Continuation of dialogue

What a treat it was for me to spend yesterday morning with you. Having “looked at as much stuff” as possible about PLAY, I had been excited for days about the prospects of interacting with a team of people whose mantra is “Look at more stuff.”My entire career as an academic anthropologist and a trainer/coach/consultant for business has been aimed at helping people to understand the cross-cultural perspective and to “think harder” about how it relates to their own personal and professional lives. Often times even the best university students and business people fail to get beyond mere understanding by seeing the relevance of these concepts and insights for themselves. What was so satisfying to me was the fact that the few ideas I threw out there yesterday were devoured, internalized, and rapidly analyzed by 18 highly inquisitive people. I could actually see light bulbs going on and connections being made right in front of my eyes. For four hours yesterday this educator was convinced that he had died and gone to heaven.One of the last questions that Andy raised in our session before lunch was “, what are your thoughts on PLAY.” Everything I had read about PLAY on your website and learned from Matt was more than borne out by our interactive session. Your organization has a that is highly conducive for promoting creative solutions for your clients and showing them how to be more creative themselves. The innovative ways that PLAY redesigns traditional physical space and social relationships is what enables creativity to occur. PLAY’S methodology is what justified the claim made by the Center for Creative Leadership that, when compared to other organizations on creativity, the scores for PLAYAs I started my four and a half hour drive home yesterday afternoon, I formulated a clearer answer to Andy’s question. Despite all of the great energy and “making of connections,” I was struck by the fact that no one even alluded to PLAY as a structural (cultural) entity. I was left with the impression that while the PLAY team worked together exceedingly well as “creators of creativity,” there was not an explicitly stated or clearly understood notion of what the culture of PLAY was all about, how it worked, and (from a structural perspective) why it is so damn good at what it does. As a cultural anthropologist, I have a tendency of trying to make sense out of an organization like PLAY by looking at it as a working cultural entity, not unlike the Maasai or Kikuyu of East Africa or the Yanomamo of Brazil. In other words, PLAY, like the Kikuyu, is comprised of a number of components, such as shared values, attitudes, and ideas, language and linguistic style, the use of physical space, well understood social roles, traditions and folklore (stories), normative behavior patterns, unique material culture (such as red balls and trampolines), decision making procedures, social stratification (or the lack thereof), forms of social control, and even ways of passing on this corporate culture to new recruits. These, and other features as well, not only comprise the culture of your organization, but that culture, when viewed as an organic entity, offers a more thorough understanding of why you are able to accomplish your goals of generating such high levels of creativity. If all team members have a really sound understanding of what the overall culture is and how it works, they will be in a better position to structure their own solutions to creative problems.But, there is perhaps an even more compelling reason to develop a clear ethnographic description of the culture of PLAY. Your corporate culture (which most team members, I suspect, have a vague and maybe disjointed understanding of its totality) is your most important product that you have to sell to your clients.

If you are providing consulting services to show corporations how to become more creative, then it is imperative to know enough about the client’s corporate culture to be able to identify certain structural barriers to creativity. If you can, then, show the client that those same structural barriers to creativity have been avoided or eliminated in your own corporate culture, then you will be in a more credible position to suggest appropriate structural changes for the client corporation.From the perspective of the field anthropologist, conducting an ethnographic description of PLAY would have all of the appeal and interest of doing fieldwork among an exotic culture such as the Yanomamo, but would have other attractive features as well. The “native informants” would be knowledgeable about both the culture itself and well as the implications of the descriptive enterprise for their own professional lives. Moreover, with all team members serving as “native informants,” the study would be based on a 100 percent sample and would serve as a valuable professional development opportunity for team members.

I look forward to reading your blog postings.

Gary