Play Journal

The Play Ethic and the Toy Industry

A fascinating morning recently, delivering a keynote speech to the Toy Industries of Europe 'Toy Safety' conference in Brussels. The toy industry has had its troubles to bear in 2007 - many safety recalls of toys from major manufacturers, largely located in their Chinese factories (80% of all toys in Europe are made in China, 95% in the US). As I said to the audience at the conference, with books like Eric Clark's The Real Toy Story being published (which tries to do for the toy industry what Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation does for convienience food), they are an industry which risks a lot by not lining up their ethical business practice, with the trust that parents put in them to provide safe, ethically and sustainably created products. But if they extend 'play ethics' throughout their business - from labour conditions in China to the nature of the toys they produce - the opportunities for their business (exemplified by the turnaround in Lego, whose CEO Jorgen Knudstorp delivered the other keynote) are major, given the general shift of social values in a 'play-friendly' direction.

NOTE: I'm using the embedding function of Slideshare for the first time here - if you go through to the actual link, you can download the PPT of the presentation with extra notes.

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The Play Ethic @ Lego's Playground

A interesting outcome of my keynote speech at Lego's anniversary conference in Billund early this year is this article for Playground, the newsletter of Lego's organisational consultancy arm, Serious Play. I thought I'd print my attempt to wrestle the 'seven rhetorics of play' into a pro-business discourse.

The kinds of play you might not want at work

From a traditional business perspective, play is often understood in only two of its possible modes: play-as-personal-freedom and  play-as-triviality.

1) Play-as-personal-freedom, within the workplace, can often seem a negative phenomenon – it highlights issues like absenteeism, slacking, or people becoming alienated from their job roles.

2) Play-as-triviality stretches from (often ineffective) attempts by management to make the workplace 'fun' to darker phenomena like pranks and black humor.

These are the kinds of play that the Protestant work ethic can relate to most easily - either as something disruptive to be effectively clamped down on, or unimportant and thus easy to ignore.

More significant types of play

Play is more than just egoism and wackiness. It is also a way for people to come together to achieve a result, to sharpen their capacities and performance, even to attain some wisdom and patience about the direction of their working lives. In short, a way of developing their 'response abilities' regarding the challenges of business and society.

3) Play-as-identity is recognized by most smart companies as an effective tendency. This includes those common rituals, festivals and celebrations that make people feel good about being part of the 'community' within the organization.

4) Play-as-power-and-contest is another effective category, which has to do with what you do with your healthy company identity when you're in the marketplace. Play-as-power can be affected by play-as-identity – too much internal competitiveness and the organization flies apart, too little and complacency results.

Forms of play you may not relate to your business – but should

There are three other 'rhetorics', or values, of play which high-performing businesses should be aware of.

5) Play-as-imagination, the creative and experimental use of the mind and talents, often comes under the categories of 'R&D', 'brainstoming,' or even the suggestion box.

6) Play-as-development is the function that play has in the evolution and progress of our talents, not just as children but as adults also. Play is how we start out 'adapting' to our environment, and it keeps us adaptable throughout our lives.

Companies that attend to the well-being of their employees, through training, mentorship and support services, are giving them the best platform upon which to become the dynamic players of the previous rhetorics.

7) Play-as-fate-and-chaos is the final rhetoric. As old as religion and gambling, and as new as a market derivative – it brings with it a more philosophical perspective. This is an awareness that there will always be unpredictability in our lives, a fundamental openness to chance that we cannot rule out. But one that can bring positive as well as negative opportunities for business, if we can remain essentially 'response-able' as players.

Harry Potter World: Scotland, not Orlando

Not entirely serious article from me in Comment is free, about the sheer inappropriateness of the proposed Harry Potter theme park going to Orlando, Florida, rather than what I regard as the book's spiritual home, Scotland. Most of the subsequent commentary seems to revolve around my use of the term "flourescent fanny-pack", which I now only half regret. It's also an example of my revived 'constitutional patriotism', in the aftermath of the Scottish elections which saw a social-democratic party committed to independence (SNP) take power in the Parliament. My enthusiasms are expressed in my contributions to the progressive weblog, Scottish Futures.

Legotopia

Spent a stimulating few days in Billund, Denmark last week, delivering a keynote [powerpoint file] to Lego's 'Play to Learn' conference at their Innovation Centre (which is right next to Legoland, pleasantly enough). I got the opportunity to program a dog made out of their Lego Mindstorms technology (tried to get it to do synchronised dancing to 'Who Let the Dogs Out'. Failed). And to talk to the CEO Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, who's interviewed here. Met Stuart Nolan and other Lego Serious Play advocates too. I'm also going to put up a little montage of clips taken with my battered Nokia N70 of the experience, including the coolness of Billund airport, the wackiness of the Legoland Hotel, and a few minutes of ludology from Mitch Resnick of MIT.

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...

