Play is extremely functional. It is in fact a pleasure signal hard-wired to learning. It ensures that young animals make every effort to discover and manipulate the world around them, because they enjoy doing so. It continues in social settings quite simply because social settings are fluid. As an adult primate you may have played in the branches enough to perfect your balance, but your place in the hierarchy of the troop is mutable, so you need to “stay in the game”.

We associate play with childhood. Human children, during their long journey to adulthood, play endlessly, but when they actually arrive at their maturity they are supposed to “put away childish things”, stop playing and start working. Though the impulse is still there, something that was normal and is apparently useful is suddenly labelled useless and frivolous. Few people would actually say that adults should not play, but most think it. If you admit to playing games as an adult you are admitting a weakness, unless the games are Chess or Go or the kind we call “sport”. When I wrote above that I was an “avid gamer” I felt as if I were standing in a “Gamers Anonymous” meeting and being regarded with sympathy and patience by my fellow addicts. I would never put that on my CV: it is asking for trouble. Many capable professional people game, but they do not admit to it because of the negative connotation of playing games.
I speculate that the negative attitude towards play and games is a hangover from an older, simpler time when work was a well-defined task that needed to be executed assiduously to put bread on the table. If the fields need tilling then playing is out of the question until harvest home. These attitudes are highly appropriate to a society in which play and learning are only needed to teach children basic social and communication skills before moving on to the static, enduring jobs adults do. Play is then compartmentalized to the weekend basketball game or perhaps a bridge session.

Such attitudes are outdated in a society where jobs change all the time and the line between leisure and work has become porous. You probably carry a smartphone (probably one with Angry Birds on it) jangling with push e-mail and appointments. You have a job your parents would barely recognise. It is almost certainly not the same job you were hired for, or even did last year. It is now expected that adults will need to learn new skills and adapt to new working practices throughout their lives. They need to continuously do what they did when they were children: learn to handle a new world, because it’s a new world all the time now.

Computer games have changed the world and they are not finished doing so. It used to be true that solitaire play was limited to one-shot puzzles, like Patience or jigsaws. If you wanted a game that would last and continue to challenge your growing skill, you needed a human opponent to play chess with you. Now, for the first time in history, you can indulge an instinctive love of complex and ever-more-challenging games without needing a human opponent. The dynamic in any computer game is very fundamentally different: instead of a large reward achieved at the end of a complex game, we can now get many small rewards, meted out as we achieve smaller goals: it is as if I were rewarded for making a single good chess move. Games also change the kind of challenge they present as you advance – you do not just need to perform faster or more precisely, but you also need to do something new. Not at all coincidentally, this corresponds to an optimal learning strategy: many small rewards and a steady stimulation of new skills. Games have adapted to the fragmented nature of our lives now: casual and social-media games are designed to be picked up and dropped. You can play them for a minute and then do something else. You can also play in teams. Online games offer multi-player challenges in which teams of humans play against teams of computer opponents, or other human teams, or both. The universal connectivity of the Internet allows me to game competitively or cooperatively with French, Russian and Korean players. It even supports basic forms of communication that sidestep the language issue.

Stepping back a moment – games are engineered to help us learn to play them and defeat them. Modern computer games are extremely complex beasts and are heavily engineered to engage and educate their users. They interweave with social networks and voice communication. They are piggybacking on the pleasure trigger we get from learning, from play. The body gives you endorphins when you run fast: it’s a survival thing, but now we use it for jogging. The body rewards you for learning and adapting to new situations for the same reason and we use it to play games.

Computer gaming has been an integral part of our culture for forty years. Pretty much the entire professional population at this point has at least a passing acquaintance with computer games. Better yet, the most technical and cutting-edge people are the ones still playing them actively. These people love the complexity and challenge, but are faced with a work environment in which gaming is seen as an unproductive distraction and are unable to “unhook” from their main task. Naturally this is about as realistic as an unenforced speed-limit. Statistics abound on how many work-hours are “wasted” on browser-based games. People want to play.

