they are often the most serious, and hence suffer from the most severe learning disabilities.
The learning disabilities in unhealthy organizations are physiological and social. Learning is physiologically compromised by the fact that people are under stress don't think well. Stress triggers fight or flight, not reflection. A lack of emotional or financial safety also diminishes the capacity to learn (Kline, 1993).
People in power in these organizations don't want to hear the truth and therefore suffer from "the emperor wearing no clothes" syndrome. People tell them what they want to hear and they punish anyone with dissenting views. An unhealthy organization values stability over reality and health, so it cannot really change (Bradshaw, 1988).
Conclusion
Play is a very significant part of work, especially with regard to facilitating learning by introducing variation into organizational thinking and processes. Not all play is educational, but even recreational play is enlightening from a metacommunicative perspective because it provides important insights about an organization's capacity to learn, its patterns of information distribution, and the social system—cliques, status relationships, and who's in and who's out. The kind of play that facilitates learning enables people to think about, speak about, and do different things in the same way or the same thing in different ways.
References
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About the Author
RENÉ-MARC MANGIN is an expert in corporate culture and organizational development who specializes in organizational assessment and change, as well as, executive coaching. Rene-Marc has an MBA and a multi-disciplinary PhD.
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