Stay on the Ball

Extracts from an article published in The Times (UK) (03.09.2005)

Start having fun if you want to boost your brain power and live longer.

You know the advert. A schoolkid frowns as his mum rollerskates to pick him up from school, waltzes round the supermarket on her trolley and attacks the playground swings, all because of some healthy diet supplement. The implication is that healthiness makes adults playful and full of energy, irreverence and invention. But the reverse is also true.

More play in your life can help you to live longer and think sharper, broaden your occupational and spiritual horizons, and generally fine-tune the complex organism that is you. I'm an ardent advocate, having left a safe editorial job in a Scottish newspaper five years ago for a player's creative life of freelance working.

Play? In the work-driven 21st century? It sounds frivolous, but some of the most serious corporate contenders are learning how playfulness can equal competitive success. It can work at basic building-blocks level. Lego offers a consulting business, called Serious Play, that uses those knobbly bricks to spark ideas in staff. And a recent book from Harvard Business School, Got Game, claims that computer gamers will reshape future businesses, creating workers/players who love to take risks, who cope with failure as a learning opportunity and juggle multiple scenarios with ease.

Chris Gittins, a community-development entrepreneur from Bristol, knows this aspect of play very well. In his past he tried to get people to commit to change through “the head stuff, very intellectual, very campaigning”. But after much frustration, he realised that it wasn’t enough to urge people to act in better ways — to recycle rubbish, to use their cars less, or to become more neighbourly — without giving them an attractive reason to do so.

Playfulness was the solution. “If you want communities to come together more, then organise a street party. If you want to create a car-free day, encourage music and kids running about and trellis tables of food,” Gittins says. “People forget to be resentful about the inconvenience and just enjoy themselves. He is organising 22 street parties this month in Bristol, based on previous successes in dealing with binge drinking in the city centre. “We put musicians and actors on to the night streets and got drinkers to interact and to play with them. It did more for peaceful streets than policing or public regulations ever did.”

Liz Dyke’s job — team leader for a social work department — would seem to be the least playful of all professions. Yet as she does her rounds in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, she finds that being a player, which for her means “being fully engaged in my activity”, helps her to become more efficient. She has revolutionised her attitude, to respond playfully and creatively to constantly changing demands that might burn her out if she tried to fight them head-on. “I waste less energy because I am more focused. Feeling at play in my work makes me feel stronger. It lets me trust and value my intuition more.”

Dyke is tapping into the passionate aspect of play which the Puritan work ethic largely obscured (“the soul's play day is the Devil's work day”, as the 19th-century preachers thundered). As complex mammals, we simply have to play. The biologist Paul Martin calls it a “universal design feature of organisms with large brains”. Play helps you to test emotions, aptitudes and skills, without the consequences being severe. In doing so, you improve your ability to survive and thrive in a demanding environment.

“A playful attitude makes me feel more engaged with the world, less likely to function on autopilot,” says Dyke. “Life is richer when perceived as full of possibilities to be considered rather than avoided.”

According to the psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith, play is also an “autonomous and intrinsically motivated activity”; in other words, we do it because we want to and are free to, not because someone has compelled us to. The health benefits of this mental attitude are becoming ever more recognised: a playful adulthood, as well as a playful childhood, can contribute hugely to our happiness and wellbeing (see box below ).

But how do we enter the virtuous circle of a play ethic? Certainly in our workplaces, it's a sign of an organisation's basic health that the atmosphere is relaxed and full of laughter, that creative brainstorming (a form of adult play) is the norm rather than the exception, and that management is about telling inspiring stories rather than controlling perspiring workers.

Chris Yapp, the head of public sector innovation at Microsoft, has used the notion of a play ethic in training and workshops among his UK staff. “I find that it opens up people's attitudes about their own creativity, their ultimate motivation for being in their occupation. We require a level of daily inventiveness from our staff and often the lightness and energy that comes from play is what’s required to kick-start that.”

Being a player at work is one thing, but playfulness should affect a wider spectrum of your life than that. We musn’t mistake play for leisure, much of which can be passive and uncreative (vegging-out before the flat-screen, submitting to a gym regimen). It can bring about huge changes in your life. It's worth remembering that the linguistic root for “play” comes from -dlegh, the Indo European term for engagement, energy and movement. And becoming a full player sometimes means taking tough decisions about your life, decisions that can collide with our modern office-and-shopping existence.

The drift to freelance lifestyles — where people strike a different balance between their expenditure levels and their desire to make their work their play — is an almost inevitable consequence of a more playful perspective. When I made the move into freelancing the health aspects become even more important. Waking up in the morning knowing that you have chosen the pattern of your day, or week, is a truly liberating feeling.

But it's a paradox of the play mentality that the more enthusiasm you have for your self-chosen activities, the more of those activities seem to be on offer.

This leads to a counter-intuitive truth: you need more energy for a player’s life, not less. Time spent freely surfing on the web crowds your brain with ideas; conversations with fellow players suggest new projects, and where the worker worries if they’ll ever attain the life they want, the player’s anxiety is whether they can realise all the opportunities life presents.

Committing to a player’s life is an enlivening experience. The problem (and the excitement) is that you can’t go back to sleep again. That schoolkid in the advert might just have to get used to his exuberant mum, if she swaps play for her supplements.