The story so far…

It feels like a generally accepted truth that sometimes work is super poo-poo painful. It’s just a thing that happens and we just have to accept it and push through it cos ‘life wasn’t meant to be fun’. 

But also, we can all think of times when work has been awesome fun, the quality of what we produced made us proud and work seemed to just…work. It’s then we feel like we somehow stumbled into a bathtub of ice cream, or got the cheat codes to life (and also: it probably will not last).

When we stop and think about why something felt ick or awesome (if we ever get a moment to), we probably hit on a few varied reasons: it was all down to an individual, or maybe it was that your team just got along well (or not), or perhaps the strategy was poorly defined or communication was working well or maybe it was something to do with a new layout in the office?

And the ‘truth’ is probably somewhere closer to - it was all those things, and it was none of them, and it was probably a whole bunch of other reasons you don’t even know about. And then we kinda just give up trying to make sense of it and hope the next roll of the work dice comes out in our favour.

But we reckon there's another way. We reckon there's a whole bunch of stuff that can help you, the teams you work in, and the organisations those teams live in, to make sense of work life and create the conditions where shit gets done and we enjoy doing it. We reckon the academic nerdery of studying group dynamics, mixed with the practical magic of experience in organisational life, sprinkled with a little bit of the untapped art of performance theory has got something to show us as we lead, follow and create in the groups we inhabit. We reckon it can be summed up real easy in concept that is sorely misunderstood and weirdly absent from our working lives.

It’s called play.

🍑 Play is a tool that helps get stuff done; faster, safer and better.

🍑 Play is enjoying the difficult task of learning (and in this economy, organisations that don’t learn, die).

🍑 Play is enjoying the difficult task of collaboration (and in this economy, collaboration wins).

🍑 Play is enjoying the difficult task of creating something new (and in this economy, there's always something new that needs making).

And it’s a whole bunch of other things too. 

But Play has got a bad wrap lately, and has kinda been misunderstood. It’s not trust falls or asking people to wear a funky tie on Fridays. Play is a whole special thing that has helped humans learn and develop since, well, since before we were humans. Play can be thought of as a space that's co-created between two or more people, where those people can figure out all sorts of cool stuff like who they are, how the world works, how each other works and really… anything. This all comes from the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, education and early child development, but trust us, the science is in and Play is awesome.

Our business is about helping you create the conditions so that play can happen authentically to you and your organisation. We don’t do compulsory fun, trust falls, or cringe play that is not at all fun. 

Playgrounded was founded by 2 humans 👇

Both of us talking at the same time. Very on brand.

We met working together in a growing technology scale up. We’ve always shared the philosophy that people feel good at work when they’re doing good work, and building great relationships. But, we came at the problem of supporting people at work from 2 very different directions. 

G is an HR leader who worked in leading and developing the people functions of high growth startups. She was also a play-sceptic - when people would talk about play at work, G would cringe. Her experience with play consultants and play content had been…bad. It was all compulsory fun activities that she did not find fun and oftentimes had to make more time in her busy work days to have the compulsory fun (which was not much fun). Do not misinterpret, she loved her workplaces, and loved loving her job, but her focus was always on supporting people and business through developing awesome processes and practical solutions to solve problems; “give people the tools they need to do awesome work, provide safe conditions for work, support them and get out of their way”.

Stef is an academic, teacher, facilitator and clown. He was also a ‘play-tragic’. He loved play, and deeply felt that there was some magic that happened when people loved what they did, together. But the problem was that he could never figure out how to make it actually happen in peoples’ day to day. They would come to a workshop, feel really connected, start doing some cool creative thinking with their colleagues but he knew, once they got back to their BAU, all of it would disappear because worklife didn’t support play. It was this great tool that couldn’t be used because the processes didn’t support it.

Then one fateful day, we were thrown together in a forward thinking organisation that wanted to make PLAY, WORK. The tragic and the sceptic shared their ideas and realised that there are systems and frameworks that can support teams to make their own play and build their own culture that fosters engagement, joy, collaborations and challenge.

Now, we’re taking our learnings and ideas to the world.