Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:00:16: The Career Collective

00:03:26: Looking at play and work

00:10:58: Examples of being playful at work

00:14:45: Play as an antidote to stress

00:16:25: Ideas for action…

00:16:50: … 1: pockets of play

00:17:17: a) Wordle

00:18:03: b) Protobot

00:18:48: c) LEGO

00:19:58: d) team games

00:22:38: … 2: playing with presenting

00:25:42: a) vision boards

00:26:28: b) question cards 00:32:16: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  Every week, we talk about different a topic to do with work, and share some ideas and actions so that we can all navigate this Squiggly Career with that bit more confidence and control.

Helen Tupper: And before we get started on today's topic, which is all about how you can fit more play into your work, we just want to let you know about an event that we have coming up that we'd love to see you at.  It is on 2 December, and instead of just doing Squiggly Careers Live, which is an event that we've done before and has been really well received, we thought we would join up with some other podcasters, and we are creating a one-off special called The Career Collective.  Many names were quoted --

Sarah Ellis: Did you see how Bruce Daisley, who's one of our collective contributors, have you seen how he's described it today?

Helen Tupper: What's he said today?

Sarah Ellis: He said, "Apparently, we are like the Avengers"!

Helen Tupper: Well, do you know what?  On that point, I wanted to call it something like that and I wanted to market it and put capes on all of us.  I thought I could go on to like Midjourney or DALL-E.

Sarah Ellis: Right, I would like being like a superhero for a day.

Helen Tupper: Right, I'm going to pick this back up.  But the cynicism that I have faced in this collective of creating this event!  So, I've gone with The Career Collective, which feels very formal instead of having more fun.  But it basically is several podcasters who are coming together for one night to discuss and debate what's next for work.  And we're going to take some topics, which I think we'll have some very fun, but potentially heated conversations, about our differences and opinions.

Sarah Ellis: Oh, yeah.  I think it actually makes me quite nervous, because I just think, you know usually, I think we will still do this, usually we do our end of year podcast, where just me and you chat about our years, and I always really look forward to that podcast; whereas this year, we're doing some sort of high-profile, 300 people in a room with some --

Helen Tupper: It's 450, just so you know!

Sarah Ellis: Okay, with potentially some quite -- I think I'm going to get absolutely dominated in these discussions!

Helen Tupper: You're not going to get dominated!   But everyone, if you want to come, we would love to see you there, but also a little bit of support, because I think it could be a lot of fun, and a lot of learning.

Sarah Ellis: I need some Squiggly chanters in the room, "Squigg-er-ly!"

Helen Tupper: "Squigg-er-ly!  Squigg-er-ly!"  Can you imagine if everybody…!  I remember when I worked at Microsoft and we went to this big event, and all the different countries were there and all the countries had different jackets.

Sarah Ellis: Okay.

Helen Tupper: So, you could see the UK team and the German team.

Sarah Ellis: I think I might try and find us some Squiggly stash to wear!

Helen Tupper: Well, our team are going to be in Squiggly stash, but I wonder whether Squiggly Career listeners can have a little badge.  That would be funny.  But no, everyone, these people are all of our friends.  And you've got Isabel Berwick from the Working It podcast.  You've got Bruce, who's been an amazing mentor for us, on the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast.  And you've got Jimmy from Jimmy's Jobs of the Future.  And we're all coming together, it's one night only.  All the profits from the event, all of the 450 tickets that will get sold, are going to charity.  They're going to Beam, and they're going to upReach.  So, not only will it be a night of fun and learning and connection with people who are interested in careers and work, all of those profits are going to charity too.  So, we would love to see you there. We are posting about this an awful lot on LinkedIn.  We will put the link to the event as well in the show notes of the podcast.  And if you cannot find the details and you really want to come, just email us, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com and we will tell you how to do it.

Sarah Ellis: So, on that note about being playful, I can't decide whether that event sounds fun or scary right now, I'm trying not to get distracted.

Helen Tupper: Try not to get distracted by that.

Sarah Ellis: Bit of both.

Helen Tupper: Bit of both!

