In serious times, play can be one of our most powerful tools.
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa talks with Jill Vialet, social entrepreneur, author of Why Play Works, and founder of Playworks, about why play belongs at the center of how we lead, learn, and navigate complexity. Jill covers her journey to building an organization that transformed recess into a source of connection, trust, and resilience for millions of kids.
Their conversation explores how play helps people regulate their nervous systems, build relationships across differences, and see new possibilities when problems feel stuck. Jill shares lessons from Playworks, why trust is a prerequisite for learning, how unstructured play supports emotional growth, and what leaders can borrow from playgrounds.
You’ll hear about:
How play helps us navigate chaos and uncertainty
The connection between play, trust, and feeling safe
How small, unexpected tweaks can unlock entirely new futures
This episode proves that creativity, empathy, and experimentation often emerge when people feel safe enough to engage. If you are leading through uncertainty or looking for new ways to bring people together, Jill offers practical insight and hopeful perspectives on how play can help us move forward.
Links from the episode:
Jill’s Substack, “Workswell”
Why Play Works by Jill Vialet
Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown
🎧 Listen now:
▶️ Watch now:
📖 Read now:
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
Today’s guest is Jill Vialet, and I could not be more excited to share this conversation with you. Jill is an award-winning social entrepreneur and the founder of Playworks, an organization that has helped hundreds of thousands of children across the country experience recess as it should be: joyful, welcoming, and full of possibility.
In this episode, Jill and I talk about the surprising wisdom on why taking play seriously might be one of the most effective ways to build resilience, learn across differences, and even strengthen our democracy. I left this conversation feeling full of heart, humor, and the kind of grounded hope I think we could all use right now. Let’s have some serious fun with Jill Vialet.
I just want to say, Jill, it just feels like we are in such serious times right now, and boy, do we need play more than ever. I am so grateful to have you here to talk about how play and incorporating play can make us more resilient leaders, can make us more adaptive, can help us think about solutions that are not necessarily in our immediate purview because we’ve allowed ourselves space and time, to let our nervous systems relax, to let us feel joy, experience connection at the human level, in service of these difficult problems. I’m thrilled, Jill. Thank you so much for being on How We Future.
Jill Vialet: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: Jill, let’s start with play, which has just been a huge part of your career, your life, who you are. I’d love to start. When did you realize that play was so foundational to the work that you wanted to do in the world?
Jill: Yes, it’s funny. I think when I think about a conscious realization of its role, there was definitely this moment where I was out visiting a school while I was running the Museum of Children’s Art, and I was meeting with a principal who was dealing with kids having a hard time at recess and lunchtime. There was just this moment where I just had this wash of empathy for these kids because the chaos they were dealing with was not--
I’m pro-chaos, but there’s good chaos, and there’s bad chaos. It was just really abundantly clear that these kids didn’t have the play experiences that made it easy for them to navigate the chaos in a way that helped transform potentially bad chaos into joyful, good chaos. Anyway, there was this moment where I was like, “Oh, had I been in their situation, I would not have become the human I am.” It was so much because of feeling other or different, but having play as this experience and mode of connection with others that saw me through challenging times.
Lisa: I think that story really exemplifies what I’ve come to know about you, Jill. One of the most abundant social innovators of our time is this ability to take in what’s going on, infuse it with empathy and questioning, like, “What’s going on here? Why am I noticing what I’m noticing?” and then the ability to say, “I wonder if. Let’s reframe what I’m seeing here as chaos and out of control, and maybe a missing need or a missing opportunity.”
I know your time, as you share so wonderfully in this book that you wrote that is pretty much under my pillow, Why Play Works: Big Changes Start Small, you talk about how that foundational experience led you to start in just an incredible organization, almost 30 years ago, now called Playworks. It wasn’t initially called Playworks, and we’ll talk about that.