The Economics of Attention

Just completed this review for the Independent, on a fascinating book that combines humanistic scholarship with the most nerdy interest in web and info-tech - Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention. The opening lines:

If there's one thing the internet has not brought about, contrary to all prediction, it's the destruction of literature. As the author of this consistently interesting argument notes, we have been liberated into a bibliotopia almost unimaginable to previous generations, with Amazon selling millions of second-hand books at cut-price rates, and Google digitising university libraries for (hopefully) free usage. It's not literary or artistic values that are under threat, but the opportunity to pay even the most cursory attention to what lies before us. Our true scarcity is attention, not culture.

If the definition of economics is the "allocation of scarce resources", then Richard Lanham suggests we might need a new version of that dismal science to account for our hyper-mediated lives.

Dallas Lecture: From Worker to Player

Welcome to all those who attended my Dallas Lecture last night, delivered in the quite humbling Trades Hall in Glasgow, on the shift "From Worker to Player" (the full text is in 'extended post' below).

This was a great week to address a business audience in my home town about the struggle between a work ethic and a play ethic, as there had been a bit of a stushie about 'workshy Glaswegians' thinking service jobs were beneath them, revealed in a report by the Scottish Chambers of Commerce this week. But my talk also allowed me to make some long over-due connections between my own music practice and the 'liberal arts' of management, as outlined by the late Peter Drucker.

The questions afterwards were informed and illuminating, and I hope some of you will repeat your points in the comments box below.

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.

Fashion Crafting - from 'No Logo' to 'Own Logo'

Thanks to Jyri (another impossibly bright Finnish digital boy), I am alerted to the rise in something called 'fashion crafting', courtesy of this blog. There's even a Draft Craft Manifesto:

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.
2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.
3. The things people make they usually want to keep and update. Crafting is not against consumption. It is against throwing things away.
4. People seek recognition for the things they have made. Primarily it comes from their friends and family. This manifests as an economy of gifts.
5. People who believe they are producing genuinely cool things seek broader exposure for their products. This creates opportunities for alternative publishing channels.
6. Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs.
7. Essential for crafting are tools, which are accessible, portable, and easy to learn.
8. Materials become important. Knowledge of what they are made of and where to get them becomes essential.
9. Recipes become important. The ability to create and distribute interesting recipes becomes valuable.
10. Learning techniques brings people together. This creates online and offline communities of practice.
11. Craft-oriented people seek opportunities to discover interesting things and meet their makers. This creates marketplaces.
12. At the bottom, crafting is a form of play.

I have only one contribution of street anthropology to add to this: the return of "scoubidous" to North London schoolyards (my partner's boy Conn just handed me one). But the writer also extends this to a thesis about a post-'No-Logo' response to branding:

First, in the global entertainment industry, an increasing percentage of sales come from products that were never meant for the masses - that is, products that make up the Long Tail. Recently, niche production has also increased sharply in the fashion industry. Witness the increasing number of designer and crafter communities who discuss trends and techniques, post photos of their designs, and often also sell their hand-crafted products online. On the demand side this means that an increasing number of people prefer products that a) they have made themselves or b) somebody they personally know has made.

For the young people who are leading this trend, buying a mass-manufactured garment is totally uncool. Instead, buying a garment that has a (hi)story is awesome. I guess this could be interpreted as a form of self-expression - partly by rejecting readymade mainstream designs offered by global fashion brands, but also (perhaps more interestingly) by inventing new designs of their own. An essential aspect of the own logo phenomenon is the branding of one’s own creations. Many of the people who have started to make their own designs (including me and my friends) want to tag their creations with their own symbol. The symbol can be their initials, a nickname, or any other sign that they want to adopt as their own brand.

These people would probably agree with most of the arguments that Naomi brings up in her book. Still, instead of No Logo, they are signing up for Own Logo.

Creative Crass?

The title of this piece - "Why I Don't Love Richard Florida" (which actuallly sounds like a great short story title) - depends on knowing who Florida is. (See Creative Class for a speedy skinny - essentially, hipness sustains city vibrancy more than big mass projects).

Florida has taken something qualitative and turned it into something quantitative. That's what social scientists do. It's their special form of creativity. But in his argument in favor of economic development based on the arts and on businesses favored by the kind of people who enjoy the arts, he seems to have exaggerated either the size or the creativity of his Creative Class. I don't have any more faith in the prevalence of Florida's class than I do in the so-called values voters who cropped up after the elections. Both groups exist in nature but have been somewhat inflated for the sake of argument.

These days every time I walk down, say, Rivington Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, or Fifth Avenue, in Brooklyn's Park Slope, I notice how the distinctions between the hip places are beginning to blur. One cool business district looks pretty much like the next, just the way one suburban mall looks pretty much like the next. And once you start thinking about creativity in terms of class, hipness as a monoculture seems like the inevitable outcome.

For another take on the relations between hip counterculture, and its marketisation, see the vastly illuminating set of interviews that Ken Goodman aka R.U.Sirius recently did with Raw Story, around his new book on the counterculture. The interlocutors are Thomas Frank, Joseph Heath, and Douglas Rushkoff.

I think this is a big issue: what might an authentic urban vitality be? At what point might policy makers and planners in cities push their embrace of difference too far, turning it into the kind of identikit designerism the Metropolis writer sees? (See the magus Momus on the perils of this). Or, from a ludic perspective, is this just unsophisticated pining for a simpler, less mediated world?