Sarah Ellis: We're going to talk a bit about play.  And when you say play and work, I suppose we want to take our work seriously.  So, sometimes play can feel like a funny phrase to use, or it can feel disconnected from work.  But I think just because we care about our work doesn't mean that we can't have fun and we can't enjoy it.  And there's quite a grown-up definition from a guy called Stuart Brown.  So, he's a doctor who has written a whole book about play that I've read.  It's actually really interesting.  It talks about how play is so important and such a critical part of learning.  He almost makes a relationship between, he says play is like how you actually facilitate learning, which you know when you then start to think back to, well how do your kids learn or how do the kids that you know learn?  It's by playing.  And how do they learn best?  By tricking them into playing, is what I've discovered when I've been trying to get Max to do his homework.  I'm like, "Right, how can I make this 'fun', in inverted commas", but I actually do really need him --

Helen Tupper: So true!  I'm trying to make maths fun at the moment with Madeline.  I'm like, "Let's do maths with pasta.  What other things can we find that are fun to do our sums together?"

Sarah Ellis: I was trying to make the patron saints fun, which not that fun.  I worked very hard and I got props involved.  I mean it did technically work, but it took all of my creative energy.  And so Stuart Brown says, he describes it as, "An absorbing and seemingly purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-confidence and sense of time".  So, that prompted us to think, "What does that mean?" in practical terms as ever, trying to be useful.  And we got to, "This looks like playing at work and being playful with your work in a really low pressure way".  I think as soon as play loses the fun, you stop playing.  If it's not fun anymore, you're probably not playing.  And if it's too organised, if there's too much pressure on an activity, it stops being playful. I was reading a really interesting article by IDEO, where they actually very intentionally create these play times in between set projects that they have to do.  What works really well about that is people choose what they want to play with and how they play, but they've noticed a real watch-out. 

If play becomes that dreaded organised fun and people feel pressured, or they can't opt out, or they don't have many choices about how to opt in, you lose all of the purpose of what you were trying to do with playing at work in the first place, you lose all of the benefits of the creativity and the connection that comes with playing.  So, I think it's not an easy one to get right I think in groups, because you can't just say to everybody, "Oh, let's just play more".  I don't think anyone would do anything differently.  But then equally, if you go too far in terms of putting structure around it, you probably don't then get to some of the benefits that you're trying to realise.

Helen Tupper: It's just made me think actually, because I do think that people have a different opinion of what is fun.  If play is fun, then --

Sarah Ellis: We definitely have a different opinion of what is fun!

Helen Tupper: Yeah, we definitely have a different opinion.  And so, having one activity that works for everyone actually could be quite hard to do, and two things came in my mind when you were talking about it.  So, the one was, if you've got like a team offsite, I quite like the idea of having, or you could do it virtually, you could do it in virtual rooms, but the idea of having play stations, not like the very well-known game, but almost like different, so there is a choice, like you were saying with IDEO.  So, some people can, I don't know, play with, there could be some word-based games, some people might have number-based games, some people might have those physical things, but there's play stations that you can pick based on your play preference, I suppose, is one way of thinking about it. Then the other thing I was thinking about was ages ago, this is going back now a couple of years, we did some work with ASOS.  And I remember, I think it was part of their learning week.  And as well as having people like us from our company, Amazing If, going in and running some sessions as part of their learning week, they also had some staff sessions.  And I remember, because I think it was in the room next to me, they had somebody who was internal, like  staff member, who was using one of their skills, and they were doing a session on, you'll probably know because you like plants, but you know those hanging baskets, but internal ones, where you almost like crochet it yourself; what's it called?

Sarah Ellis: Oh okay, not like in a terrarium.

Helen Tupper: No, not like a terrarium, I always get those confused as well.  But no, they're like hanging baskets that are made of almost like a crochet hanging basket.

Sarah Ellis: A crochet, like a knitting one?

Helen Tupper: Yeah, yeah.  And that's playful, right?  And they had that in like, it was part of a careers week.  But they had, as well as the more, I guess, serious skill-based sessions, I'm not sure I think of our sessions as very serious, but as well as those ones, these very playful sessions that were taught by other people, and you didn't have to be brilliant at it.  But I think having some choice around what the play is that people get to play to their preference, I think might be better than this always feeling forced.  And we'll come on to some of the options that we've got, so that you can give people those choices about what play might look like for you or in your teams as well. I was reading an article this morning which we'll put in the PodSheet around play, and I quite like the distinction it made between performance and play.  So, it talked about at work, a lot of our focus is on performance and high performance, and that is about achieving excellence against expectations.  So, there are some benchmarks about what good looks like and we're trying to meet or beat those things. 

