
WHY PLAY
Three Reasons Why You Should Play At Work
The power of challenges
Experiencing through experimenting
Overcoming expectation
One difference between kids and adults is their level of experience. And while being experienced is of high value to us, our biases, pre-judgements and expectations also block us from experiencing something new. An additional power of play is how within games we suddenly are able to overcome our expectations.
When we play, we are more willing to engage with each other, we overthink less and explore more. We create before we criticize and we evaluate based on our experiments, not our knowledge. Thereby we are more open to discover new perspectives and to enter into unknown territory.
From play to change
Even if games are such powerful tools as mentioned above, they have a weak link: they don’t do the transformation for the players. When we exit the play space, finish the challenge and leave the story we return to our serious selves. So how can we integrate the experiences we made?

Connecting what players experience in the state of play to their personal and professional lives is where trainers, coaches and colleagues come into play. The task is to integrate the new experiences and adjust our expectations and views, based on what we learned in the state of play. As kids this comes natural to us, as adults we need to relearn how to use the power of play for our own development. This is a delicate but promising potential – so lets get play back to work.