Play Is Where Everything Important Gets Learned: Why Organizations Need Experimental Spaces
Bonus Insight #4 from 25 podcast conversations with leaders who leave the world better than they found it
Kwasi Adi-Dako designs educational programs for young adults - and is a parent to an even younger person. When I asked him what early childhood education should focus on, he was emphatic:
"Everything happens in play."
Not structured lessons. Not curriculum. Not teacher-led instruction.
Unstructured play. Where kids work out conflict over toys. Where they learn to share. Where they practice empathy by navigating relationships. Where they build courage by taking small risks.
"Your ability to manage conflicts, your ability to count, your ability to read, your ability to engage in difficult conversations, your ability to learn about sharing—everything happens in unstructured play."
Then he said something that stopped me: "I feel like we step in a little bit too quickly today."
We don't let kids stay in the discomfort long enough to learn from it. We resolve conflicts for them rather than letting them work it out. We structure play so heavily that experimentation disappears.
And organizations do exactly the same thing.
The Problem With Over-Structure
Organizations love structure.
Clear processes. Defined roles. Step-by-step protocols. Risk mitigation frameworks.
Structure serves real purposes. It creates consistency. It helps scale. It reduces certain kinds of errors.
But it also eliminates something crucial: space to play. Space to experiment. Space to learn through unstructured practice.
Most organizational learning happens through:
Formal training programs (highly structured)
On-the-job experience (high stakes)
Performance feedback (after the fact)
What's missing? Low-stakes practice space where people can try things, fail safely, and learn before the stakes are high.
That's what play provides for children. And it's what organizations need but rarely create.
What Kwasi Means By "Designed Pain"
Kwasi uses an interesting phrase: "designed pain."
He's not advocating for harm. He's describing the productive discomfort that comes from working through challenges in safe containers.
Two four-year-olds arguing over a toy? That's uncomfortable. But it's where they learn negotiation, compromise, frustration tolerance.
A child trying to build a block tower that keeps falling? That's frustrating. But it's where they learn persistence, problem-solving, adjusting approach.
The adult impulse is to step in: "Let's share the toy." "Let me help you with the tower."
But stepping in too quickly robs the child of the learning that comes from staying in the discomfort.
The same applies to organizational learning.
Where Organizations Need Play Space
Here are contexts where organizations would benefit from more unstructured practice:
Difficult conversations: Before a high-stakes performance conversation or board meeting, create space to practice. Role-play scenarios. Try different approaches. Fail safely.
Strategic decisions: Before committing to a major pivot, create space to play with possibilities. Prototype on small scale. Test assumptions without betting everything.
New partnerships: Before entering formal partnership, create informal space to work together on small projects. Learn how you collaborate before high-stakes commitment.
Innovation: Before formal product development, create space for unstructured experimentation. Let people play with ideas without immediate pressure to deliver.
Conflict resolution: Before formal mediation, create space for people to practice conversations with lower stakes. Learn to navigate disagreement before it becomes crisis.
Leadership development: Before promoting someone to leadership, create space for them to practice leadership in lower-stakes contexts. Let them learn before the role is official.
In all these contexts, play means: practicing the real thing in contexts where failure is tolerable and learning is the goal.
Why Organizations Resist Play
Organizations resist creating play space for understandable reasons:
It feels inefficient. Why practice when you could just do? Why experiment when you could execute?
It feels risky. Even low-stakes practice involves some risk. What if people fail in ways that have consequences?
It feels childish. Play is for kids. Work is serious. We don't have time for games.
It's hard to measure. How do you quantify the value of practice? What ROI do you put on experimentation?
It requires patience. Play takes time. You have to let people work things out rather than stepping in with solutions.
All of these concerns are real. But they create organizations where people only practice when stakes are high.
And high-stakes learning is expensive and stressful learning.
What Kwasi's Approach Creates
When Kwasi deliberately creates space for unstructured play with designed pain, several things happen:
Students learn to navigate conflict because they practice repeatedly in contexts where the cost of getting it wrong is low.
Empathy develops naturally through genuine encounters where they have to consider others' perspectives to get what they want.
Courage builds through repeated experience of discomfort that doesn't destroy them. They learn they can handle hard things.
Problem-solving emerges from trying approaches, seeing what happens, adjusting, trying again.
Resilience develops because they experience that failure isn't catastrophic. You can fail and try again.
All of this happens through play, not through instruction.
Organizations need the same learning contexts.
How To Create Organizational Play Space
Creating play space doesn't mean turning work into games. It means creating contexts for low-stakes practice of high-stakes skills.
Here's what that looks like:
Before major decisions: Dedicate time to "what if" scenarios. Play with possibilities without committing. Prototype on small scale before betting big.
Before difficult conversations: Practice with colleagues. Role-play the hard parts. Fail safely before the stakes are real.
During innovation: Protect time for unstructured experimentation. Let people try ideas without immediate pressure to deliver ROI.
For leadership development: Create practice contexts where emerging leaders can experiment with leadership before it's their job title.
After failures: Create space to dissect what happened without blame. Play with "what could we have done differently" before moving to next project.
In team building: Create contexts for teams to work together on low-stakes projects before high-stakes collaboration.
The pattern: identify high-stakes skills people need, then create lower-stakes contexts to practice those skills.
The Permission To Not Step In
Kwasi's insight about stepping in too quickly applies directly to organizational leadership.
When teams are struggling, our instinct is to rescue. To provide the answer. To resolve the tension. To fix the problem.
But sometimes the most strategic thing a leader can do is create a safe container and then let people work it out.
Not abandoning them. Not letting chaos reign. But creating boundaries and then allowing the designed pain that builds capacity.
This requires:
Tolerance for discomfort: Watching people struggle without immediately solving is uncomfortable. Leaders need to build their own tolerance.
Trust in process: Believing that people will learn through experience, not just through instruction.
Clear containers: Creating boundaries that make the practice safe even though it's uncomfortable.
Presence without rescue: Being available without taking over. Coaching rather than solving.
This is hard. It goes against leadership instincts to solve problems and remove obstacles.
But it builds organizational capacity in ways that constant rescue doesn't.
From Serious To Playful
I'm not arguing for less seriousness about your mission. The work matters. Outcomes matter. Quality matters.
But I am arguing that the path to excellent execution includes more play, not less.
Play is where people develop capacity for serious work. It's where they learn to navigate complexity, handle conflict, persist through difficulty, innovate under constraint.
Play isn't avoiding serious work. It's practice for serious work.
Next time you face a high-stakes situation—difficult decision, challenging conversation, major pivot—ask:
Have we created space to practice this first? Have we let people play with approaches before the stakes are real?
If not, consider creating that space. Even 30 minutes of unstructured practice might reveal insights that hours of structured planning wouldn't.
Because everything important gets learned in play.
And if you want your organization to develop capacity for difficult work, you need to create space for playful practice of that work.
Before the stakes are high. Where failure is tolerable. Where learning is the goal.
This is bonus insight #4 in an extended series exploring lessons from podcast conversations with leaders who leave the world better than they found it.
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