Playful Inquiry: August 2013

What Is Playful Inquiry?

Inquiry
Inquiry is the science, art and spirit of imagination. We naturally associate Inquiry with the logical mind’s intent to satisfy curiosity, solve problems, and explore ideas. Inquiry helps us connect our prior understanding to new experiences, modify and accommodate our previously held beliefs and conceptual models, and construct new knowledge.

Antonyms found in the dictionary: Answer, reply

Playful

Playful describes a state of surrender. It involves being open, letting go, and embracing unexpected direction or results. Being playful has positive effects on the body and the brain. Problem solving ability increases after a person has spent some time laughing. This works because laughter turns off the posterior hypothalamus and allows the cerebral cortex to focus on a given task.

Antonyms found in the dictionary: Earnest, serious-minded, sober, humorless, serious, working

8/7/13

Richard Boyd, at the 2012 Serious Play Conference
Also see the additional text interview with Richard in our previous blog post

Richard Boyd Interview, 2012 Serious Play Conference from Lori Sortino on Vimeo.

This is one in a series of interviews being conducted on the topic of Serious Play, Serious Gaming -- using games, simulation and virtual worlds to help stimulate learning in innovative new ways and find real world solutions.

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Inquiring About Serious Play

In spring, 2012, Lori began to inquire about the application of game design in helping whole communities and cultures shift to their desired vision for their community or organization. This inquiry looks at the structural aspects, which include purpose, rules, protocols, expectations, member/participant behavior, environment, roles, controls, types of feedback and how feedback influences choice and outcomes; basically systems based views. Gamers are very open about their behavior; they don’t waste time hiding the fact that they may be using cheat codes. They’re more concerned with doing whatever it takes to reach their goal. They dedicate full resources to their mission and work under intolerable conditions; focusing on task often for hours and hours without breaking for anything beyond essential physical biological needs. Compare this to the secret life of organizations in corporate culture (a phrase borrowed from Dr. Ariane David), where people spend more time and energy hiding their true motivations, avoiding authenticity, and unintentionally misunderstanding almost everyone around them. Lori found herself becoming more and more vocal, saying essentially, “Most will acknowledge that organizations are dysfunctional, but can we please move beyond creating comic strips, embrace our intelligence, and accept responsibility for our collective experience?”

Lori quickly found the Serious Play Conference, scheduled in August 2012, and realized this would be a superb environment for immersion. This sparked the desire to interview the conference presenters, and those interviews are being shared here on the Playful Inquiry site. Whole fields and disciplines are merging in some of the work and research being done; it's fascinating. While the sectors of education, public health and public defense are certainly engaged in the Serious Games and Serious Play dialog, Lori is keenly interested in the conversation on behalf of the collections of individuals that are coming together looking to collaborate on co-creating better communities and a better world. How can we improve connecting talented individuals with the work they are good at and love to do? How can we support the individual and independent people who want to contribute and are looking for a place to plug in and “play” in real life? How do we more effectively allow the innate desire in people to make the world a better place to be realized? How? By realizing why.

"We've seen what the Gaming Guilds are capable of in terms of their ability to form teams based on strengths as well as their completely organic models for shared leadership," says Norma Owen, who, along with Lori Sortino, is holding regular conversations about the applications for the Future of Work and Nurturing the Essence of Community. Lori claims "If we watch what's going on in the gaming community, and ask ourselves what it would take to bring those conditions into the world of work and community, we will accelerate the shift to our collective desired reality. If we can become a talented orchestra with the structure of music composition, the playbook of sheet music, and the discipline of practice, then we can borrow the process and play with games and simulation until we practice ourselves into better ways of working and being."

The momentum behind this inquiry for Lori includes her work with Lyn facilitating Playful Inquiry, and also her work with the Future Working Together Guild, which is a Network of consultants, teachers, coaches, and other professionals who are bringing new models of working together to the world of work, offering conferences that border on simulation and are the bridge to introducing new creative models to existing communities and organizations. In addition, the systems thinking background that Lyn and Lori share provides a structure for studying systems in the process of inquiring about how to change any aspect of our life experience; work, relationships, education, our health, etc.

Lori’s work with facilitating community groups, designing events, and connecting groups and individuals for collaboration has placed her in countless intimate conversations; a sort of un-reportable yet very real research that results in a knowing about what’s deeply important to people; what they’re yearning for and where our collective hope resides. Our experience with any aspect of life is somewhere on a continuum. Playful Inquiry is the invitation to look at our own individual approach, our unique experience, our current challenges; the things we are trying to change or bring into our life, and the level of importance.