That's what performance is.  And that's not bad, but that's what it is.  And then after performance, there's practice, which is where we are consciously trying to improve, we're trying to grow and get better.  And again, that's not bad, that's just practice. But play is different to performance, it is different to practice; play is judgment-free activity.  So, it's not about getting better at something and it's not being the best at something.  It is just doing something for the joy of the activity really, without worrying about how good you are at it.  And sometimes, play, he talks about in the article, it can feel a bit awkward or it might feel a bit uncomfortable or a bit embarrassing.  But actually, it's in those situations where we often learn the most, when we're that little bit vulnerable and we're going into a zone of work that can sometimes feel a little bit uncomfortable.  We learn about our skills, we learn about ourselves, we learn about other people as well.

Sarah Ellis: And when I was reading some examples of organisations who have done this really well, it often does help if everybody is starting from the same place.  So, if some people have got more expertise than others, that can be tricky because then you're like, well, this whole point about you want to try and take away the pressure, you want everyone to be able to be playful.  Let's say you were doing, I don't know, some improv, which is often used for play, but some people in that group were actually brilliant at it.  It then starts to actually put pressure on the other people to be like, "Oh, but I'm not as good".  So, trying to think about and to choose things where you're like, everybody will automatically be starting from a very similar place, yes, they might get to different outcomes, they might get to different places through playing, but almost if you have some expertise in the room, it can actually get in the way, which is why often playing in a way which is far away from what you do in your day jobs, I think is really helpful.

Helen Tupper: So, when was the last time that you were playful at work?

Sarah Ellis: I don't know.  So, firstly, I think I didn't find this very easy to answer, so almost to the extent where we nearly took the question out.  But then I thought, "Oh, that's interesting in itself".

Helen Tupper: You have also been in a bit of a bubble writing a book for two months.

Sarah Ellis: I have.  I've emerged today and I don't know how I've emerged, to be honest, based on Helen's feedback about half an hour ago; potentially mixed, still a bit upbeat but a little bit frantic at the same time.  I haven't had much downtime since finishing, so I think that's probably what I need.  And so, the last time I think I could remember an example I could point to, was on our Squiggly Staycation this year, earlier this year.  This is quite a long time ago, so this is, what, four months ago, five months ago, we did an activity with Play-Doh.  And it wasn't just, "Use some Play-Doh, have a play with some Play-Doh", we did put a bit of structure around it.  We said, "Make something with Play-Doh that represents how you feel about the next three months".  And actually, that did get everyone giggling because you're all using Play-Doh and it feels quite joyful and kid-like, and no one made any incredible creations, certainly not that I can remember.  Hopefully the team are not like, "How dare you, Sarah!" I think it just gave us a different way, it gave us like a moment of feeling light-hearted, which was good because we'd done some other more focused stuff.  But then actually, people also got to share a bit of a story and have a bit of a play.

 And it did feel a bit silly, but then actually it seemed to also combine people being able to share a story, and that did feel playful.  I'm not sure it was completely, you know, lots of the definitions around play talk about it being purposeless, or perhaps seemingly purposeless, because I think that did feel quite purposeful.  I felt like I learned about what was important to people, but maybe the making of the Play-Doh bit, that bit felt very low pressure.  And also, it really felt like you could go wherever you wanted to.  You could share what you wanted to, you could make whatever you wanted to. Some people probably did things that were a bit more deep and meaningful, some people were more just -- I remember actually one person just saying they loved the summer, because we were just about to go into the summer, and I do remember the flower, not too bad to make with the Play-Doh, this wasn't me, and somebody just going, "This is the season I look forward to, this is my moment.  I like the longer days, I like the light, I like the sun".  And you're like, "Yeah, that was great".  So, that was probably the only example I could come up with.

Helen Tupper: Well, I probably got one more recently, just because I think you were in Book Bubble, which was there was a Squiggly sculpture that we had seen in London.  I think it had just come to us on an email or something.  And so, we were having like a team -- it happened to be a team meeting, and we said, "Oh, should we go and see what this sculpture is all about?"  And we wandered there.  It was a bit weird because we didn't know, is it still going to be there or what was it going to be like?  And then we got there, and I remember we were just quite playful.  The team were standing on the statue, we were taking photos, and it just felt a bit silly.  And I do remember people being like, "Oh gosh, is this a bit silly?"  But it was really fun and it was playful and it did actually create connection. One we did a while ago was, we did a team improv session with Max Dickins.

