Hack:
Using Play to Innovate

The solution to all these challenges is not complex but the execution can be depending on the industry you are in, the company and of course the culture that is already present both internally and externally. It’s about empowering people within to openly engage in collectivism while maintaining their own individual values. It’s about generating and supporting innovative thinking and using the resources available to conduct research and development in all areas, not just that of the current core business to create the sense of belonging, ownership and more importantly driving passion for the industry. Within the gaming industry it is said that the best ideas and the best innovation comes from the strangest of side projects that people do for fun , not just because they have to. 

 

The best example of this is within Google who only employs highly motivated people who share the same interests and values as the company does. Google allows its people the time, space and resources to adapt and become members of the overall Google community by fostering innovative behaviour and providing the environment to do so in a fun and inventive way. Google maintains a philosophy around what they call ‘10 things’ which it has had from the beginning of its history. These 10 things call for innovation and free thinking while maintaining focus on the end user and how they perceive the world. It looks at the fact that with technology, the internet has provided a massive medium that everyone is connected through. Google has aspirations of bringing these people from all over the world, closer together regardless of language, culture or race.   It does this through development of technologies that translate information, indexes data and provides the best possible answers to every person’s individual questions. 

 

So with the ‘10 things’ that Google have and reading through the various documents, websites and articles on Google, it’s easy to spot a trend in why Google has been successful. Google’s employees are passionate about their jobs and the work they do, and all of them believe that they participate in helping to change the world through Google. How Google does this is of no surprise, it believes that to do well in your job you need to have fun and be free to be creative in thinking. To quickly highlight this, we need to consider the Burning Man Festival and what it means to Google. 

 

The Burning Man Festival is an extraordinary amalgamation of normal life and the world of art. Each year in August over a one week period, 40,000+ people drive out to Black Rock Desert in Nevada and build Black Rock City from nothing, which stands as a self-contained, non-commercial community. Burning Man represents a freedom of sorts from normal life and being non-commercial, it enables people to escape all the pressures from modern society and live in a truly free environment. Every year Google’s headquarters closes for the week of Burning man and everyone attends the festival.  What the festivals does for the Google staff is it enables them to have a have complete autonomy in creating what they want within a socialised workplace . For many, the festival gives them an ‘obsessive’ and ‘exciting’ workplace that many experience with working on their own projects that they believe in and have vested interest in it succeeding. The founders of Google believe that the Burning Man Festival gives people the play that they want to be able to engage in projects and stimulate the mind without prejudice or criticism. It teaches/reminds people how to be creative. 

 

So how do we do this? With Google as the example, we have identified that we need to create an environment that enables people to have fun which will open creativity and allow learning as well as discovery and experimentation, ultimately leading to innovative ideas. All of this creates employee engagement with the company as a whole while generating that ‘obsessive passion’ for what they do. 

 

This flow is simply identified as a mix between the learning cycle , and innovation cycle  that are already known particularly within the scientific community. Managers who understand the way these cycles work can set the conditions within the work environment and measure the effectiveness. The flow of the cycle is illustrated below and each component can be shown with how Google operates. 

 

DIAGRAM

 

Play. 

As we grow older we tend to play less as the pressures of life surround us and complicate our dealings with normal society. Playing is an important part of engagement within the learning cycle, it’s were the activity of some sort is conducted for enjoyment and recreation. This helps to break the barriers of thought processing down and captures the interest in certain topics. Google uses play within its work environment to help inspire people and on its campuses numerous areas for both physical and mental forms of play are available such as volley ball courts, large inflatable balls, foosball tables etc .

Bringing play into a work place environment can be difficult and no one solution will suit every industry, company, branch or business unit. The problem with play however is ensuring that the right amount of it is brought in so not to be disruptive to the work flow and maintaining the all-important outputs required.  

 

Creativity. 

Play is useful for expanding the imagination and inspiring new possibilities or new alternatives. People are intrinsically motivated to be creative because of their need for varied forms of complex stimulation.  An example of what creativity can produce is easily found simply by watching an episode of ‘The Jetsons’ and understanding that very little of the technology in that programme was actually available at the time it was made. Now days a lot of what was in those shows actually exist and have had very good market success. 

 

Learning & Discovery / Experimentation & Prototyping.

As creativity develops new and challenging problems for us to solve, we naturally have an inclination to want to research the issue to see what is possible and what we can achieve. The Internet provides us the easiest method for research in the form of search engines, journal repository’s, databases, and most importantly, other people to bounce ideas off. The Learning & Discovery and Experimentation & Prototyping phases are closely tied together. As we research information from various sources we learn by trying the ideas in experimentation. Google uses this approach by allowing its employees time allocated to this process for their own personnel projects of interest. The only catch is that any projects that are developed during company time are owned by Google. 

These phases are important as it gives the employee the ability to understand and start applying the information, techniques or ideas in their current work. It could be something as simple as a new dashboard for monitoring systems easier and cheaper or a piece of code that optimises their work flow. 

 

Evaluation.

All the personnel projects that are developed by Google’s employees are evaluated and critically assessed by peers and managers for commercial feasibility; similar to how the hackathon works. This is where the company can benefit from the entire process as these ideas are developed, new opportunities and business ventures present themselves. The key here is to provide a feedback and evaluation system for these projects as well as being ready to move on an idea that is good. 

