Yesterday morning I washed windows. A cold winter led to a decision for inside storms on interior windows that border an unheated porch. Washing the windows wasn’t a big deal, but a job I put off. Then, an email announced the upcoming installation and a reminder that clean inside windows mean no need to remove the new storms anytime soon. I grudgingly left my desk, and got the Windex and paper towels.
Pablo Picasso reminds us it takes a long time to become young. I think I just learned something important about what he meant.
As I was spraying the Windex, I suddenly remembered how, as a young child, I begged my mother to let me wash the glass front door, and I turned it into a host of games.
I was a friend of Elroy on the “Jetsons,” and the Windex was my ray gun. I was Dale Evans, working with Roy Rogers to protect the Double R Bar Ranch from bandits. I was a museum employee, polishing the glass on a great work of art – and it needed to be spotless. I was a scientist doing important experiments: how long before the paper towel became too wet to clean without smudges? How much Windex was required to do the job without being wasteful? We had the cleanest front door in town! My mother was happy. And I had a blast.
So, yesterday I enjoyed the childhood recollections and spritzed away the morning with a smile. I played scientist again, and developed my own data-based tricks to maximize speed and quality – windows warmed by the sun needed a different wiping pace than the cold ones; cold windows needed drier paper towels than the warm; the edges of the panes needed special care and thorough drying, while clean damp centers seemed to take care of themselves. I complimented my inner child on her experimental design and mindfulness– and kept happily spritzing.
During rests, I took in the views. I watched a young mother stop and carefully lift her child from a carriage to look at an evergreen bough blowing in the wind. I saw how well the new robotic arm on our town’s garbage truck emptied the neighborhood’s heavy cans – saving, I’m sure, the precious backs of many a sanitation worker. I enjoyed two spirited Golden doodles romping down and around the sidewalk, repeatedly tangling their leashes to their walker’s dismay.
Then I suddenly found myself thinking in new ways about a grant application I was writing: phrases and data to include started to come freely. The idea for this blog post emerged, as did a playful list of leadership wisdom – useful ditties such as,
- It’s more efficient to clean things up from the top down: dirty drips make a mess for the bottom and lead to a lot of wasted time and effort.
- Sometime just in time is just fine.
- Figuring out what’s on your side of the glass and what’s on the other is critical: if it ain’t your dirt to clean, you can polish to your heart’s content to no avail.
Play is the well-spring of joy and creativity for children and adults. It activates different parts of the brain, relaxes our defenses, and frees us to think outside current cognitive constraints.
There is plenty of research on the links among play, creativity, successful entrepreneurship, and the development of 21st century organizational skills. More than forty years ago, organizational guru Jim March – in an extension of his work on decision making with Nobel Laureate Herb Simon — advocated for the vital role of playfulness in his landmark book with Johan Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations.[1] Play, according to March, is an antidote to the natural limits in how humans think: we may think we are looking at all our options, but we only see those that fit within our mental models and beliefs about what the world is and how it works.
Escape is possible, continued March, if we let ourselves play — deliberately embrace “the power of sensible foolishness” in order to open our minds to new ways of thinking and being.
Play gets a negative rap in the adult world – “grow up,” “stop being such a child,” “quit playing around,” and the like. Play, however, is a critical leadership skill when viewed as an essential complement, not an enemy, of rational thinking – a kind of “Mardi Gras of reason” that affords our minds a planned occasion for creative experimentation, relaxed reflection, free and unrestricted associations, and openness to innovative solutions just waiting to be found.
How are you going to productively play today? What project could use some innovative thinking? What will enable you to free your creative mind?
[1] March, J. G. (1976). “The Technology of Foolishness” in March, J. G. and J. Olsen (ed.). Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.