Sarah Ellis: That was brilliant.

Helen Tupper: He comes from a company called Hoopla!

Sarah Ellis: That felt like pure play, right, I think?

Helen Tupper: Yeah.  But also again, improv isn't easy.  I mean, Max creates a brilliant situation where you feel comfortable.  But you are doing things that make you feel a bit silly.  But equally, you're doing it in an environment that feels safe, everyone's coming at it from the same place, and I definitely think you just create new connection and new energy.  It takes you out.  If your work is feeling quite relentless, I think play is a really good way of hitting reset a little bit, rather than just keeping doing the same thing.

Sarah Ellis: And there is loads of evidence that play is an excellent antidote to stress, particularly actually when used in smaller ways.  So, I think what Helen and I have both described is almost these moments of play that we've designed and thought about.  But what we haven't done is, there's actually some really interesting examples in hospitals, of where they've created very short moments of play, but that are more daily.  So, it would be something that's like five to seven minutes.  And each day, they tested things like, one day they just made some origami, which origami is always really hard, I think.  Or they did one very simple improv exercise. You can read a brilliant Guardian article by a doctor called Heidi Edmundson, where she basically says she introduced fun to the lives of A&E staff.  So, this is hardcore hospital, right, of all the bits of the hospital.  And she talks about how the laughter was infectious.  I remember reading it.  It reduced sickness.  So, nurses, it actually improved people's wellbeing, to the extent where they could see it in people coming to work every day, less people left, but also just people's sense of enjoyment of coming to work, in what must be a very hardcore environment, improve.  And you can read it, you can also listen to her.  She was on Bruce's podcast, I think, quite a few years ago, which I think might be how I originally found her.  And I remember thinking, if she can do it in that environment, there's no reason that everybody else can't, because that to me feels like a tough place to start.

Helen Tupper: So, we wanted to give you some ideas so that you can practise playing at work.  So, we've got two areas really.  We've got things that you can do at work, and we split those between things that you can do on your own and things that you can do together in a team; and then we've got some ideas for how you can play with your work, so the things that you do on an everyday, how you can just do that in a slightly more playful way.  So, we'll go through each of those now for you.

Sarah Ellis: So, the first idea we've got for you, we're calling pockets of play.  So, these are really small moments of play that you could add into your day.  So, this is inspired by the work that people like Heidi Edmundson has done in her hospital, where people are really thinking about playing more frequently than probably Helen and I were saying either of us do particularly as part of our work at the moment.  And so individually, a couple of examples of things you could do.  We both do Wordle, and we decided Wordle counts.  I think we were desperately trying to think of like, "Does that feel like --"  I think if Wordle is a game, and I think the way that I do Wordle means that it counts. So, I know some people do Wordle, and they're part of like a WhatsApp Wordle group, and they talk about how many they got it.  Or, you know if you were to, "Oh, I'm tracking my streak, and I must try and get it in two", or whatever. 

I do Wordle really fast.  I just go, right, I want to try and do it in the next three minutes.  And I don't worry too much if I'm like, "Okay, well, I need to sometimes use a word to learn about what it isn't as much as what it is".  And it is definitely fun for me, and it's pure play.  So, I don't take it too seriously, but I do find it very satisfying. The other thing that you can do, and Helen and I were saying we got different ones, there is a great website called protobot.org, and each day it generates random product ideas that you can have a go at.  So, today I got, "Design a birthday cake that fits in your pocket".  What did you get Helen?

Helen Tupper: "Design a lawnmower that responds to voice commands".  I think that would be great.  I'd love one of those.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, that would be quite good.

