Adopting Playfulness as a Strategy

From the beginning of the 21st century, predictability in work life has gone out of the window. Predictability and permanency have disappeared from the way businesses are run as well. Be it extremely short product lifecycles or unexpected changes in the business environment caused by a new regulation or something like a Coronavirus, unpredictability is all around us. Almost all of the sequential, logical work with predictable outcomes is today done by robots and algorithms, be it the shop-floor of an automobile manufacturer or micro-level individual tasks. The result of this is that humans are left to deal with work that rarely has a predictable outcome.

So, an approach of ‘sticking to the norms’, that worked even 5 years back, is unlikely to work today, as the norms would have been rendered defunct, thanks to increased robotization. At the workplace, humans have to be adaptive to change, all the time. To survive in this new environment, they have to be agile and nimble footed and willing to unlearn old habits and pick up new skills, all the time. Unlike the single-career professionals of the 20th century, most humans today are expected to have multiple careers in their lifetime.

Being nimble-footed does not come easily as humans have a natural resistance to change. Moreover, as adults, we are taught to adapt to social norms and to be afraid of failure and criticism. The way to overcome this is to be playful. Playful not as being sporty or childish, but to adopt playfulness as a mindset. This course describes the ‘why and how’ of adopting a playful mindset to combat uncertainty. This can be adopted by organizations and individuals alike.