What You Can Learn From IBM Design

Do you fool around enough?

That is to say, do you build in opportunities to play – for yourself, your teammates, and your organization as a whole? I was struck by the importance of play when I gave a keynote to IBM Design‘s global studio leaders and hung out with their teams for a couple of days in Austin, Texas. I walked away with a deep appreciation for how intentional they are about cultivating connection. Building connectivity is especially important for this crew because their design studios are spread out all over the world as they work to integrate creativity and design thinking in a technology and engineering focused firm.

Play, meshed with work, is essential. This is because play is a method of inquiry that encourages experimentation and requires curiosity. When done collectively among employees and in a scheduled way it causes colleagues to happily collide in new ways while- most importantly- laughing! It builds in an ebb and flow and expectancy to one’s work on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.

Another observation I made about the work culture of IBM Design is that play, done purposefully, has a way of cultivating tribes. As Seth Godin has compellingly written and spoken about, new iterations of tribes have resurged due to digital platforms. In Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, Dave Logan and Halee Fischer-Wright have even written about five stages of tribe formation in organizations. Tribes are as ancient as the Paleolithic cave paintings, and continue to be based on meaning, shared values and a commitment to building a collective vision.

Here are a few examples of how I saw IBM Design get serious about play:

· Goofy is Good– At several points, teams shared skits in order to demonstrate points about business development tactics- associates went all out, including colorful props and some amateur acting. A certain amount of exposure and vulnerability occurred, but this ultimately builds trust.

· Show Me, Don’t Just Tell Me– At IBM Design studios, space matters, and fluid space with modular furniture and plenty of whiteboard space is helpful. Theirs was a hyper visual environment with doodling evident on most vertical spaces. Writing concepts on the small surface area of a Post-It note forces us to crystallize our points.

· Move and Laugh– Doing team-building exercises, especially those that do not focus on the specificity of the work at hand, is important. For example, on one afternoon there was a variation of a game of musical chairs and during one dinner craft tables abounded for t-shirt print making, circuit building and sticker collection, while DJ’s from IBM’s intranet radio played awesome dance music.

Intentional engagement with play is happening in a growing number of sectors. At the 2017 Future of Digital Marketing Summit at Philly Tech Week, Roee Adler, Head of Digital at WeWork shared how WeWork offers an adult summer camp to members. Replete with canoeing, karaoke and fireside chats, WeWork members tap into their inner teenager. For WeWork, the summer camp provides a feedback loop to their commitment to making their members successful. And at the Institute of Hip-Hop Entrepreneurship, an initiative funded by the Knight Foundation, participants launch entrepreneurial ventures by modeling the best practices of hip hop. Play surfaces in the way participants ideate and source inspiration from hip-hop culture which interweaves play into the language, music, and fashion.

Play builds tribes: people with a common worldview and vernacular who give each other a sense of home. Start getting intentional about play and tribes, and begin noticing a different way you and your colleagues show up for work.