Let me throw into this mix the latest trend in games: pervasive games. These are games that are designed to be interwoven with another activity, like attending an event.

Imagine a world in which you could play professional games at work that helped you hone business skills, learn a new habit, think more clearly.

Imagine playing a game against your boss that made you both better communicators. Imagine playing a Disaster game where tested and found flaws in the company disaster planning. Imagine playing a game that taught you how to run a project successfully, with other employees of your company as playing as project personnel and opponents (believe me, every project has opponents!). This is where we need to go now. Educational games have the reputation of being bad games and poor education. They are limited to word-learning and maths tutors for the pre-teens. Business games (the ones I have seen) are often poorly designed, needing a consultant to run them and having no replayability: like a jigsaw they guide you to a single reward and then cease. They are stuck in the 18th century, because nobody currently sees a need. There is a market for Halo and Skyrim, but nobody has made the sell to the business world that casual gaming, pervasive to their business, could do the heavy lifting in the education area. That is all the more needed given the downsizing of so many corporate education functions.

Let’s sum up. I claim that working and playing are being woven together by the changes in the working environment. Playing games is a core, hard-wired part of human motivations. Playing and learning are joined at the hip: they are inseparable. Modern work requires continuous learning and adaptation. This means that the ideal form of learning is in form of pervasive, pick-up-and-drop games that engage many members of your staff.

I have spent a year recovering from burn-out. During the first period, I frankly do not know how long it was, I could not play in any way whatsoever. Given that game-playing has always been important to me, this was a sign of poor mental health. As I started to recover I regained interest in games. I started running a Savage Worlds (tabletop rpg) game for a group of teens and I started playing computer games. Let us look for a moment about the effect of those games on my health.

I experienced the tabletop game as an important creative outlet. I made a story-world for my players that was an adaptation to the modern day of  the book “Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham. I was inspired by rereading the book and created characters for them to interact with, going so far as to paint small portraits of them. I also crafted miniature Triffids out of papier-mache and drew an elaborate map of the caves and the cave entrance that the characters emerged from at the start of the story, teaching myself the GIMP image processing program to do so.  These were little steps on the way to being myself again. I was proud and encouraged that I had created something, surmounted all the little obstacles to trying something new and succeeded. Running an RPG game is also a small, well-structured social arena to rediscover the skills of connecting with others in. I believe the reason that some less socially adapted people are attracted to role-playing games is because they are a wonderfully safe and encouraging environment. They are non-competitive, create rapport and team-work and supply cool successes.

In the same period I gradually started playing computer games again. I started playing Team Fortress 2, a game in which you, as part of a team, attempt to defeat another team. Though TF2 is a shooter and you spend a lot of time being blown up, often after a mere few minutes of life, it somehow manages to have a cheerful, humorous tone. The characters you play are cartoonish, bombastic parodies, so it does not hurt your pride when you are repeatedly massacred by more skilled players.

That last part is important. I am rather competitive and a bad loser. It is not a trait I am proud of, so I do my best, at some cost, to be graceful. I had previously abandoned “shooter” games largely because my initial lack of skill and subsequent rapid defeat caused me to become frustrated and upset. Strangely enough, something about the goofy tone and rapid pace of TF2 did not press my competitive buttons and I was able to play it with pleasure and therefore become quite expert.

Which brings us to the here and now. I still play and enjoy the tabletop games, but I am finding it harder, as I get mentally healthier, to enjoy Team Fortress. I now get impatient if I am not among the top scorers and I get very unhappy if my team performs (in my view) badly. Apparently as I pull out of the burnout, my competitiveness and aggression are gradually increasing, to the point that it is becoming harder to participate and progress in the game I used to enjoy. It is something of a paradox, that becoming more of “my old self” brings with it traits that I was happy to miss. It also points up that some competitiveness is useful and a spur to excellence, but that too much can prevent you from sticking with a learning task long enough to become excellent. Video games are a powerful metric. They show you in many ways how skilled you are at playing them and the change in your skill level is visible from day to day. My learning task now is to find a way to relax and enjoy the times when I fail, in the certain knowledge that this will enable me to become more skilled and capable in the long run. I think the most crucial aspect of my early play was a concious setting of low expectations and the goal of having fun, rather than being very capable. Fun leads to skill, to expertise, not the other way round. If I want to get good at Team Fortress, or anything else, I had better be able to enjoy it.