I just want to name for the How We Future podcast and the intention that we have here about sharing stories of our neighbors, of our friends, of our inspirations that started off with noticing something that didn’t feel right and then saying, “I wonder if there could be a different path here.” I just think that story is so clearly grounded in that.
Jill: Yes. I feel like it was super serendipitous, having a career focused on play, that that is, in some ways, what you’re describing, exactly what happens when you are playing. I’m a big basketball fan, repping the Golden State Valkyries here. You watch the game, and it takes place in this court, and there are the same set of static rules. You could even watch the same players play against each other multiple times.
Within any game, there are, at any moment, all these multiple futures of what might happen based on all the variables that come in. I think being open to that and finding joy and possibility in that, as opposed to being shut down or overwhelmed by it, I think that feels just, on some level, like pure serendipity that I had a childhood that led me to believe that “Oh, there’s so much possibility.”
Lisa: Yes. I know you’re not only a basketball fan; you’re a basketball player, former player yourself.
Jill: Former, former.
[laughter]
Lisa: We’re all players. We’re all athletes inside.
Jill: Yes, but I don’t leave the ground anymore. The absence of leaving the ground really changes the dynamic.
Lisa: Yes, I hear you. The hops definitely go, but the play doesn’t. The play doesn’t. From that, you started Playworks. Would love our listeners to learn more about Playworks, what it does, and just the impact it’s had.
Jill: Yes. Started as Sports4Kids in the Bay Area, and actually started with a half-time model in the first year. I hired someone I’d played college basketball with to be the first test coach. It was very much an experiment. I’d been asked by a principal, “Could you help us fix recess?” I’d previously started an arts program. “Could you do it the way you did the arts programming?” It was extraordinary. Even in the first year, other principals started hearing about what was going on and were calling and saying, “Hey, whatever you’re selling, the chaos at recess is a need that we need help with.”
It grew over multiple years, a lot of iteration, and a lot of bringing in other humans who had deep thoughts and instincts, and a real desire to experiment with what we might do, so added components around youth leadership, which is our junior coaches program, which I think actually is probably the most distinguishing special sauce, but also playing with before school and after school, and looking at class game time, and how you might work with classroom teachers to bring the principles of play that you were modeling on the playground into the classroom.
It was this iterative process growing nationally and then working hard at getting lucky. After I became an Ashoka Fellow, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation heard about our work and reached out to us about making a significant investment in us, mapping out a path to scale. They were extraordinary partners, along with some other key funders who really, in that moment in time, were curious about how to do this and were up for partnering with us to try and, again, lots and lots of experimentation.
Lisa: Well, I think it speaks to the fact that you were demonstrating by show, don’t tell, that play works, right? The fact that Robert Wood Johnson and some of these funders, I don’t know how many social impacts are like, and then funders came in knocking. This idea of like, I know our colleague, Bob Sutton, who has taught at the D School for many years, a celebrated teacher at Stanford, he has this concept of vu jade, not deja vu, but this idea of seeing something old with fresh eyes.
I think you were one of the first that says, “There’s this thing that happens in school. It’s called recess. Let’s not overlook it as the throwaway time; let’s actually look at that as the most important time. How do we put just a little bit of structure that honors it and gives it the best chance of being as impactful as it can by letting kids do what they got to do and letting the probably most important social, emotional, intellectual development happen in that time, which is often looked as, I think, historically, is the time where teachers get a break?”
Jill: I appreciate you bringing it up, too. I do think that there has always been this funny tension between our work’s about play, and, on some level, it’s been easy for folks to dismiss on some level, like, “Oh, that’s sweet.” I think one of the things about running a business and growing a business, even if it’s about play, and then especially dealing in schools, this insight that there are these tweaks that can be made in any kind of system that have this outsized impact.
I think fixing recess, weirdly, is one of those. The other one that my work took me through, because I was in all these schools, substitute teaching, this mind-blowing impact on the whole school building with just one human in one classroom. To your point, we either see or don’t see these things that are in plain sight based on the stories we tell ourselves and the way we lead our lives. Bob’s work has always been an invitation to really look around and see, “What are the tweaks that have this outsized impact?”
