Posts Tagged ‘playspace’

Creating Playspace for a New Job

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

In From Workplace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning and Changing Through Dynamic Engagement I share many examples of how organizations across industries create playspace each day and, in doing so, improve employee engagement, productivity and profits. This is not, however, the only place we can create playspace. You don’t have to work in an organization to enjoy it; in fact, you don’t even need a job to bring it to life!

I recently received an email from a former student, Tim Odom, from my creativity class at DePaul University in Chicago. He shared his success creating playspace for himself during the job search process and gave me permission to share it with you here:

I am actually somewhat of an introvert and it takes some time for me to become comfortable in speaking about myself in front of others. An interview does not afford me this luxury but I have found that by creating my playspace in the office as I wait to be called in eases my stress and starts to focus me on the task at hand. My nerves abate as I continue to explore this new space, and by the time I go into the meeting, I am primed to look for the gifts from the interviewer. It is no longer either an adversarial relationship or a sales pitch. Since I am now in a partnership with my interviewer and am actively engaged in receiving gifts, gifting, and re-gifting, I am able to clearly understand the questions asked of me, give back and most of the build on the conversation. My self-consciousness disappears!

While this is not the only facet of interview preparation, it was certainly the key to me both enduring the interview cycle for six different companies, and landing my current position that started last Wednesday!

Tim’s story shows that we can create playspace for new possibilities to emerge in the most stressful, and personally challenging situations. As much as what we do, playspace is about how we show up, and by showing up with awareness and openness, we can create space for new and exciting possibilities to emerge. Congratulations, Tim!

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Posted in Best Practices, Engagement | 1 Comment »

Four Learning Trends & Reflections from ASTD 2010

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

One week after this year’s ASTD International Conference & Exhibition  I thought I would take a moment for a little reflective learning and lessons learned.

Importance of Pace and Energy Conservation

From years of conference attendance and presenting, I have learned how important it is to pace myself and monitor my own energy. As a participant, this means not trying to go to every single session, meet every possible contact, and visit every exhibition booth. Early on, I learned that with this strategy I soon met with diminishing returns. Much better to attend a few sessions that are right on target for my current interests and practice issues, take some breathing room after to make notes and think about application than to scurry off to the next session.

Similarly, I find it much more useful to have quality interactions with people, than work on quantity. I found some wonderful connecting places and opportunities to share resources with the folks who I made the time to get to know.

Whole Person Learning in Action

Pace & Energy in Facilitated Learning

Attuning to pace and energy in the learning sessions is especially paramount on long conference days. No matter how ground-breaking your content, if you haven’t engaged participants energy and ability to make meaning of your content you are dead in the water in the first five minutes. The sessions I attended that were most effective respected the basic human need for whole person engagement, without reducing the experiential learning to a “dog and pony show.” In other words, the learning experiences need to be relevant. This is not new news, and from the sessions I participated in it is clear that even at this stage in our practice and understanding we all need to be reminded of it.

Emerging Technology & Learning

Perhaps the biggest trend at the conference was the power of social media to help us connect, keep us connected and share key learning. Throughout the conference many participants tweeted from sessions, giving people who could not attend the specific session (or the conference at all) a chance to “get the high points.” People were tweeting across session rooms, as well, commenting about what they loved (and didn’t love) about their experience. Twitter also served as the bulletin board for spontaneous gatherings (Tweet-ups), Exhibitor give-aways, and program updates. The blessing of this is engagement; the potential “curse” is that rich content and experiential learning cannot always be reduce to a140 character limit.

I highly recommend checking out the #astd10 twitter stream to get a taste of the content, as well as some great tips on Chicago pizza and sights seeing!

Relational and Social Learning

Walking the Exhibition Hall, I was also excited to see all of the new platforms available using technology to enhance learning. The biggest trend I see is the use of multiple platforms to support informal, incremental and just-in-time learning. Many, such as bloomfire.com have designed programs that are embedded in, or facilitate the creation of communities of practice. I am heartened to see this combination of relational and social learning, with content, and skill development.

The future of training and learning looks bright. It is social, interactive, engaging, improvisational and sometimes even playful!

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Posted in Best Practices | 2 Comments »

Improvisation Capacity & Playspace

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

The dynamics of playspace come to life as they are enacted each day in the real-time spaces we create. I first discovered the power of playspace through the detailed descriptions of people who were developing their capacities for innovating, learning, and changing as they learned improvisation.

As I analyzed their experiences, I saw two important interconnected phenomena. First, the individual capacities emerged as people developed increasing awareness, acceptance, and appreciation of themselves, their colleagues, and their context in action. Second, people’s individual experience came to life through dynamic engagement in the playspace the co-created. The more playspace people experienced, the more improvisation capacity they developed and the more improvisation capacity they developed, the more playspace they experienced.

From: From Workplace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning and Changing Through Dynamic Engagement (Jossey-Bass, 2010)

In this short video I describe and demonstrate the relationship between playspace and improvisation capacity:

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Posted in Playspace Dynamics, Warm-up Exercises and Ideas | No Comments »

Making The Business Case for Playspace

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

The most common challenge I hear from organizational stakeholders is that they need to be able to make the business case for the so-called soft strategies before they can get buy-in from their colleagues. The idea that strategies that engage the whole person are soft, while those that target operational aspects of organizational life are worthwhile, overlooks the very core of organizational success—the living, breathing people who must fulfill its mission each day. Without engagement, without playspace for innovating, learning, and changing, the best that
organizations can hope for is compliance. Unfortunately compliance is not enough to ensure organizational success. People do not challenge each other’s ideas, explore alternative scenarios, or persevere through complex issues and obstacles out of compliance; they do so out of commitment (Senge, Roberts, Boss, Smith, & Kleiner, 1994).

Commitment is fostered by engagement, and engagement
is fostered in playspace. A study conducted by Patrick Kulesa (2006), global research director at Towers Perrin, of 664,000 employees from around the world showed a significant difference in the business success of companies in which workers were highly engaged and those with low engagement scores. Their research showed a 52 percent gap in operating income between high- and low-engagement companies, a 13 percent growth in net income for high-engagement companies versus a 3.8 percent decline in low-engagement companies, and a 27.8 percent growth in earnings per share for high-engagement companies versus an 11.2 percent decline for low-engagement companies. There is a direct link between spaces that inspire high engagement and profitability.

From: Meyer, Pamela. From Workplace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning and Changing Through Dynamic Engagement (Jossey-Bass, 2010)

References
Kulesa, P. (2006). Engaged employees help boost the bottom line [Electronic Version]. HR.com, 2. Retrieved April 15, 2009 from http://tinyurl.com/qyw45x.

Senge, P. M., Roberts, C., Boss, R. B., Smith, B. J., & Kleiner, A. (1994). The fifth discipline field book: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday.

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Posted in Business Case, Strategy/Planning, The book | 1 Comment »