Manitou always look like what you don’t want; their way of rattlin’ your bones. So Pigskin sits there, the dust streaming away around the flayed snout, black eye-pits and heaving, bleeding fat belly and shuffles with the long, delicate fingers of a fine lady.

I ain’t fooled. We go waaay back me an’ Pigskin.

It’s a cliché, but completely accurate in my experience, that when you buy an expensive toy for a child she spends all her time playing with the packaging. I actually remember doing that: it is because the packaging has more possibilities. Many elaborate toys have a single directed purpose, they are the “cherry-pitter” of toys. We once bought a magnificent plastic walking, LED fire-breathing dragon for one of my kids. He was charmed by the spectacle (as we had been), but got bored quite fast and kept it as an ornament rather than a toy. It reminded me of the elaborate robots with sparking effects that were the must-have toy when I was a kid. I always got frustrated by them because they stopped working when I took them apart. Taking apart is a very good impulse. It looks destructive to parents, who know that the workings cannot be easily understood or put back together, but it is in fact healthy curiosity. The outer, walking, sparking behaviour is great, but just look at all the complex moving gubbins inside…. that is really interesting.

Let’s talk about video games. There is no video game in existence (with the exception of the infamous Desert Bus prank) that does not present and reward an ever increasing level of difficulty. This is so well known that the conclusion is overlooked: games are only fun it you are learning and developing. They provide you with immediate thrills and spills, but also with visible and measurable growth in your skills. I have personally experienced the joy of coming back to a place where I was stalled in a tough game after a night of sleep and discovering that I had somehow become better during the night. Gamers are addicted to that feeling of growth, so successful games feed it, no exceptions.

My children have a history with video games. The ones they play the longest are the ones where you can design your own levels. The oldest built elaborate levels with complex scripts and behaviours in Warcraft 3 and then moved on to Phun (that was before they got all “educational”, changed the name a charged money for it). Middle one builds buildings with lifts and stairs and gun-emplacements in Roblox. All three of them are now obsessed with Minecraft. If you are not a gamer, you need to know that Minecraft is the free-to-use product of a single programmer with a lot of unpaid assistants, has ancient, crude blocky graphics and is a sandbox: within the (large) confines of a Minecraft world you can do pretty much anything. Take a moment to Google Minecraft and watch the videos if you don’t know it, I’ll wait here.

You back? Pretty impressive stuff wasn’t it? Of course some of the kids at play with these toys are industrial designers and programmers with full-time jobs, but that just brings in the next drop of bloody obvious: there is no toy as fascinating to a child as the tools of an adult. Any parent knows that kids will find your mobile phone, your electric drill and your lipstick more interesting than anything they have. They do not want a plastic hammer and pretend nails. They want to do what you do, because they are programmed to learn the stuff that big humans know before they become big humans themselves.

So what are we homing in on here? If we accept that all play is learning and that children play at every opportunity with anything that is not nailed down the question becomes: “why is education not play?”

It even becomes  ”how on earth can education be effective if it is not play?”

Play, particularly imitation of adult behaviour, is pretty obviously the built-in monkey instinct for learning about the environment. It is exploration, taking apart, copying and experimental creation. It is the reason we rule the world (good luck world), fly aeroplanes, build, create and discover.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that dickishness is more than plentiful and less would be better, but DBAD seems to be something that is only said to other people. That is not really the problem. In most of the situations where I would apply DBAD, I am involved. I am often even a contributor. Despite my best efforts and those of my beloved wife and upbringing I am sometimes a dick. Sometimes people and things Rub Me the Wrong Way (pause for double-entendre) and I am a nasty, judgemental, sarcastic meany-trousers. It’s not very often, but sometimes my dice land that way.

