All Work and No Play Makes Jack Slightly Less Innovative

B. Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• The consumerization of IT, Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, bring-your-own-device: What do these uber-trends have in common?  They shake up the status quo by placing the employee at the center of the universe, bringing them together and merging their personal and professional personas.
• This progression toward a people-first workplace has greatly influenced enterprise social networking platforms, making them more ‘humanized,’ but that is not enough.  True innovation needs free experimentation and exploration; in other words, a state of play.

In the late 90s, the extent of play within the enterprise was limited to ‘Windows shopping’ for the perfect Windows 95 desktop background color, e-mailing an ASCII art visage of Jerry Garcia, or perhaps even holding an after-hours Doom session on the company’s 10 Mbps Ethernet LAN.  Since then, of course, we’ve had ‘the internets’ to entertain, at least for organizations allowing free and full access to those climes.  However, trolling the Twittosphere in search of fleeting pop-memes is not actually play and does not actually make you any smarter, more productive, or even more informed.  That only happens when we play.