By Per Kristiansen

It is not just about playing more, it is about playing better! This was one of the key messages articulated by Bart Victor, one of the professors who helped LEGO develop its play-based business strategy process.

One could argue that "playing better" has always been the purpose of LEGO. In creating its plastic bricks and interlocking parts, the company originally wanted to help children play better so they could unleash their full potential while having fun--what the company called "hard fun."

Bart put it that way--"better" rather than "more"--because while some organizations were indeed incorporating play into their work, they didn't do so intentionally and weren't getting the most out of it. He and others believed that by deliberately incorporating play into their daily practices, organizations had much to gain.

In his book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, author Stuart Brown concurs: "Play is our natural way of adapting and developing new skills. It is what prepares us for emergence, and keeps us open to serendipity, to new opportunities." Borrowing from Otto Scharmer's Theory U terminology, my colleagues and I have observed that play creates a safe space where participants are comfortable with suspending judgment, fear, and cynicism, and can really engage in co-creating shared solutions.

Systems Thinking in Action Conference:
Because Sustainable Success Doesn't Just Happen
October 31-November 2, 2011
Westin Seattle Hotel
Seattle, Washington

By David W. Packer

As we all know, in systems everything connects to everything else--the ubiquitous interconnected web of existence. Systems thinkers know that understanding the interconnections between and among components is more important than understanding the components themselves. Without this knowledge, we fall into the paradox that Deming so well articulated and end up optimizing components in a way that often leads to woefully suboptimal, poorly performing systems.

Yet much of our national and even global discourse focuses on components and fails to give credence to the key links among them. For this, we are all the poorer and at risk of unknowingly creating a system that is so flawed that it will ultimately collapse and make mincemeat of its components.

I see this playing out in the U.S. today around two important components: a sustainable economy and a sustainable social structure....

The potential problems in each area are serious enough. But if policy makers and the general public don't consider the interconnections between these components, it is not only likely but also virtually inevitable that the system as a whole (encompassing the components and the interconnections) will stumble badly. The unseen missing links between the two will take their toll.