Why play can improve the interdisciplinary collaboration in your team
Improving collaboration by learning from playful behavior
A year ago I started writing my thesis for my study at Hyper Island. I choose to research the collaboration between developers and creatives, since reflecting on my own history, the collaboration between creatives and developers has always been an uneasy one. Even though it can result in amazing outcomes, it often feels as an incredible struggle. It often feels easier and better manageable to just prevent those two disciplines from collaborating at all. Let creatives be creative, and let developers do their thing. Don’t play with fire.
My background is in being a developer, but also in being creative. This all works really well when working alone of course, since there is nobody there to hold you back (except yourself). Working on creative technology projects in university was like a dream came true. Soon after my bachelor, when working in the real world, it became clear to me that working as a cog in a bigger team isn’t easy. You’ll face a lot of complexities due to the collaboration with others. This means that interdisciplinary synergy is often lost. You have to fit a label, you are a strategist, designer, developer or a project manager, you can’t be all right? This meant I became a developer. And all of a sudden the possibilities of me being creative felt lost behind a lot of different stakeholders and complexities.
I want to see that interdisciplinary synergy happening. Not only because I feel this is limiting me personally, but by creating those silos it can limit the possibility of all teams. Interdisciplinary collaboration is hard, therefore I went back to a school. To one that is known for their unorthodox, holistic and pragmatic style of education; Hyper Island. To me their biggest attraction was learning their vision on how to nurture and develop creative collaborative environments. My thesis is heavily inspired by this ‘Hyper Island’-thinking. The full thesis can be read here, and dives deeper into creatives and developers but for this blogpost I am going to keep it shorter and only going to focus on the most important learning of my thesis: play is effective in creating & nurturing an interdisciplinary collaborative team culture.
Play, as in learning by doing
So let’s look at what play is first. In this case play is not seen as leisure or distraction, rather it is the work of working something, of figuring out what it does and determining how to operate something. Play is not the same as games, although play lies at the heart of games. Play is a deeper, more instinctual trait, like young animals using play to learn and get familiar with new abilities. In our culture play is seen as a child-like behaviour, not to be expressed by mature professionals since it involves intuition, rather then rational behaviour.
“But I do want to keep this idea of imagination in mind that the thing that humans are doing, especially young humans are doing, when they play, is imagining. They’re learning to imagine. They’re learning to think about how other worlds could be. You think about this world by imagining alternatives to it. And you think, of course, about futures by imagining how the world could turn out.” — Brian Eno (2015)
So play is tinkering, trying out things, failing, and succeeding. Play thus comes with a bit of (calculated) risks, there is always the uncertainty to ‘lose’, outcomes are not predefined. Losing is not necessarily a bad thing, since it gives the player the option to reflect, learn and be better next time. Play is thus intuitive, but also pragmatic in learning from practice not from theory.
Johan Huizinga, one of the most important scholars in the academic field of play, observes that play is meaning giving. When playing there is a relationship between a players actions and the system outcomes. This system is the fictitious reality where a player emergences himself in. This world is called the magic circle by Salen & Zimmerman. In this space the normal rules and reality that guard normal life are suspended. Rules when playing aren’t laws, they only apply when playing and are make-believe in players’ heads. The relationship between this fictitious world and the real world is porous, there is always a relationship between the two. Rules governing that fictitious world can therefore vary, evolve, and adapt to fit to circumstances. When playing with a football, a player needs to pretend and imagine that a goalpost has a meaning in his act of playing since it doesn’t have that in real life. If there are no goalpost in a players environment, it isn’t a far stretch to pretend other objects that are at hand can have that same meaning.
Play is more than an individual act
Play is about action and reaction. Something happens and a player has to respond to that, onto which another thing happens. A player kicks a ball against a wall and has to anticipate it bouncing back to kick it again. Play goes back and forth. This is also true when playing with others. There is always a relation between a player’s moves and another player’s counter-moves. A player has to be emphatic to other players, to learn to understand how they will behave so one can act accordingly. One way to do is by learning through mimicry. Mimicry is pretending you’re something or somebody else. It is therefore not only used to understand people, but also understand others aspects of life. Imagine a kid pretending to be a formula one driver, he is imagining what it is like to drive a car and how a person who does would feels like.
Even though play can be done with others, play is an individual and subjective experience. You can play with others but every player will have it’s own unique view on that happening. One player might win, and another would lose. Those players therefore have another qualitative experience. The reason to play is this experience itself, to be fully immersed in this is its own justification. The goal of playful behaviour is not achieving some subsequent ending. Play is not about acquiring beneficial gains. Those beneficial gains might happen, but those were not the aim for showing playful behaviour.
Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture. Huizinga states that in human evolution play was eventually transformed into culture. He argues that many of the valuable aspects of human culture are formed by human cravings for those playful experiences, rather then by rational thinking.
Why interdisciplinary collaboration is needed
In interdisciplinary collaboration experts from different fields of expertise are challenged to work together in order to succeed in solving the tasks at hand. Collaboration can not be seen separate from culture, since culture shapes views towards collaboration. Interdisciplinary collaboration can liberate a group from previous cultural restraints. “This is how we do it” is not always improving end results. If a culture is not open enough for outside influences tunnel vision can arise. Team members can then act in ways that are harmful or dangerous to themselves, or others due to cultural limitations in their scope of view.
Immigrants play an important role in culture, since they can bring fresh insights and methodologies from their previous disciplines, while seeing cultural aspects which are invisible to the natives. To improve interdisciplinary collaboration, both disciplines must value this diversity, develop the capacity for self-assessment, work towards understanding one’s own disciplinary culture, and be sensitive to the dynamics inherent when cultures interact. Cultures must get used to collaborating with other cultures. Every cultural encounter could broaden their view. These collaborating cultures must therefore want, not be mandated to engage in the process of becoming culturally aware, knowledgeable, skillful, and familiar with cultural encounters.
Each discipline has it’s own background, which has shaped their culture and language, which may be conflictful when collaborating. Teams must therefore recognise the potential for miscommunication. Team members must therefore start learning to speak the language of disciplines it collaborates with, while being mindful and aware of their own language.
Be open to learning
It is important that cultures are really open for hearing, and acting upon each others inputs. This collaboration should be desired by the whole team, not put up as a symbolic act. Representation does not mean inclusion. Important for inclusion is the willingness to share power, otherwise tokenism, the symbolic effort of giving a few people from a minority a say to make them feel more inclusive, might occur. Tokenism is likely to be found wherever a dominant group is under pressure to share privilege, power, or other desirable commodities with a group which is excluded. This tokenism can lead to experience substantial performance pressure, heightened awareness of boundaries, and perception of entrapment in this role for those excluded members of the team.
This is part of a bigger learning process of understanding each others disciplines better in order to collaborate more successfully. These disciplines have a complementary expertise for the tasks at hand, by possessing relevant knowledge the other discipline does not have. This creates a relationship where both disciplines are an expert in their own domain, while being a novice in the other. When collaborating each party becomes the ‘teacher’ for their own domain, while being the ‘pupil’ in the other domain at the same time. For both creatives and developers this process should feel familiar, since both disciplines already require individuals to dive deep into the problem domain to better understand the problem, and provide a successful solution.
Collaboration as an act of play
After my period at Hyper Island I’ve seen that creating interdisciplinary collaboratives cultures are not only possible, but more successful. In my year at Hyper Island we had 60 students with 27 nationalities, and even more diverse backgrounds. And I think this is because Hyper Island teaches methods, tools and ideas that cunningly use elements of play to create and maintain cultures.
One can learn from play that every situation is unique, like no act of play is the same or completely predictable. You can’t oversee every aspect of what is happening. All teams are made out of different people, in different roles, with different backgrounds and with different goals to achieve. There is not such a thing as an archetype for any discipline. Some patterns emerge everywhere but it is hard to generalise these patterns. It will be hard, or even impossible to create an easy roadmap to fix collaboration for everyone and in every situation. The solution for improving the collaboration is not in being dogmatic, rather in having a pragmatic and holistic mindset. Improving interdisciplinary collaboration is only possible when all actors involved ‘buy into’ changing their mindset. There is no way to change one’s mindset if that person does not intrinsically believes in it.
To create that mindset team members have to be immersed into creating a joint culture. Like with play, the goal shouldn’t be about personal gains but about the experience itself. These gain might (and in the case of collaboration, should) happen, but those gains are secondary to the experience. Think about professional athletes, during the game they will be completely immersed into the game, even though the gains after might be huge. Losing that focus and immersion can be devastating to them. When playing those gains are secondary, and going completely in to the experience is the only thing can counts.
Using the magic circle
At Hyper Island everyone was continuously talking about the ‘hyper bubble’ we were constantly creating. In hindsight I think that was the magic circle we were experiencing. We were in such an immersed collaborative state that the normal rules and reality that guard normal life were partly suspended, which gave people the possibility to collaborate beyond the normal barriers of their backgrounds. It therefore makes sense to keep that magic circle or bubble alive during the collaboration. One thing you learn, and hear a lot at Hyper Island is “trust the process”. You’ll hear this so much, after a while it will even get annoying. But it serves a purpose, it keeps this immersion alive I believe. When playing we all know what we’re doing is make-believe. When you start questioning those make-believe elements that porous magic circle is easily broken and the immersion lost. Trusting the process enforces focussing on the experience rather then the gains.
