Play Journal

Knowing too much, doing too little

Into the swing of 2007 with a new Comment is Free post at the Guardian today. It's pegged to quite a few Play-Ethic-oriented items - the UK Trades Union Congress's report that UK workers give their employers 7 hours unpaid overtime a week; the recent noises from the Conservative Party about exploring the possibility of a 35 hour week; and my usual concern with the great contradiction of the developed world - so many options for informed and connected action, so little time and resources by which to realise them. Lots of hyperlinks in the piece, be keen to hear your reaction.

Update: a reasonable response from CiF commenters - my own comment, and this response to it, enriches the argument considerably. And Jackie Ashley seems to have perused this material ever so slightly in today's Guardian...

Well beings or ethical beings?

Been fascinated by the recent convergence on wellbeing and happiness between the main political parties in the UK. This op-ed article for the Guardian comment page (here's a lovely PDF of it) explores the hidden affinities between conservative philosophy and the more normative aspects of the happiness agenda (which I've explored elsewhere in this blog, here and here and here). If you've come from reading the article, I'd love to hear your comments below.

Guardian, June 1st, 2006

If you’re happy and you’re Tory, clap your hands. So skilfully is the young pretender, David Cameron, pressing buttons on wellbeing, quality of life,and happiness that charges of superficiality and empty trendiness are coming thick and fast. But a deeper examination of his  recent speeches shows an underlying rigour that his political opponents would be foolish to underestimate

Iron cage in the head

It’s always an event when Richard Sennett publishes, even though I have problems with the gloominess of his take on the effects of information capitalism on peoples’ lives. I’m halfway through his new book, The Culture of the New Capitalism, so I won’t comment definitively – but a friend has read it, Madeleine Bunting, who basically agrees with Sennett. Here’s a representative quote:

What Sennett seems to be suggesting is that, in much of the workplace, there are no longer any rules. It's the chancer, the trickster, the chameleon, the illusionist on the hunt for the big break who flourishes. The rest of us, insecure and anxious, just hope to scrape together a sense of connectedness sufficient to keep loneliness, disorientation and meaninglessness from the door.

Passages like this – which seems to indict play values (chance, trickiness, chameleonic, illusory) as the unraveller of stable work cultures – make me realise just how far ahead of the consensus my arguments for a play ethic are. Can we still only conceive of purposeful, meaningful activity as that which occurs within public or private organisations, for which we exchange labour for wages? The mobile internet hints at a more ‘commonist’ society, which can support innovation and self-directed activity in many different locations – at home, in the street, as we travel.

But the idea that social regulation could support this fluid style of producing and making – say with a social wage or income supplements, or free communication channels – is far off. If even the best writers and thinkers (Bunting and Sennett) cannot themselves abandon those semi-military metaphors of bureaucracy and organisation, cannot escape Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of convention, then a players’ society will have to emerge from the margins. The metaphysics of the work ethic still grips the minds of Anglo-American public intellectuals too tightly.

Follow the Fun, says Rushkoff

Been looking forward to Douglas's business book Get Back In The Box, particularly since he told me it was going to foreground the presentation on play in business that he's been making for the last few years, under the title 'Follow the Fun'. He's posted some of this material on his blog:

In a renaissance society driven by the need to forge connections, play is the ultimate system for social currency. It's a way to try on new roles without committing to them for life. It's a way to test strategies of engagement without being defined by them forever. It’s a way to rise above the seemingly high stakes of almost any situation and see it as the game it probably is. It’s a way to make one’s enterprise a form of social currency from the beginning, and to guarantee a collaborative, playful, and altogether more productive path toward continual innovation. 

And this play begins at work.

Establishing a playful career or company isn't as easy as it looks. It doesn't require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention of a company's culture based on some abstract ideal. But it does mean going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and survival - not just in business school, but for the past five centuries! Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures, producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as collaborative minisocieties, whose underlying work ethic will ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at large.

Couldn't agree more - the first paragraph is a lovely summary of the kind of social mentality I was proposing in the Play Ethic book. I particularly like the idea of producers seeing their companies as "collaborative minisocieties".

