Safe enough to play with work

Let’s break it down

The Play State Peach Framework describes the conditions for people working together to play with work. It’s based on academia from systems psychodynamics and practical experience leading awesome teams.

Every organisation, team, team of teams, committee, community group, has a shared mission, or primary task.

When groups play with their task, awesome things happen. They’re engaged, productive, and creative. They collaborate, share candid feedback, self-authorise, solve complex problems, work through complex relationship issue and feel comfortable bring themselves to work.

It needs to be safe enough to play with work. Psychological and physical safety at work is paramount. But, safety is a feeling, so we need boundaries make it safe enough to play with work.

Boundaries is a weird word. We use it to means the things that tell the organisation who they are and how they work.

There are 5 categories of boundaries:

🥽 Task clarity
What is the company working on, what are teams working on and how does it all relate?

Think - Vision, mission, strategy, goals, metrics.

Articulate, regularly communicate and seek feedback on what it is you’re working toward

👐 Emotional Containment
What is the emotional experience of work and what does that tell us about our organisation’s effectiveness?


Think - Tolerating projections, processing feelings for effective action


Use reflective practice to understand the emotional experience of working and use that as data to improve the organisation

🧠 Organisation in the mind
How people experience the organisation?

Think - culture, rituals, and what people think of when they think of working in your organisation

Identify repeatable rituals that allow the organisation as a whole or your team to come together to focus on task in a way that’s authentic to you and your teams

🚦Systems and processes
How does work happen?

Think - Working systems, processes and execution



Identify processes and opportunities to develop, document and iterate on the processes that give people the tools to work. The key here is the Goldilocks balance between not too much and not enough.

👑 Decision making and responsibility
How do decisions get made and actions get taken?


Think - Hierarchy, role clarity, responsibility, empowerment & tacit authority

Ask yourself the following question: do people in my team take appropriate action without seeking permission? Reward and recognise appropriate actions without seeking permission.

A cheat sheet for improving how effective boundary management can be is to work on your relationships, rituals and reflective practice. That’s where we come in.