Helen Tupper: I've got a lot of grass that needs…

Sarah Ellis: It would be quite useful for you!  And so, I guess the idea of Protobot is prototyping.  But I think you could just have a play with that.  You could just be like, right, you could do a sketch, you could do a mind map, you could use objects around your house, anything basically that you felt was fun.  And the other thing that I've been reading quite a lot about, and this is one of the reasons I think it's now so popular with adults, individually or as a team, you can use LEGO.  I read a great book called Build Yourself Happy, the Joy of LEGO Play, which is by a lady called Abbie Headon.  And she talks about just actually the process of playing with LEGO.  It's so good for you, in terms of being relaxed at an end of a day, just something that you just enjoy, you're not feeling like you've got to take a picture of it and upload it on social media or anything like that, you're basically just like messing around with LEGO.  And though we sometimes think of LEGO as like, "Oh, I've got to create an incredible castle or a brilliant building", actually what a lot of adults like doing is just the low pressure, "I'm just going to put some bricks together and see what happens", which is definitely how I use LEGO when I use it with my 7-year-old.  So, that could be interesting. We are actually experimenting with that.  So, we've got an event coming up in a couple of weeks, and we're going to get 100 people playing with LEGO at the start of the day.  So, we'll let you know, we'll let you know how that works out.

Helen Tupper: We're also doing improv with people on the same day.

Sarah Ellis: We are, yes.

Helen Tupper: So, we are practising what we're saying.

Sarah Ellis: And as a team, some other ideas that you could try.  I have done this before, but not for a little while.  You do a self-portrait with your non-dominant hand, and you create a team gallery.  Everyone signs their pictures, and that's really fun because obviously everybody's are rubbish.  We've not done that in our team, so I think that would be a good one to do.  And you could use Play-Doh in the way that we've used it, or you could use Play-Doh, we've sometimes said to people, "Oh, create the shape of your career so far with Play-Doh", and you get all sorts of weird and wonderful shapes. 

That can be quite a good thing to do.  Anything with drawing, in my experience, because we use a lot of drawing in the work that we do, people are always quite nervous of drawing, and then loads better than they give themselves credit for, usually a lot better than I am, and we use quite a lot of drawing.  But if you can get people making or drawing or doing something where you can -- I often think play where you can see something, it's nice that you've got the bricks with the LEGO.  You're getting out of your head, I suppose, and doing something a bit more practical.  I often think that works really well.

My advice would be, try and connect play to a moment that you already have together as a team, because I think sometimes where I've tried to do this and it's not worked, if you try to do something separate, it always feels like a nice-to-do and then you don't really make time for it.  I think where we've seen this work best in our team is, "Oh, we are getting together, let's make sure we've got a moment of purposeless play".  And I think some of what we've done so far has been more by accident than design.  But having researched this and spent a bit of time thinking about play, certainly over the last few months, it makes me think it's worth being more -- it's funny, you've got to be intentional about then being purposeless about play.  But otherwise, I'm not sure as a team, it could be hard to make it happen if you just said to everyone, "Oh, we should just play more".  I just don't think anything would change.

Helen Tupper: I think when we do PodPlus, I will ask our community for some of their ideas, because I think lots of people do this fun stuff, but I don't think it's really, I don't know, I don't think people share it and I think we can borrow some ideas for each other.  I was thinking about doing team paper airplane challenges, and stuff.  It's a really quick thing to do and often takes people back to that childhood.  I think maybe some of these exercises that take you back to that childlike state of play, like the LEGO or the paper airplanes, those things are quite helpful to do. 

So, maybe having five minutes of play at the start of your monthly team meeting could be a really good way to just make this part of how your team comes together and creates energy at the start of that moment. So, the next thing, so that was all about playing at work, either on your own or with the people that you work with.  The other thing we wanted to give you some ideas for was playing with your work.  So, how do you add a bit of play into the stuff that you are already doing?  So, lots of us are probably doing presenting at work.  It's something that lots of people do in the same way.  And so, they don't necessarily connect that with play.  We open up some PowerPoint, we put some words and images on slide, and then we share that thing.  Playing with presenting could be a good way that you take a bit of pressure off, and you bring a bit more playfulness into that thing that you're doing quite often.  What we would say with presenting is clearly, there are probably some presentations at work that are more important than others.  If this is to your senior, if this is a board meeting --

Sarah Ellis: "I'm just going to use some AI to do this for me"!

Helen Tupper: "I'm just going to communicate through the art of juggling"!  Maybe not then.  "Catch the balls to get the data points"!  I'd like to do that, can you imagine?!  Oh dear, maybe don't do that.  Thought I have seen, like Danielle, who is our Finance Manager, she was at our team meeting that we were at, and she was really playful with how she communicated some really important numbers.  She did higher or lower, didn't she?