But I also think this needs a real metaphor-shift (meaning head-and-heart shift) at the strategic and executive level, particularly with traditional companies, for that vision to have purchase. (Speaking from some direct consulting experience here). I'm sure Douglas would agree that some of that impetus comes from new business models forged by entrepreneurs, social and private, who (if they're successful enough) can generate profoundly playful productive cultures.

Why Do You Work So Hard?

Can't take myself away from the UK's slide into a terror-and-security state to blog about play... but  this is exactly the time to be pushing a philosophy of openness, love of difference and imaginative understanding. So I'm back, with an article from the SF Gate suggested by a US reader, which gets the spiritual underpinnings of a play ethic exactly right:

We are designed, weaned, trained from Day 1 to be productive members of society. And we are heavily guilted into believing that must involve some sort of droning repetitive pod-like dress-coded work for a larger corporate cause, a consumerist mechanism, a nice happy conglomerate.

But the truth is, God, the divine true spirit loves nothing more than to see you unhinge and take risk and invite regular, messy, dangerous upheaval. This is exactly the energy that thwarts the demons of stagnation and conservative rot and violent sanctimonious bloody Mel Gibson-y religion, one that would have all our work be aimed at continuously patching up our incessant potholes of ugly congenital guilt, as opposed to contributing to the ongoing orgiastic evolution of spirit.

It is not for everyone. It implies incredibly difficult choices and arranging your life in certain ways and giving up certain luxuries and many, many people seemed locked down and immovable and all done with exploring new options in life, far too deeply entrenched in debts and family obligations and work to ever see such unique light again. Maybe you know such people. Maybe you are such people.

But then again, maybe not. This is the other huge truism we so easily forget: There is always room. There are always choices we can begin to make, changes we can begin to invite, rules we can work to upset, angles of penetration we can try to explore. And if that's not worth trying, well, what is?

Mark Morford is a fascinating voice - will be keeping my eye out for him. (& I just figured out what the image is...)

The Book of Jobs

Interesting to see Virginia Postrel - poster-girl of the libertarian right in the US - backtrack a little on her previous play-positive zeal. In this most recent of her columns for the New  York Times, 'The Book of Jobs' (again, you'll have to buy the original - so there's a fair use extended post below), Postrel profiles a well-known US phenomenon, 'What Color Is  Your Parachute?', a yearly 'Bible' for job- and career-changing. The spiritual overtones aren't inadvertent. Says the founder, Richard Bolles:

Job-hunting gives us a chance to ponder and reflect, to extend our mental horizons, to go deeper into the subsoil of our soul. It gives us a chance to wrestle with the question, 'Why am I here on Earth?'

Postrel, in her newly respectable garb, seems to enjoy this new version of the Protestant Work Ethic - or perhaps we should now call it the Existential Work Ethic:

The book's peculiar power comes from its unusual combination of market realism, psychological insight and spiritual idealism. ''Parachute'' is suffused with the Protestant idea of the calling, but it is not Max Weber's grim, ascetic version. Instead, Bolles offers the grace-filled version of labor I recognize from my Presbyterian childhood, which was when I first heard of the book. Bolles believes God has given each of us special skills and talents and the responsibility to discover and use them. When we find our mission in life, he preaches, we will enjoy our work.

Doesn't she see the paradox - that the very labour-market restlessness the book encourages is as much a critique of our existing work cultures, and their ultimate penumbra of control and meaninglessness, as it is a 'graceful' re-validation of them? She used to get it:

The knowledge economy also discomfits those who equate the "work ethic" with a narrow range of industrial-era virtues: diligence, stoicism, patience, conformity. Particularly for conservatives, the idea that a job should be satisfying in itself is an uncomfortable one. They fear the consequences of allowing play to infect work.

A job as a 'graceful mission' steers a little too close to Bush-era piety than I'd have expected of Postrel.