Lisa: Yes. There’s a lot of talk right now about the need for systems change, right? “We’ve got to have systems change,” which is important, but it’s a very abstract construct, like a system. What I think you’ve done with Playworks, and I’m so glad you brought up Substantial, which again, it’s just models this ability to have an impact on a much larger system, starting with an observation, a single observation.
“There’s this thing that happens, which is that teachers get sick. They can’t be in their classroom every day. There’s this replacement that we have called a substitute. It’s treated like a second-class citizen.” I’m paraphrasing here, Jill, taking some liberties.
Jill: That’s generous.
Lisa: Right? “The kids feel like it’s a day off, and the substitute teacher feels totally disrespected. How might we reimagine what substitute teachers could do, not just in that classroom, but around elevating what happens within the school and within the whole learning environment?”
Jill: I think what’s fun, too, is that there are two things going on at once, too, right? As a human who is doing this work and leading into the space, there’s the paying attention to the work itself, but then there’s also this secondary, behind-the-curtain, back-officey, managing the business of doing that work. I think one of the things that’s been really fascinating to me over my career is seeing how inextricably intertwined those two things are, and still at the same time, how distinct they are.
Because you can totally become obsessed with what’s happening with substitute teaching, but then the work of building out an organization and figuring out how to navigate that work, it’s its own independent thing, which also actually is well-served by maintaining a perspective on the multiple possible futures for your organization as well. Not to get extra meta, this past June, we closed down Substantial, but Subschool, which was our biggest platform, it’s an online professional development platform, both asynchronous and coordinated for cohorts, was acquired by the National Center for Grow Your Own.
In their acquisition of that platform, it went from serving 20,000 people, which is not nothing, but now it’s been adopted by the entire state of North Dakota and the entire state of Tennessee, thanks to this other organization acquiring it. Kay, that only is possible because while we were running this organization focused on substitute teaching, we kept also paying attention to multiple potential paths for the organization itself and forcing ourselves, asking ourselves, “What possible future would best serve the humans we want to reach?”
Lisa: I love that story. It speaks to a couple of your superpowers, Jill. One is the ability to have a larger perspective around what could happen, and then also the ability to zero in on the stories that will help translate the value across different stakeholders to be able to toggle what has to happen on the backend, what has to be communicated to stakeholders, what also has to be communicated to the people that are on the front lines doing this work, and talking about impact that didn’t exist before, metrics perhaps that didn’t exist before, through stories to give people a sense of what’s possible, to invite them into a future.
Again, throughout your work, whenever I’ve heard you talk about it, the book, which we’re going to talk about in a minute, are these stories that really capture your imagination. I didn’t think that was possible, but you showed me, with a slightly different tweak, something totally different was possible.
Jill: You were actually one of the people who brought this to me about the power of stories and science fiction, all this sort of Afrofuturism. It’s so much easier to imagine a future that’s radically different from the one we’re currently existing in if you have stories that help paint that picture. That’s the brain science of it all. There it is. It becomes much more real and much more possible.
Lisa: Again, throughout your book, you’re like-- and I want to share one observation that happened, this one moment, where the school had no recess, and you had a junior teacher that was like, “God, what do you mean there’s no recess? There has to be some recess.” Basically, in that moment, convinces the lunchroom women to open up the doors to allow the kids to go out for 15 minutes, and magic happens.
The principal’s like, “What? I didn’t even know this was possible.” Then you could be like, “Okay, this happened in this school. What if every school had that?” There’s that invitation to dream, but it’s not dreaming based on nothing; it’s dreaming based on something that unfolded where people went from, “I didn’t think that was possible,” to “Wait a minute, now we have an obligation to make it so.”
Jill: Yes, I appreciate that.
