Good afternoon everybody. Thanks for letting me be here. I’m going to talk a little bit about the concept of play and I thought I would first just do a little bit of a reset on our definition. We talk with a lot of our clients about playing the idea. They’re like, we don’t like play at work. It gets in the way. It’s a bad thing. I think people often think that play is the opposite of work. What we like to think is that play is actually the opposite of boredom. We think that play is actually a great opportunity to actually think about unlocking new ways of problem solving, getting out of your head. I’m going to give you just a few concepts. I thought I would first go back to where it started to show up in Idyos history. This guy, his name is Bob McKinnon. I was a creativity researcher at Stanford. He ran their design program and he actually believed that play was actually a pretty powerful mechanism to get people to work together to solve problems. He did a lot of experiments at Stanford to try to unlock ways of doing that. Part of that was actually how you get different types of people to talk and work together. He tried hallucinogenic drugs as one gateway and actually found it pretty successful. We’re not going to try that today, but actually you have some stuff underneath your chairs and we’re actually going to try, there should be a blank piece of paper and a pen. If you want to get those out, we’re going to try one of his methods, which was just the idea of extreme time compression. When you have your papers, and hurry up, I only have 17 minutes up here, so I don’t want them to play the music on me, looking pretty good, you’re going to take exactly 30 seconds to draw the portrait of the person to your left. If there’s no one on your left, draw the portrait of the person to your right. Are we ready? Are we ready? Paper’s up. I’m going to time you. Do your best and go. Do your best portrait. Okay, you got 10 seconds left to put the finishing touches on it. Five, four, three, two, one. Okay, hold them up. Let’s see what you got. This is awesome. Fantastic. There’s a lot of artists in the room. All right, so let me bring it back and talk about what we just did. So I heard a few, I’m sorry, I think some people are afraid that they might have insulted the person next to them. And this is just as a contrast, this is a drawing of a child doing the same activity. And they’re pretty happy, and this is not a comparison of artistic talent, that’s not why I’m showing this, but this is one of the things that’s been interesting about this whole journey is kids are really happy to do this, do a drawing of you, sign their name and give it to you as a gift. And there’s a couple reasons why. At this point in their lives, they haven’t learned about the judgment of their peers, and they haven’t learned to self edit. And so play is one of the mechanisms that we use to try to get ourselves back into that child mindset. Connecting Bob and that exercise back to where I work, our founder, David Kelly, was a student of Bob McKim, and he won’t really say much about the hallucinogenic period, but we know there was something there. But he started the company with the idea that he wanted all the employees to be his best friends. And that principle was founded on the belief that actually friendship is a shortcut to being able to play, and actually have real conversations to solve ideas, to have some sort of foundation together. And obviously as we grew, he couldn’t possibly have that many best friends, but we started to build things that sort of show up in our offices as sort of signals about permission to play. This is someone did a crazy portrait of him using a skeleton. But these sorts of things, they look pretty silly. But actually their intent was that we give signals in our space that there’s actually permission to explore, try different things. We’ve got like, you know, post-its and sharpies and weird things all over the place, that’s kind of things to have at hand. There’s another thing that actually, because having these moments of playing together as a sort of a vehicle for kind of charging or creative energy came up, there’s actually a thing that was invented in our Palo Alto office. This thing called a finger blaster. And you will find, I’m from the New York office and we don’t do this. But in Palo Alto, there are people who take these sort of finger blaster breaks when they felt like they got stuck and they need to do something. And you have them under your chairs. You also have some safety goggles. So let’s make sure that we’re using protective eyewear. And I’m going to just give you a target up on the stage. You can actually shoot them anywhere. But let’s just launch them. You just put your finger in and you kind of go, give it a shot. Let’s see how we do. Uh-oh, here they come. Uh-oh, I’m a convenient target on the stage. I’m glad I’m wearing these. Wow, you guys are pretty good. But there are… Yeah, you can throw them too. Nicely done. All right. And you can take as many of these home for your kids. Ow, whoa! All right. I got a couple sort of bulls-eyes right there. All right. Awesome. Well done. And you can take as many home as you want. I guess that this was all sort of fine and good, but you might be asking, well, what the hell? Other than having fun, like, why are we up here? And I thought what I want to do is just give you three kind of principles