Stil, even when people are not being very nice to me, I have the opportunity and even obligation to take the better path and higher ground and sometimes I do. That is the heavy lifting. That is when a gorilla get it’s wings, I get a year off purgatory and extra shiny karma.

The greatest challenge is that moment of judgement. The moment when I decide that someone is wrong, bad and a drain on the species: “cut me up in traffic!”, “took it without asking!”, “got in my way for no reason!”, “looked at me funny!”. That is when I could say “don’t be a dick” to them and skip away secure in my own perfection, but it is harder, but I think better, to say “you don’t know their story”. You don’t. I once sat in a very intensive coaching session with twelve ordinary-looking, well-paid professionals and discovered how much sadness, grief and suffering lurked in their lives. There is a lot of suffering out there that people who look no different to you are just dealing with. You have no idea, I certainly didn’t.

The rude guy in the supermarket had just had a hell of day with his abusive boss. The dithering lady in the car ahead is dealing with the death of a friend but still has to pick up her children. The kid that pushed in front of you got humiliated in front of all his friends and maybe Will Wheaton’s power-mad flight attendant can never have children, is facing redundancy, or  just got out of bed the wrong side this morning.

Judgement without information is just stroking off my ego and licencing me to be horrid. If we know the story, see at a real person in the wrack and fury of their world we might feel differently. We might get it, show compassion and let it ride. Life is too short.

It’s a short ride on this spinning globe sweethearts: no one gets out alive. You may bump into me on this whirligig and I may be a complete dick at that time, so please remember: you don’t know my story and I don’t know yours. Until we do, judgement is not ours.

with Love, Tim

Cultural change is free from Mindfields College on Vimeo.

GTD evolved out of the kind of busy commercial middle and executive management environment Peter Drucker wrote for. Its bones and brains were honed against a deluge of inputs and interrupts, lack of clarity, moving targets and the pressing need to remain sane while keeping an ever increasing number of plates safely spinning. It is indeed about “getting things done” and the unsaid follow-up is “despite your screw-ball environment”. The assumption is that the (for me unsung) rigourous process of defining a Next Action will automatically chunk things into a size you can focus long enough to handle. That is mostly true, but not always.

I have a set of documents I prepare once a week which takes a serious amount of time and concentration. The action is perfectly clear to me. The doing is sometimes challenging.

The Pomodoro Technique on the other hand evolved from Francisco Cirillio’s wish to improve his ability to study. It is armoured against distraction, lack of focus and loss of the ability to absorb information: it is a way of staying the course, buckling down. The assumption here is that your task may well be large, but it is pretty well defined: it is a book to read attentively, learn from, perhaps a programme to write.The “atom of time” GTD thinks about  is two minutes. Pomodoro’s take 25 minutes: some things need the one focus, some need the other. It is also worth noting that in most GTD forums there is  a lively discussion of procrastination, which suggests to me that GTD needs a little help in the doing area. Also very powerful in the Pomodoro technique is the emphasis on learning, keeping records so that you can see patterns and improve over time: very Kaizen.

There is no wrong here. E-mails patter into my PC at about 40-60 a day right now. The need to be handled and transformed into action and it needs to be done with rigour. It needs a process that makes sense of them quickly and prevents overwhelm. Some of my stuff is just too small and volatile for Pomodoros – I hate mashing disparate tasks into one 25 minute slot. On the other hand, I also have those big-chunk documents to deal with – those work out to about six Pomodoros on a Tuesday.

I also collect vigorously, always have a notebook, take a tear-off pad to every meeting and process my notes afterwards. I need both a toothbrush and a hairbrush, tap-shoes and wellingtons (rubber boots for you US people) even the rapier and sledgehammer on some days. My wisdom here is this: use what works for you, GTD, Pomodoro or both.