Sarah Ellis: Oh yeah, she made us do that quiz thing.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, she made us do a quiz.  And it was a quarterly update on the performance of the business.  It was quite an important meeting, but she had managed to bring play into that in a way that got everybody engaged, even when numbers weren't the thing that was most put on the agenda.

Sarah Ellis: I think I knew some of the numbers and still got the game wrong.

Helen Tupper: But again, I think those like, I don't know, the Generation Game or the higher-and-lower things, again people have got an association of those things that I think you can bring into work.  But the point with presenting is, pick some low-pressure presentations that you have got coming up and play with how you present.  So, for example, you could try drawing.  That is something that Sarah and I do in how we present.  So, we just use an app.  We get asked about this all the time.  It's the WeTransfer Paper app, though there are lots of other drawing apps that you can use.  But that one's free.  And again, you could just present by drawing as a way that you could play with how you do it.  Or there's PechaKucha, which limits how many slides that you can have and means you just have to use images and do it within a certain amount of time.  You could only use images that you've created with AI, for example. I was remembering my presentation that I created.  This is very weird, I always remember it.  I think the software doesn't exist anymore, but I think you could probably do something similar with Mural, or something like that.  The software was Prezi.

Sarah Ellis: Oh, yeah.

Helen Tupper: Do you remember Prezi?

Sarah Ellis: I do.

Helen Tupper: I remember I created a presentation for Richard Branson to launch a business on Prezi, and this was the most random, but it was quite playful, you zoomed all around.

Sarah Ellis: I know, yeah.

Helen Tupper: Because Prezi, do you remember?  But I think just playing with presenting, I think, it just makes it more fun than just sticking images and bullet points on a slide.  So, have a go with that, that could be one thing that you could do.  And then the other thing you can do is play with the meetings that you are doing.  So, we are recording this towards the end of the year, recording it in November.  So, if you are listening when this goes out, you might have some end-of-year team meetings coming up, or maybe you're thinking about a January meeting when you're all getting together.  We are doing that in our team, for example, and we're going to do a vision-board exercise.  So, it does have a purpose, to Sarah's point, the purpose is at the end of it, people will have a vision board for the year ahead, but we're doing it in a really playful way.  People will basically have images, they'll be cutting and sticking.  It's pretty low pressure, these things do not have to be perfect.  But I think vision-board exercises are quite a good way that people can connect and be playful about how they are coming together. Just one last idea, and we thought we would just test this live for you to end today on, is one other thing you can do is, have you seen those connection cards?  I think Steven Bartlett created them, I think School of Life have them, but they're like little packs of cards where there's just a question on it and you ask each other the question, and those questions can be quite random.  We thought we would create -- I'll put this on our LinkedIn page when the podcast goes live.  So, go to @amazingif on LinkedIn if you want to download this and use it out of your team.  But we thought that you could use some of these question cards for play and to create a bit of connection, perhaps in your end-of-year or start-of-year team meeting.  And to show you what that might look and sound like, we thought we would test one out on ourselves.  So, Sarah and I can see in front of us right now, I think, how many have we got here?  We've got 12 random and playful questions and we don't know what question the other person is going to ask.  So, we can see them and we both get to pick.  So, Sarah, you go first.  What are you going to ask me?

Sarah Ellis: What is your favourite movie of all time, and why?

Helen Tupper: This is actually a bit embarrassing, I think.

Sarah Ellis: Oh no, I think everyone's a little bit nostalgic or embarrassing, yeah, surely.

Helen Tupper: Okay, yeah, it's both of those things.  Do you remember a film called Flight of the Navigator?

Sarah Ellis: Absolutely not.

Helen Tupper: I can't believe I'm saying this!  Oh my gosh, you're missing a treat, though I did try and get my children to watch it, they thought it was awful.  Flight of the Navigator features Sarah Jessica Parker, aged about 20, and it's about a little boy who falls down a hole, I mean I don't want to give any spoilers away, but a little boy who falls down a hole.

Sarah Ellis: Okay, I'm going to have to google this.

Helen Tupper: I think he ends up in a space --

Sarah Ellis: Flight of the Navigator.

Helen Tupper: Oh, it's really good.  He ends up in a spaceship, okay, and he's flying around in this spaceship and there's this really cute little animal and then it all -- his parents get --

Sarah Ellis: To be fair, it gets quite good reviews.