The solution to all these challenges is not complex but the execution can be depending on the industry you are in, the company and of course the culture that is already present both internally and externally. It’s about empowering people within to openly engage in collectivism while maintaining their own individual values. It’s about generating and supporting innovative thinking and using the resources available to conduct research and development in all areas, not just that of the current core business to create the sense of belonging, ownership and more importantly driving passion for the industry. Within the gaming industry it is said that the best ideas and the best innovation comes from the strangest of side projects that people do for fun , not just because they have to. 

The best example of this is within Google who only employs highly motivated people who share the same interests and values as the company does. Google allows its people the time, space and resources to adapt and become members of the overall Google community by fostering innovative behaviour and providing the environment to do so in a fun and inventive way. Google maintains a philosophy around what they call ‘10 things’ which it has had from the beginning of its history. These 10 things call for innovation and free thinking while maintaining focus on the end user and how they perceive the world. It looks at the fact that with technology, the internet has provided a massive medium that everyone is connected through. Google has aspirations of bringing these people from all over the world, closer together regardless of language, culture or race.   It does this through development of technologies that translate information, indexes data and provides the best possible answers to every person’s individual questions. 

So with the ‘10 things’ that Google have and reading through the various documents, websites and articles on Google, it’s easy to spot a trend in why Google has been successful. Google’s employees are passionate about their jobs and the work they do, and all of them believe that they participate in helping to change the world through Google. How Google does this is of no surprise, it believes that to do well in your job you need to have fun and be free to be creative in thinking. To quickly highlight this, we need to consider the Burning Man Festival and what it means to Google. 

The Burning Man Festival is an extraordinary amalgamation of normal life and the world of art. Each year in August over a one week period, 40,000+ people drive out to Black Rock Desert in Nevada and build Black Rock City from nothing, which stands as a self-contained, non-commercial community. Burning Man represents a freedom of sorts from normal life and being non-commercial, it enables people to escape all the pressures from modern society and live in a truly free environment. Every year Google’s headquarters closes for the week of Burning man and everyone attends the festival.  What the festivals does for the Google staff is it enables them to have a have complete autonomy in creating what they want within a socialised workplace . For many, the festival gives them an ‘obsessive’ and ‘exciting’ workplace that many experience with working on their own projects that they believe in and have vested interest in it succeeding. The founders of Google believe that the Burning Man Festival gives people the play that they want to be able to engage in projects and stimulate the mind without prejudice or criticism. It teaches/reminds people how to be creative. 

 

So how do we do this? With Google as the example, we have identified that we need to create an environment that enables people to have fun which will open creativity and allow learning as well as discovery and experimentation, ultimately leading to innovative ideas. All of this creates employee engagement with the company as a whole while generating that ‘obsessive passion’ for what they do.

 
This flow is simply identified as a mix between the learning cycle , and innovation cycle  that are already known particularly within the scientific community. Managers who understand the way these cycles work can set the conditions within the work environment and measure the effectiveness. The flow of the cycle is illustrated below and each component can be shown with how Google operates. 

 

Play. 

As we grow older we tend to play less as the pressures of life surround us and complicate our dealings with normal society. Playing is an important part of engagement within the learning cycle, it’s were the activity of some sort is conducted for enjoyment and recreation. This helps to break the barriers of thought processing down and captures the interest in certain topics. Google uses play within its work environment to help inspire people and on its campuses numerous areas for both physical and mental forms of play are available such as volley ball courts, large inflatable balls, foosball tables etc .Bringing play into a work place environment can be difficult and no one solution will suit every industry, company, branch or business unit. The problem with play however is ensuring that the right amount of it is brought in so not to be disruptive to the work flow and maintaining the all-important outputs required.  

Play is useful for expanding the imagination and inspiring new possibilities or new alternatives. People are intrinsically motivated to be creative because of their need for varied forms of complex stimulation.  An example of what creativity can produce is easily found simply by watching an episode of ‘The Jetsons’ and understanding that very little of the technology in that programme was actually available at the time it was made. Now days a lot of what was in those shows actually exist and have had very good market success. 

As creativity develops new and challenging problems for us to solve, we naturally have an inclination to want to research the issue to see what is possible and what we can achieve. The Internet provides us the easiest method for research in the form of search engines, journal repository’s, databases, and most importantly, other people to bounce ideas off. The Learning & Discovery and Experimentation & Prototyping phases are closely tied together. As we research information from various sources we learn by trying the ideas in experimentation. Google uses this approach by allowing its employees time allocated to this process for their own personnel projects of interest. The only catch is that any projects that are developed during company time are owned by Google. 

 

These phases are important as it gives the employee the ability to understand and start applying the information, techniques or ideas in their current work. It could be something as simple as a new dashboard for monitoring systems easier and cheaper or a piece of code that optimises their work flow. 

All the personnel projects that are developed by Google’s employees are evaluated and critically assessed by peers and managers for commercial feasibility; similar to how the hackathon works. This is where the company can benefit from the entire process as these ideas are developed, new opportunities and business ventures present themselves. The key here is to provide a feedback and evaluation system for these projects as well as being ready to move on an idea that is good.