Why Play Is Essential for Business | Martin Reeves | TED

Have you ever trodden on a Lego brick in your bare feet?

You’re tiptoeing through your lounge late at night,

and suddenly that stabbing pain,

the expletives

and the inevitable question:

“Why do we have so much of this stuff all over the place?”

Well, that’s really quite simple.

Your kids love playing with it,

so you buy more.

And a confession --

I love to watch my kids play with Lego.

Especially good is when I see them inventing their own rules

and their own worlds.

So here are my daughters,

last Saturday,

making something out of different kits

and pieces of string

and pieces of wood and dolls and other objects.

And I asked them, “What is it?”

And they said to me, “Dad, of course it’s a princess flying on a dragon

to visit farm animals in New York.”

Of course, what else could it be?

Kids at play inspire me.

They’re not afraid to ask, “What if”

and “Why not?”

But what kids implicitly know that adults tend to forget

is that play isn’t just about fun.

Now, as a biologist, I know that play is spontaneous and pleasurable --

as you can see by the smiles in this photograph --

but also, it accelerates and derisks learning.

It helps kids to try out new behaviors,

to refine those behaviors

and to imagine what is not

but what could be or what will be.

As a business strategist dealing with adults,

I still recommend play.

In fact, play in business is not just possible,

I’d argue that it’s essential

and even urgent.

And here’s why.

Competitive advantage fades away faster than any time in recent memory.

In the 1980s,

if you had a performance edge over your competitors,

you could reasonably expect to continue being a leader for around 10 years,

on average.

But now the half-life of that advantage has shrunk to just one year.

That means that short-lived success is actually still very common,

but sustained success becomes very hard

and very rare.

That means that, actually, reimagination is the new execution.

In order to stay on top,

or even just to tread water and stay still,

you need to constantly reimagine your business.

But that’s not so simple

if you already have a highly successful business model.

We become prisoners of the mental models that underpin our past success.

In fact, I found in dealing with businesses

that you can’t really stretch your strategy

unless you stretch your mind.

Now play is of course a great way of stretching your mind.

Now --

I mean, there’d be no mistake,

I’m not suggesting literally

that executives huddle around a conference table

with a big pile of Lego bricks --

although I’ve done that, and that works too.

But instead, I’ve created a series of imagination games

to help executives to stretch their thinking.

Would you like to play with me?

(Audience nods)

Good, I'm glad you said that.

OK, so let’s supposing that you’re stuck in the rut

of seeing the world through the lens of your past and current success.

I would recommend the “Anti-Company Game,”

and here’s how it works.

You get a piece of paper,

you create a list of everything which is essential to your strategy --

everything which underpinned your past success,

everything which is core and sacred --

and then you flip it.

You create the exact mirror-image list of assumptions,

and then you make the best business case for this antiself.

You’ll be surprised at the ideas that it triggers.

Supposing, for example, that you’re the CEO of a hotel chain

and playing the game and flipping the assumptions.

Let’s assume that, inconveniently,

you don’t actually own any hotels

or any rooms

or even operate any hotels or any rooms anywhere.

Ridiculous --

quite possibly --

but actually, how would you know the difference between ridiculous

and the merely unfamiliar, untried and uncomfortable?

And who’s to say

that something that seems impractical can’t actually become and evolve

into a more powerful idea?

Actually, had the executives of hotels played the “Anti-Company Game”

before 2007,

they might have been able to foresee the appearance of Airbnb,

the hotel-less hospitality company,

and they might have been able to stave off disruption

by preemptively disrupting themselves.

Let’s play another game:

“The Maverick Game.”

On the edge of your industries --

on the edge of every industry --

are a population of maverick companies

that are taking a bet against the incumbents’ business model

and their view of the future.

Actually, they have no choice

because to be a miniature version of the incumbent would not be viable.

Now, it’s easy not to notice them --

many of them are small companies.

It's easy to deliberately overlook them with some justification.

Many startups disappear fairly quickly after being founded.

And it’s very, very tempting,

given all of your experience in the business,

to judge them.

Do they know what they’re doing?

Does their business model make sense?

Will they ever make any money?

But instead of judging them from the comfort

and the confidence of your position,

try assuming that it’s they that have the right bet on the future.

Think about the consequences of that for your business model.

Try making the best case for their idea.

Supposing, for example,

that you are the CEO of a company

that makes equipment that makes semiconductors.

Naturally, you’d probably spend most of your time and attention

on your main customer industry,

the electronics industry.

And if it so happened,

that a couple of maverick bioscience companies

were tinkering with your patents and your technologies,

you might overlook that as a distraction,

an irrelevance.

But actually, Brooks Automation,

a leader in the field,

decided to take a close-up look at such a group of mavericks

to see whether it could learn anything.

And what it realized

by looking at the world through the eyes of these mavericks

was that, actually, the same techniques

and technologies which can be used to handle delicate semiconductors

can also be applied to other fragile and easily contaminated materials,

like biological samples.

And puzzling on the significance of this,

they reimagined how to handle and store and transport

and label and identify biological samples.

In fact, they became a successful pioneer

in the new industry of automated biobanking.

So successful, in fact, that just a couple of days ago,

they announced that this was now their core business moving forwards.

It’s only by focusing on these anomalous mavericks

that they could see their own path to renewed success and growth.

Now, not everything in business goes according to plan.

In fact, sometimes the plans go horribly awry.

But you know what?

That can be a source of inspiration, too.

To find out how,

let’s play the “Pre-Mortem Game.”

So your role in this game is to write ...

the obituary for your company,

which is going to fail with 100 percent certainty

in five years’ time.

What is the cause of death?

What will have been the point of failure?

Why will it have failed?

How will it have failed?

The challenge here is that it’s easy to be seduced into the baseline fallacy.

The baseline fallacy is the idea

that it’s the current business model which is the low-risk bet.

And of course that tends to be true

until it isn’t true,

at which point it’s probably too late to do anything about it.

Now, your employees are an early-warning indicator.

They will have intuitions if the model begins to slip,

but it’s very hard for them to speak up.

And it’s even taboo for them to speak up

when the business model is under pressure.

But when executives create playgrounds --

spaces for the safe exploration of alternatives

and alternative scenarios --

then you get to tap into your employees’ considerable experience

about the vulnerabilities

and the weak spots

and the blind spots of your company.

Does anyone remember visiting recently one of these gorgeous marble palaces?

No?

It’s probably been a while since we visited the local banking branch.

Had bricks-and-mortar banks played the “Pre-Mortem Game,”

perhaps they would have heard their employees expressing some concerns

about the gradually dwindling flow of customers to local branches.

And perhaps they would have been slightly less taken by surprise

when companies like NewBank,

a digital native,

seized, very rapidly indeed, on that opportunity

to convince, to date, more than 40 million Latin Americans

that in-person transactions in real buildings

were a quaint but obsolete relic of the past.

It’s only when you bring your vulnerabilities into full view

in this way

that you may be motivated to reimagine your business

and to do so in a robust manner.

It’s why the Roman Catholic Church invented the role,

the position of the Devil’s advocate in the 16th century

to test the future consequences of its decisions to appoint new saints.

They did that by imagining

what would Satan say

or propose

or counterpropose,

in addition to the normal procedure of thinking about the big man upstairs.

Now, any human being, any employee, any team

and therefore any company can harness human imagination.

It’s a defining trait of our species.

Failures to imagine in business are really failures of leadership.

Business is a serious matter, but it should not exclude play.

When leaders embrace play and imagination games,

they can unlock the imagination of their employees,

uncover disruptive new strategies

and renew their lease on the future.

Thank you.

(Applause)