Helen Tupper: It's very, Sarah.

Sarah Ellis: It's 6.9 out of 10 on IMDB, and they're always quite critical, isn't it?

Helen Tupper: It's very good.  But the reason why, I think, is I used to have a childminder and she didn't have many videos.  You know, it's back in the day!  So, I used to go after school to her house and I would watch Flight of the Navigator over and over and over again.  So, I just think it just has a little soft spot in my heart for that stage of my life.  Right, shall I pick one for you?

Sarah Ellis: Go for it.

Helen Tupper: What is your favourite day of the week and why?

Sarah Ellis: That's a good question, I like that question.  Favourite day of the week and why?  Do you think that includes weekends?

Helen Tupper: Yeah, it's an obvious answer, but if you've got a good reason why.

Sarah Ellis: Not a Monday or a Friday, not a Sunday, so I'm going by elimination.  Either a Saturday, because I think I've always liked the Saturdays of a weekend, I feel are sporty and you're doing fun stuff and you're out and about and it's a nice change from how you spent the rest of your week.  I think a lot of my favourite activities are always more likely, to be honest, probably on a Saturday, more personally.  I think in a week, I like a midweek moment.  So, I think I ramp up as the week goes on.  So, I think by Wednesday, my brain is firing, I'm thinking, but I'm not too tired.  And you know sometimes, I guess, then you fall off as the week goes on.  So, I'm going to go for, I like a midweek Wednesday.

Helen Tupper: Midweek Wednesday.  So, yeah, you've learned some stuff about Sarah and I.  You probably didn't need to know about Flight of the Navigator or that Wednesday's Sarah's favourite day of the week.  But the point is that you have this range of questions.  You would pick one, you'd pose it to someone on your team, it is very random, it is very playful.  And also, you learn a bit more about each other too.  So, we'll create a version of those questions, we will put it on Amazing If on LinkedIn.  So, if you want to do that with your team as part of one of your end-of-year or start-of-year exercises, head there, download it, and then you'll be able to do it.

Sarah Ellis: I feel like what this starts to get to, and there are some good examples actually you can read of organisations doing this, but you know the dreaded marshmallow challenge?

Helen Tupper: Yeah, I like that one.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, but everybody hates it, because everybody who's worked in big companies has done it as part of things like assessment centres, and I feel like that has ruined the marshmallow challenge, which if you've not done it, it's marshmallows, it's spaghetti, make a tower as tall as you can.  And I feel like that had good origins, like its origin story might have been, "Oh, it's fun and you work as a team and creative", and then it became forced fun and like, "I'm being assessed on this".  And that's why people are like, honestly, if you google it, people are like, "Not again, I've done it so many times", or it just feels like the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. 

So, I feel like we need new versions of play that genuinely feel playful, and that just give you that moments of light relief that, I think, help you to learn.  And I don't think these have to be like big changes or like, "Oh, we've got to spend half a day doing a big team-building exercise". I think all of the examples I've read, all of the inspiring ones, like in the NHS or people like IDEO, they're much more like small -- that's why I think 'pockets' works really well as a description -- they're small pockets of play that people start to really look forward to, and you just know you can just turn up and have a go and then you move on with the rest of your day.  So, I'm really intrigued to see, because we're trying a few more things out in the next month or so, and then I would also like us to think about rhythms and rituals and how you do that too.  So, we'll let you know in six months whether we've been playing a bit more, because I don't think we do loads of this at the moment and I think there's some really good opportunities to do more of it that actually aren't that hard to make happen.

Helen Tupper: And we'd love to crowdsource some ideas from our Squiggly Careers community as well.  So, if there are fun things that you are doing in your team that you think that lots of our listeners could learn from, please let us know.  You can either message us on Instagram or LinkedIn, if that's where you are, or just send us an email, helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com, and just share with us what moments of play you're already doing so that we can maybe put a spotlight on them and share them with the community at scale.

Sarah Ellis: But that's everything for this week.  Please do join us at The Career Collective, if only to see how much I get dominated in those discussions and/or to raise a lot of money for two very worthwhile charities.  So, we would love to see you there if you can make it to London, and obviously we will release that as a podcast episode as well, as we do know London doesn't always work for everyone.  But that's it for this week, thank you so much for listening and we're back with you again soon.  Bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everybody.