What does it mean to be serious? What does it mean to play? Serious Play, in essence, points to an emotional connection with an outcome. It indicates that people are concerned about how things turn out. Why? Because they believe the outcome matters. They have identified a need and have connected to a calling to meet that need somehow, and this creates a focus and an intention. We view focus and intention as serious rather than playful.

The art, though, is noticing when the focus and intention becomes attached to the "how". Playful Inquiry invites us to let go of the how in order to reconnect with the why. Why do gamers spend hours and hours on line playing games? What are the very real needs that get met with this activity? Grab an open mind and take a look: community, recreation, immersion, strategy, problem solving, competency, belonging, accomplishment, autonomy, self-reliance, collaboration, completion, respect, opportunity to lead, celebration, creativity, exploration, and more.

These are real life basic needs that everyone has to some degree and so many of these needs are met in reality via on line gaming and are largely NOT being met in mainstream educational and work environments and cultures. Part of the shift in consciousness being explored by hundreds of groups is acknowledging the power and importance of these basic human needs and harnessing that awareness in the designing and nurturing of community going forward.

To play, or not to play. Observe or participate. It’s your life. If you’re not happy with recent outcomes, do some research for yourself and play it a little differently.

Biographies

Lyn Wiltse (left) and Lori Steed Sortino (right) are passionate about helping individuals and teams ask the right questions to achieve their goals. They will no doubt tell stories about their trip to Brazil and want for you similar experiences in life: The opportunity to immerse yourselves in a different culture, language, and political reality, the ability to recognize the truth of who you are, and the realization of how you can best contribute to the world.

Lyn Wiltse is the founder and president of PDSA Consulting, Inc. She is a graduate of Willamette University and holds a Master’s degree in Educational Policy and Management from the University of Oregon. She has over 25 years of experience facilitating process improvement and interest-based collaborative initiatives. She demonstrates empathetic listening which creates a trusting environment for relationship-building and consideration of new ideas, especially regarding the potential impact each person has on surrounding systems.

Lori Steed Sortino facilitates groups and mentors leaders with an emphasis on individual growth and transformation that supports and encourages our capacity for embodying authenticity. Key themes in her work are transparency, awareness, aligning with core beliefs and core values, and integrating what we do well and what we most love to do. Her diverse background includes corporate management and training, continuous improvement, project management, and solution discovery. She's a starter, innovator, designer and photographer with a focus on celebrating life.

Quotes

Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Steve Jobs

In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones, we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.

Sam Keen

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

Tuli Kupferberg

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.

Henry Miller

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.

Japanese Proverb

On with the dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto, whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

Mark Twain

Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will insert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safer, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Cecil Beaton

Viola Spolin:

Play is democratic! Anyone can play! Everyone can learn through playing! Play touches and stimulates vitality, awakening the whole person – mind and body, intelligence and creativity, spontaneity and intuition, when all are attentive to the moment.

Intuition bypasses the intellect, the mind, the memory, the known. Using intuition cannot be taught. One must be tripped into it.

There is, clearly, a strong resemblance between improvisation in the theater and jazz. Art Farmer, the jazz flugelhorn player, says, “You can never force what you’re doing. The harder you try, the less happens. At the best time, it’s as if you had been taken over by some other power. This power plays you and you become the instrument.”

The heart of improvisation is transformation.

Creativity is not rearranging; it’s transformation.

The Spolin theater games are artifices against artificiality, structures designed to almost fool spontaneity into being – or perhaps a frame carefully built to keep out interferences in which the player waits. Important in the game is the “ball” – the Focus, a technical problem, sometimes a double technical problem which keeps the mind (a sensoring device) so busy rubbing its stomach and its head in opposite directions, so to speak, that genius (spontaneity), unguarded, happens.” Film Quarterly.

When we are conditioned to look to others before we can respond, a time-lag is established, a space, a gap, between query and response, which allows the approval / disapproval syndrome to show itself. There is no integrity, no honesty in the reaction of someone debating, “Should I or shouldn’t I?”

Play experience can prepare the student for purposefulness in non-play activities, for true play creates the incentive to use one’s best ability.

Neva Boyd

Excitement and enthusiasm are a precondition to breakthrough.

Schiller taught us long ago that we are fully human when we are at play.

Eric Bentley