of play that we use every day. And just going to help you understand if these are helpful pointers to think about, actually, unpacking creativity. These are kind of the three things I talk about. So the first is the idea of exploration. Play as a gateway into being able to explore new ideas and think about things. And we look at this, for example, and what is this? Tin foil. Yep, looks like tin foil. What’s up? Very good. Could be like Elon Musk’s thing or one of the rockets that was supposed to come back. But yeah, like, to a kid, this is the costume to ward off aliens coming to sort of visit or read his mind. But this idea that we can actually look for the possibilities and something without judging ourselves. And maybe a way to think about this is we often are, especially within companies where we work, are taught a lot about the mindset that’s on the right side of this, which is convergence. So that’s once we see a bunch of possibilities, we’re really good at filtering them down. So saying, well, that idea more than that, that’ll make money. This one won’t. That actually is easier to do than that one. If you ever had conversations when you thought you’re having a brainstorm and somebody goes, we tried that before. Or, you know, I just don’t think that’ll work. Or, you know, nah, I don’t like that. Right? That’s that’s convergence. And there’s a point at which that matters, right? What the mindset we aren’t as good at harnessing is actually on the left side, which is divergence. So if convergence is making choices, divergence is creating choices, creating the possibilities. And they’re actually different mindsets. And when we talk about brainstorming, which, you know, everyone does, and you have a love or hate relationship with it, we put a lot of ground rules around that because it is actually a divergent moment. So we say, like at the moment, you know, we have things like encourage wild ideas, we tell people similar to the exercise earlier, you know, okay, in a 15 minute brainstorm, a group should be able to come up with 100 ideas. We want people to actually listen to and build on the ideas of others. You defer judgment. That’s actually to put ourselves in a different mindset to imagine possibilities, to be optimistic, to be generous. Knowing that there is a point in time, yes, where we have to say, is this practical, is this realistic? Is there something that we should know? But actually separating out those modes is pretty critical. So in a way, I kind of consider exploratory plays are the left side, the sort of divergence mindset and how we can actually create the time to do that. The law of our clients actually encourage them to think about when they’re actually in these modes. So, for example, different meetings, boring meetings, actually, which ones are actually generated meetings versus the ones that might be more evaluative. So thinking about ways that we can bring that in. The second one is the idea of building and construction as a mode of play. Kids, when they’re growing up, spend a big percentage of the time on what we call constructive play, when they’re trying to out the world, seeing how they put things together. They’re doing that because we give them things to play with, things they can actually build or construct and play around with. Our founder, David Kelly, has this concept of build to think. So actually using build as a vehicle for helping to generate ideas. As part of that, it’s actually having stuff at hand that allows you to actually just sort of tinker around and try things out. There was an early in our history, which is when he kind of coined this phrase, as a team that was hired to think about, this is way back, and how you navigate, people navigate graphical user interfaces or what we’re used to today using on our Macs. And people were actually physically having a hard time actually kind of targeting stuff on the screen and working with it. And part of it was actually the mechanism, the sensors that were being used actually made really difficult. He was like, what can we try differently? And they just have like a box of junk, right? Go to Walgreens, a box of junk, sing in the office on the conference table, and they’re just playing around. And they picked up this emptied roll on deodorant. We’re like, what if you actually could put a ball on the bottom of this thing? And how would that work? And they just sort of experimented playing with that. And that became the first big commercial mouse for Apple. But one of the things that enables that to happen is actually having stuff at hand. If we look at kind of the environments we work in, this is kind of a corporate office, which there’s not much, I hope none of us actually work in any place that looks exactly like that. But we’re missing a lot of those tools. Actually, they disappear usually by middle school. The things that if you remember, like elementary school, you’d have like big crates of stuff, glue, construction paper, all that stuff. So we just brought all that back and said all of our offices should just have all of these things are basically kind of creativity kits. And you have them around. And then if you need to add more to it, you just go get more stuff. But it’s this stuff of having things at hand and encouraging that mindset of let’s actually build or construct our way into solving problems. The third one I’ll mention is role play. And this