Play at the Office!

You'd be surprised how far back adults have been playing at work. The idea that play is good for working adults has been around for a long time, with tons of supporting evidence, but playful teams are still hard to find.

What I do is design tangible ways of applying play so teams get the purpose, connection, and even the friction they need.

I've worked as a user experience designer and strategist for enterprise, start-up, non-profit, SAAS, and small businesses. My experiences have taught me that people do good work in places that give them purpose, connection, and space to be themselves. My approach mixes design thinking, game design, and facilitation methods, like storytelling for business and liberating structures.

I've spent some time watching many folks be miserable at work, and I kept thinking "someone should do something about this..." It took longer than I'd like to admit to realize that this "someone" was available and standing in my kitchen in their unicorn pajamas.

So! New plan.

Here's what I want for you: a team that laughs together on Tuesdays, gets down to it on Wednesdays. Focused, but not grim about it. A team that comes up for air, but also for help, for collaboration, for support, for good ideas, for a break, and for each other.

That's a lot to ask out of five days a week, but I can get you there by playing our way to better working teams.

I hold a master's from MSU in Human-Computer Interaction and a certificate in Serious Games Design. That's the stuff on paper. In undergrad, I worked with at-risk youth, designing board games to help them learn life skills. Even my graduate thesis was a game, designed to teach political issues using pick up lines. You read that right! I love to play, and I've been playing at work with my teammates in workshops, demos, and everywhere else. The teams that helped me grow into the playful teammate that I am today were absolutely killer teams made up of connection, engagement, and bringing out the best in each other. I bring that spirit everywhere I go.

Anyone responsible for a team that needs help, like tech leads, managers, program coordinators, facilitators, or founders. My favorite client imagines a better working team and already suspects play is part of the journey, but asks how does it work? You need to know how to apply it on the individual, project, and team level.

Subscribe! It's a once a week newsletter, sometimes less. I talk about games and play at work, ranging from reviews, stories, research breakdowns, opinion pieces, activities for your team, and game design applications for work. Sometimes I share paid stuff, but that's always optional and rarely the big thing I'm sharing.