Lisa: Well, I just think every story is something to hang on. All right, we need to talk about this book, Why Play Works.
Jill: I think you’ve read it more recently than I have.
Lisa: I’ll remind you, Jill, that, of course, it’s got three parts, right? That first part does this incredible heavy lift of summarizing decades of play and theory about play into some concise things and concise principles that we’ll talk about. Then it’s got 20 big changes that really brings to light how big play really is and how play might be the key to unlocking better relationships, more trust, self-esteem, connection to our community.
Then the final part, which I love so much, is, “We can do this,” which to me sounds like How We Future. “We can do this. We can do this.”
Jill: Yes, “We can do this.”
Lisa: I think the part starting with the theory and your just unbelievable concise summary of research, and by the way, which includes some critique, it’s not all universal, is just talking about the importance of understanding, as Dr. Stuart Brown, I’ve heard him say, that play is anything but trivial, play is the thing, and that it’s core to building resilience and mastery for all of us, but particularly our children. I wonder if you can share a little bit about doing that research after being a practitioner for so many years, about what that unlocked for you.
Jill: I always mock my own sequencing of events because I had launched Playworks as Sports4Kids well before I was really versed in the brain science and everything going on that actually turned out to be completely integral to what we were doing. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, but that was good. I appreciate you bringing up Dr. Stuart Brown, a huge influence on me and a dear friend.
I was on his board. You mentioned that one quote, the other one that he pointed out to me, and I think it might have originally been a Brian Sutton-Smith quote, but it’s all this idea that, well, one, that play has survived evolution despite being this risky behavior because it is so integral, but also just understanding play as not the opposite of work, but as the opposite of depression.
Stuart’s been this very catalytic figure in my thinking around this. When I wrote the book, right after when the pandemic hit, I laid myself off from Playworks. We had to really contract pretty significantly. We were a $40-million budget with 500 staff, 70% of which came from the schools, which all of a sudden came to a grinding halt. We contracted pretty significantly, and I included myself in the layoffs then.
Everything was happening. It was that moment of profound racial reckoning. We were locked up. It was a very intense moment. I felt like it was a moment that I would be personally well-served by writing and making sense of my experience of leading Playworks up until that point. It was, in some ways, a very cathartic thing to do. As I sat down to write it, I wrote it all out. I told the stories. Then I got to the end, and I realized it wasn’t right, which is very painful. You’ve written books.
Lisa: Oh, gosh, I’ve done that. It’s so painful. It’s so painful.
Jill: You get to the end, you’re like, “Argh.”
Lisa: “This isn’t right.”
Jill: “This isn’t right.” Then I went back, and I realized I needed the context around what we know about how play works and why play works. Then I really reorganized the stories around the truths that I had seen in terms of these extraordinary outcomes that don’t actually happen just because of play, but that play can be a point of entry into. I think in this moment, when we are experiencing pretty challenging times, the world seems on fire, and there’s this huge, it feels like tremendous schisms, and people just really, so absolutely holding opposing viewpoints.
Really, they’re feeling like there’s no bridge in a lot of cases. I’ve been thinking a lot about how there’s this effort to get people to talk. I’m like, “I don’t think we’re ready for talking right now. I think we need to spend a whole lot more time playing together and using play in the loosest sense, but experiencing being in shared spaces, building familiarity, which then can potentially lead to rapport, which can lead to trust, which is the essential preconditions for having these really hard, difficult, important conversations that I think we need if we’re going to be able to salvage our democracy.”
I know that sounds a little grandiose, but I really do think that’s where we are. First, looking at how play works, and then moving to examples of how play can be a tool for helping people have hard conversations, to resolve conflicts, address issues of racism and sexism, just to get comfortable with people who are different from themselves, it was helpful for me to break it down and all these things that I was feeling overwhelmed by. What are just small steps that we might take to move closer to where I would like us to be?