is another sort of activity that kids do that actually has some bounded rules around it. And we found that actually role playing is a really great way to actually sort of see if we’re all on the same page about an experience. So, you know, our heritage is a product company or designing things like this. But there’s a lot of intangibles that we have to solve. I’d say like actual human experiences. This is an example of what looks like a bunch of people who’ve lost their minds. They’re actually nurses and physicians in a hospital. They’re prototyping new ways of delivering better care to their patients. And the way that we kind of got them into that mindset was to introduce some tools of role playing. So, what might we need in order to help people better understand who their care team is, when they’re going to see them, how that’s going to come together? We can actually prototype that experience pretending that we’re nurses, doctors, patients kind of running through that process, seeing what works, seeing what doesn’t, seeing what fails, changing it quickly. One thing that’s kind of funny is I realized as I do this with clients is that there’s actually a hunger for this more and more is amazing. There is nothing that we do in our process that requires people to dress up and wear weird things. Like that just happens, which is there’s something in there that, you know, we really are going back to our childhood and missing out on something that will wear, I don’t even know what it looks like. It’s a shower curtain and I’m not quite sure what those balloons are. But in any event, this idea of role playing is actually, what I like about it is it’s actually, there are actually rules. If you watch kids do it, there are clear role definitions, there are boundaries, there are times that we go into or out of, we role playing, we call each other out if we start breaking the rules. There are things you can learn from kids that are really powerful for this. And it is amazing sometimes how much in our own minds, we live in our own minds kind of about the ideas that we have, we can get caught up in saying without just even trying it out. I’ll give you the crazy example, but I promise you this is true. We’re working with an airline client and they’re trying to figure out, you know, all the money is in the big first class flat bed seats and they’re trying to figure out how to fit as many of them in the plane as you can because, yeah, so I will not, I kid you not, the design brief was we think that we can fit more in if they’re like bunk beds and you sleep on top of them. And we said, are you sure about this? They’re like, well, we’ve run the numbers, it makes sense. You know, we checked like the weight, you know, we looked at kind of different configurations and we were like, could we just like get some chairs and just like, what do you think about the size? Okay, so lay down, so your client lay down here, okay, you lay down on top, tell me, would you do that for 10 hours? And I mean, it’s really fine, but they’re like, oh God, no, we wouldn’t. And so, but this is the thing which is hilarious is like, okay, well, if that’s a bad idea, we just as a simple role play, let’s try something else. And one of the things we found as we were playing around the room is like, well, actually can fit more seats in some people face backwards when they fly. That might be a bad idea too, but we could test that I’d be willing to go and test that with customers and have a conversation, I wouldn’t be willing to put any, anybody through that. But this idea of like simple, quick role plays like this to check our thinking can be really powerful. So, I’m going to sort of remind you again, these sort of three things like exploratory play is really about this concept of imagining possibilities, again, putting ourselves in a mode of divergent thinking and actually kind of setting the conditions for that might build agreements around that, we might name a meeting in that way, we might just sort of just have a conversation about kind of doing that. Sometimes rules, ground rules around brainstorming can help with that, but actually this idea of opening up possibilities to make choices later. The idea of building or construction is actually about this idea of having the tools at hand that allow us to actually try problem solving by prompts, physical tangible prompts, to guide ideas out there and have a conversation. Role playing is actually about trying things on for size. It’s about empathy, right, having empathy for the experience that you’re trying to create. And what I’m hoping in the very last moment is a little bit more of a creativity exercise. And we’ve got a minute left, so we probably won’t finish it all here, but there’s one last exercise, which is underneath your chairs, there should be a box that is folded flat cardboard box. And I’m going to give you just a very simple brief, which is make anything out of it that you want, and you can cut it, you can bend it up, you can write on it, you can turn into anything you imagine. And what I love for us to do is actually just find a place to put them all on the break and just see kind of what the creativity is that we’ve got in the room, what people managed to build and play with as a way to start. So I’m going to leave it at that and let you do that and say, thank you very much for letting me come up and spend a few minutes with you.