Why “trusting the process” will get annoying at times it can feel like a thought-terminating cliché. It might suppress being reflective, because “this is just the way it is”. Collaborative teams have to be reflective too, teams can’t just use this as an excuse to always continue what they’re doing. Hence team members should be involved in giving each other feedback, doing reflection and sharing the previously hidden, yet influential, thoughts and feelings. Teams have to understand that we all have individual experiences, we’re not always feeling the same emotions during the duration of a project.
Keep on tinkering
Not only individuals can improve, but the group process itself can be continuously improved. Think about the tinkering aspects of play, teams needs to start tinkering their processes continuously. Trying something, reflecting on it and than adapting and tailoring their processes to fit the demands and needs required. This is a continuous and messy process since the world we live in is in an constant unpredictable flux too, teams continuously have to respond to this. It is a constant state of action and reaction.
To create better collaboration teams also have to push their disciplinary boundaries in a playful way. Teams can only push those constraints if they have a basic understanding of where these constraints actually are. One should be interested and open to learn from the other discourse since this will provide a basic understanding of the constraints involved. Like when playing, collaborators have to be empathic to each others. It’s not just about learning how another team member completes his tasks, It is also about learning about other values and ways of thinking that might conflict with ones own. Like kids that shown mimicry, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of others to understand their thinking.
It’s not just about learning, it is also about acting after, which is easier said than done. The disciplinary teams need to be continuously aware of their mutual relationship. Play comes with risks. It is not about preventing conflict, it is about acknowledging it will happen, so you are ready to deal with it when it does. Both discourses will enter an unsafe situation where everything could happen. Trying to plan everything ahead will feel safe, but prevents improving the collaboration since the status quo will stay the same, or possible even deteriorate. It will prevent playfulness and a magic circle from happening. Playful collaboration will lead to unexpected results. Sometimes good results, yet not always. A team thus needs to know how to deal with failure when it happens.
Use facilitation to ensure ‘fair play’
A good referee understands the game, and will bend the rules whenever possible to keep the experience as smooth as possible while still keeping the game a ‘fair play’. We need that too for collaboration to succeed. At Hyper Island we therefore learned to value facilitation and facilitation tools to improve collaboration. A facilitator is not a leader, it’s a dedicated role that enables collaboration to be playful. This role is not fixed, every team member can take this role at times. The facilitation tools are playful ways of getting team members to facilitate their own processes. These tools should help teams get insights in their collaboration process, and help teams in dealing with conflict. These tools should improve communication between all actors involved in a project. These tools shouldn’t feel ‘big’, there shouldn’t be much of a training process for using these tools. The aim is to use tools that facilitate in a way that is non-obtrusive and collaborative for group members. Teams must decide themselves which tools work best in which situations. There is a multitude of ‘toolboxes’ available online like the one of Hyper Island onto which teams can get inspired to use, or make own of tools. By doing so, teams will start creating their own toolbox. This process of tinkering should be lead by team members, not from management higher up.
The most important phase in a group process is the starting phase. In here the environment for collaboration has to be created so the group can enter their magic circle. To do so I think it is important to use tools to kick start this process, so a group can break the ice. These ice breakers try to break elements like egos, hierarchies and over-rational professionalism from blocking a group from being playful. Put your team in fun situations so they can enter their magic circle. Put them in challenging situations so that magic circle get less porous.
One challenging tool that was successful at Hyper Island was the “stinky fish”. In here everyone has to tell about their stinky fish: “that thing that you carry around but don’t like to talk about; but the longer you hide it, the stinkier it gets”. The purpose of this is not to shame people, rather the opposite will happen. This will affirm the group that we’re all human beings since no matter which background you have everyone has fears, anxieties and uncertainties. You better be open about those. To create fun situations you can for example use “energizers” as an ice breaker. In here you play small (dorky) mini games with a group that last only a few minutes. Or why not organise a dinner together for some group bounding?
The final reward of play is fun. Successful collaboration will result in fun too. The process of play and collaboration itself encompasses many more emotions then just fun. Fun shouldn’t be mandated, you can’t enforce fun all the time. A group will go through various stages, and not all of them are fun. A group is not always winning, sometimes it is though. Every situation is unique. Every team has to improve the collaboration in their own way, as long as it feels ‘right’. Most important is to start doing. Talking about collaboration will not solve your problem, you need to get your hands dirty. It will definitely not be an easy process. There are no good or bad ways to improve team collaboration. What works for one team might not work for others.
As a team you should decide what is working, and what is not. As a group make your own magic circle.
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