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TRANSFORMATIONAL PLAY AND BREAKTHROUGH THINKING
Transformational play is an innovative complementary method for education and corporate training that facilitates accelerated learning in a playful environment.
It is fundamentally the use of serious play to accomplish serious business.
Transformational play can be implemented to achieve breakthroughs in all business operations, most notably problem solving, innovation, leadership and team building, as it seamlessly transcends standard operating procedures to elevate thought processes and create the visionary mental environment needed to achieve such progress. By converting the element of play into serious business applications, four major beneficial effects are quickly achieved:
Participants’ minds become more alert, more open, more focused, and more motivated.
This means that their minds become more flexible and more hungry.
In this case, hungry is interpreted as curious, energized, and ready to tackle any challenge.
Transformational play also changes the risk/reward quotient by removing judgment from the equation. This reduces fear of failure, which paves the way for increased creativity, especially in brainstorming sessions. Shifting the risk/reward quotient is a key aspect of productive transformational play. It is a known fact that the human mind will find or create distractions when not comfortable. Transformational play lessens participants’ insecurities and makes them less self-conscious. In removing such distractions, this process helps participants focus more clearly on the task at hand.
For a company planning to utilize transformational play, it is important to first decide on an intention/goal prior to commencing activity. Another key to achieving desired results is the follow up session, which is always designed to harvest the benefits of the enhanced mental state that has been established.
Triviation is a unique example of transformational play. Its methodology utilizes targeted and diverse information delivered with creative proprietary blend of questions geared to induce random thought patterns known as asymmetric thinking, while simultaneously creating a playful atmosphere that facilitates breakthroughs. This seemingly miraculous result is achieved in a playful environment that leads to high impact results. Triviation’s combination of asymmetric thinking and question analysis sets the stage for teams to move into supremely productive interactions once they focus on a specific goal. This exercise takes on a Socratic tone, as participants’ thought processes are unlocked to connect and/or offer up surprisingly brilliant ideas they never imagined could arise from within their own minds.
In analyzing of the above concept, it can be said that Triviation complicates to simplify.
This seemingly contradictory statement points to one of the most important aspects of the Triviation process. Each initial session introduces an overabundance of information, mixing targeted facts with diverse unrelated data. Combining this conglomeration of information with a unique group interaction dynamic initiates waves of asymmetric thinking, which sets the stage for synthesizing new mental connections that lead to breakthrough ideas and concepts. Essentially, the process focuses down from the complicated, to distill all inputs into workable solutions. In the process, surprising connections are often discovered that lead to important developments.
An analogy for this process is the preparation and cooking of a gourmet soup. Diverse ingredients are acquired, chopped and then mixed together to form a single delicious pot of soup. The soup ingredients are galvanized together and can be easily identified by a name such as Split Pea Soup. Although the name is simple, clearly there are many more ingredients in this soup than split peas. In fact, the key to an exceptional split pea soup is everything but the split peas! This analogy applies to a myriad of items ranging from spaghetti sauce to laptop and tablet computers. Another excellent soup to analyze is lobster bisque. It is one of the most gourmet of soups, yet if someone proposed pouring cream on a lobster, few people would find that appetizing. This points to the art and science of making innovative connections.
Connecting the previously unconnected is a major key to successful innovation.
To quote Steve Jobs: “Creativity is just connecting things.”
The great challenge is figuring out what elements to combine, and how to do it most effectively. Purposeful transformational play can effectively lead participants to significant breakthroughs in solving even the most complex business challenges. By facilitating the connection of the previously unconnected, this modality proves itself to be an invaluable tool for corporate success.