As I wrote a while ago about the Pomodoro Technique it can also be useful to work on how we handle that one task. Pomodoro does not say anything about how to handle your mass of inputs, that is what you have GTD for after all, but it is a very effective discipline when you get to the point of doing something. The pomodoro technique simply says that you need to fully focus on that single thing for a short (typically 25 minutes) space of time, to the exclusion of everything else. I have to admit I initially did not apply it with much… here is comes… discipline. Discipline is necessary to get the benefit. Discipline in this case is quite simply not letting yourself be interrupted, staying on target. It requires a little effort of willpower, but only for a short time.

You need to exercise discipline to run a pomodoro and get the benefits of the focus it provides, but like every exercise it is strengthening : you need to actually do the movements to get the muscles and do the thinking to get the ideas. The trick to any kind of exercise (or new behaviour)  is to make sure that you perceive benefits very close to the time when you make the effort. Do 25 minutes of effort and then give yourself a (short) reward. Then do it again…and again. I have been running Pomodoros for a week and a half now. It certainly has improved my ability to concentrate and it has had an unexpected side-benefit too: quality improvement. When you break things down into 25 minute blocks you inevitably find yourself finished with time to spare at some point. The Pomodoro technique says that this is an opportunity for “overlearning“, which makes sense for study tasks, but not when you are writing a document or coding a program. What does make sense is quality checking. I have consistently found that being forced to stay with something that I had mentally declared finished and double-check it has improved the final quality. I always find something to sharpen and improve. Curving back round to the subject of discipline, the extra value of small disciplined step is that is reinforces your faith in your own ability to drive yourself, keep promises to yourself.

Bottom line? I recommend the Pomodoro technique for those of us (=me) that are easily distracted from doing. It is very GTD-complementary and gives a nice little win at 25 minute intervals. Give it a try.

It is hard because we do not train ourselves the right way. My dog sits when I say “Sit!”. This is not because I am wonderfully masterful or very skilled with dogs. It is because when my dog hears “Sit!” he knows that if he does indeed sit he will get a munchy. He has a great liking for dog-munchies and so he sits.

That’s it.

I did warn you that it was obvious, but what is astonishing is what we humans do when we are training ourselves to adopt a new behaviour. We do the equivalent of whacking the dog for standing or not sitting fast enough. We withhold the munchy. We sometimes (whether the dog sat or not) bury the dog in steaks. The message here is simple:  all you need to do to get yourself to behave differently is to consistently give yourself a small but noticeable reward when you do the new behaviour at least a bit. Do not give the reward when you do not do the behaviour. Always give it when you do. Despite our wonderful yearning spirits, the learning part of us is no smarter than a dog. So if you want to lose weight, jog regularly, study French etc. build in a human-munchy until whatever it is is second nature.

But that’s ok. Here is how it happened.

At the moment I spend part of my time in an environment were there is fear and lack of candour. People feel threatened and powerless and unable to connect to each other. Such situations are anathema to me, they dampen down our fire and life and infect us with secrecy and doubt. Anger and complaints do not counter this. Bitching around the coffee machine does not help. The only cure for fear is truth: gentle, unremitting personal truth. So I told the truth about what was happening to me (I am going to leave) but that I was fine and would be happy to talk to anyone about my situation. This undoubtedly helped the manager concerned to avoid a confrontation with his staff. He used what I said to paper over growing concerns. So he will probably not properly resolve the situation. That is a shame, but I stand by my principle. I knew that I would be used and did it anyway because, as I tell my sons very often, I wish to behave according to my own best principles rather than responding to other’s worst actions. I hope that some of my co-workers will feel a little easier, a little stronger and less alone. It was for them. I was a small thing I could do.

So what am I telling you? For me, it does not matter if others would put your actions to bad use. Tell the truth. It really will set you free.