Play and Creativity

When I worked in advertising as an account planner (the person who does the thinking behind the marketing message of a campaign or brand) I was given the opportunity to spend two weeks dedicated to coming up with a big idea about why people play (really from a human point-of-view, as opposed to a scientific point-of-view) – around which to base a creative concept for a particular campaign. Besides spending a lot of time in the local bar drinking coffee and staring at passers-by or standing on the smoking-designated roof-top with splendid views of London, I managed to find out some interesting information about how play and having fun releases happy chemicals in the brain. Having fun is not just good for your mental well-being as well as your physical well-being, it can also have an important role to play in creative-thinking, and creativity, in general.
The problem that I have, and I am sure many of you have come across, is that people sometimes impose their fun or sense of fun on others. Fun in this sense isn’t fun. This isn’t the same as saying people at work shouldn’t have fun. But rather that we just need to be a bit careful about not imposing our sense of 'fun' on others.
Anyway, fun is very important in the world of creative-thinking and creativity in general. The child in the adult seeks fun - and there are strong connections between children and fun, and between fun and the imagination. When children play, they go off into their own make-believe worlds where rational thinking is suspended.
Richard Branson is someone who uses the word fun a lot. Fun brings out the child in us – the imagination – ideas. And the child in us forgets about the limits that the adult world puts on us. Adults have been harmed. They know pain. And they will try and avoid pain. Adults will try and avoid pain and risk; more so than children. But with no pain there is no gain. Fun doesn’t just seem to be about increasing the imaginative process but also in opening us up to new possibilities. And to have the optimism to carry them out. Branson says that the times when he is at his most creative, in terms of business ideas, is when he is having fun (and it is certainly not hard to spot the child in Branson, even though he is a high-powered entrepreneur.
And many other entrepreneurs, like Branson, take fun very seriously. The founders of Ben and Jerry’s (Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield) based an important part of their work model on fun. Fun not just for their customers, but fun for themselves and their employees too.
And a similar appreciation of fun can also be found in other areas of life – with people in the arts, science, education, health, and so on, as well as, of course, just ordinary people in our ordinary lives.