How Roth works (or engages)

Worth considering: a rigourous weblog entry seeking various opinions - from artists, scientists, movers and shakers - on how they work. What gets them up in the morning, how diligent are they, what's their routine, etc. Again, for me this is more the zero-sum game that enables the non-zero-sum game - the ritual that sustains the vision - but we have to allow scholars and creators, doing little more than shifting symbols around, to orchestrate some guilt for their freedoms (I suppose). Philip Roth is my favourite:

"I have to have something to do that engages me totally," he says. "Without that, life is hell for me. I can't be idle and I don't know what to do other than write. [...] I don't really have other interests. My interest is in solving the problems presented by writing a book. That's what stops my brain spinning like a car wheel in the snow, obsessing about nothing."

As ever, I love to note the e-word (engagement) that slips into these discourses - and remind the world of the etymology of play. Engagement is play, at its very core.

Happy workers (play with themselves)

From Fast Company blog, news of an exciting new development (cough) in toy action superheros. Meet Geek-man, Boss-man and Money-Man! Much hilarity (of a vaguely sado-masochistic kind) to be had here: hoping to see some weird internet toy action with these. I particularly enjoyed the specific toy instructions for Boss Man:

"BossMan’s left hand has been specially engineered so it’s cigar compatible. Just squeeze the cigar gently in-between his thumb and index finger. When the cigar is in place, you can shake BossMan around vigorously and the cigar will remain snugly in his grasp..."

"While some bosses are two-faced, BossMan, being the super manager that he is, comes with 3 faces: serious boss, happy boss and angry boss. He can also lose face and become faceless, but it’s not his most attractive look. To remove a face: place your thumb under the chin and index finger on the top of BossMan’s head. Pull the chin outward and upward, and his face will come off. It’s kind of like that John Woo movie, but without all the special effects."

Stop press: and there's more! Boing Boing reports on 'The Cubes', "a corporate drudgery playset for grown-ups":

Bob, Joe, Ted, and Ann spend eight hours a day, five days a week, at tiny desks in tiny cubicles in a giant room packed with countless similar cubicles in a giant building filled with countless similar rooms.

Each set has one 2-3/4" posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate cube: four walls, desk, chair, file cabinet, in/out box, phone, and computer. Comes with a sticker sheet of decor for your cube, complete with graphs, charts, screens for the computer and pithy office posters.

Also includes a job title sticker sheet so you can create a convoluted and meaningless position for your employee.

What would they say at Serious Play?

On the seventh year, they rested...

Two of my regular correspondants alerted me to this piece in Scotland on Sunday - the Scottish Council Foundation is proposing that workers be allowed to take every seventh year off, paid for by a subvention from their salaries in the preceding six years (a similar scheme is operational in Canada).

The surface rhetoric is, of course, about staff retention, motivation, and long-term workplace performance - avoid burn-out of your best, by allowing them a bohemian year. Again, my wonder is whether this division (again!) between unfree work and free leisure, heteronomy and autonomy, is the kind of schizophrenic life we should be agreeing to.

In so many of these discussions, the very nature of the productive activity called 'work' itself is left unexamined. Might employers ever begin to address the spiralling spiritual and psychological crisis of our creative effectiveness in the world - which workplace ennui only faintly expresses? Other than Semler and his 'Seven Day Weekend' model, I see few in business who really 'get it'. We hope to keep developing our consultancy model of the 'player' and 'the play ethic' over 2005 - if only to try and come up with some more interesting proposals than this.

Quitting the Paint Factory

A rather florid hymn to idleness from Harper's magazine (and thanks to J from Lifestylism for this). The title refers to a story of a facto ry boss who had to feign madness in order to abandon his prestigious job. I'm not an automatic fan of the more louche forms of idler culture around at the moment. But Mark Slouka makes a beautiful argument for idleness as a political necessity:

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req­uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due.

Which is precisely what makes idle­ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy." Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir­ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav­ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business."

Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a de­mocratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so am­ply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell's leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.

Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.

Bravo. All I would say, after that, is when action issues from idleness, its most appopriate form is play, rather than work - effort in the service of fully-deliberated goals and passions, rather than externally determined or duteous ones.