Lisa: The book does a brilliant job of doing that stretch between “Here’s why it matters and here’s how you can start small.” For each one of those, I love those truths that you have that, like “Here’s the bigger picture, and here’s how you could do it.” Maybe it starts with just a game of Rochambeau Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Maybe that’s the best way we can call a tie a tie and move on and not get grounded in this place where we just can’t move at all. It’s both a great invitation and a reminder of the power of play that will allow us to move on. I’m totally with you, Jill. You mentioned earlier that you’re wearing the Valkyries. I’m, of course, by design, wearing FC Bay, a show where the new women’s soccer team from the Bay Area played in Oracle Park to a sellout crowd of 40,000, breaking barriers and the joy.
There was a moment I just was so fortunate to be there, where I saw the wave go around and around, the up and down and up and down. Even that, moving our body, feeling a connection with others, cheering people on, and knowing that the game is going to end, but our love of sports does not have to end, and whoever has lost doesn’t mean that they stop playing, and we’re done, and they quit, right?
You and I are both athletes. We work a lot with athletes. What I love about athletes, regardless of what age you play, I’m not just talking about elite athletes, is that I think it is this great practice ground for learning across difference, having a purpose beyond yourself, recovering from failure because you can’t win everything, the discipline of practice. It’s so, so valuable.
That happens in a structured way. I think your approach, and what you go into some detail, is the value of unstructured play. Recess is about unstructured play with just a little scaffolding, and how important it is to build that into our lives.
Jill: Yes, I appreciate that. Yes, that feels right.
Lisa: Well, I want to go into just a couple of some of those 20 truths or big changes. We talked a little bit about finding connection in play, that play is not solo; it’s often done better with others. I want to really talk a little bit about that trust part that you were talking about. You have this great quote. I quoted it here. Jill, you may not remember your brilliant words, but I do.
You say, “Trust is an essential precondition for building an environment where learning can happen, providing choice and voice, the opportunity to choose the activity you’re going to participate in, and to have a say in the activities that are happening, and how they feel really stand out as a part of this.” This gets back to some of the research that struck me in the beginning of the book around the importance of play being voluntary, right?
By opting in, you feel a sense of agency. By playing, you feel that you are building something with somebody else. One more thing I’ll just call out is that, as you said, this book was written during the pandemic, 2020, got published 2021. That’s now about four years ago. My gosh, the need for trust has only gotten stronger.
Jill: Yes. I would say, too, one of the great moment was Nadine Burke Harris, who was the former Surgeon General for California and did so much groundbreaking work around Adverse Childhood Experiences, ACEs, and trauma-informed practices. She came out to see a Playworks school once, and she said, “You know what’s wild? If you were intentionally designing a program for kids who’d been exposed to a lot of adverse childhood experiences that had a lot of trauma, it would look exactly like Playworks.
“The way you handle transitions, that everything is really communicated before you, in the classroom, you say, ‘We’re going to go out.’ While you’re going through the hallways, you’re talking about this moment of transition. You get out there. You regroup up. You talk about what the options are, the choices.” There’s a lot of structure in the choices, and it’s really communicated super clearly.
Giving kids choice and voice and giving kids attention and getting to the place where we, as a daily practice, recognize that when kids were behaving in ways that were negative attention-getting behaviors, having the luxury of being the recess people, not the classroom teachers who were held accountable to all these different standards that they had to convey to 30-plus kids, we were the people who had the time and space and latitude to say, “Hey, maybe you just need positive-- Let’s figure out a way to get you some positive attention.”
Negative attention-getting behaviors are just attention-getting behaviors that, because they didn’t get positive ones, they’re drawing this route, so seeing that, I think. Anyway, I do think this whole thing about building trust and recognizing how important it is in any endeavor, whether that’s running a workplace or a school or a democracy, it’s just the sort of one of the single most important ingredients to any human endeavor.
Lisa: An earlier conversation we had on How We Future was with our other faved colleague, Dan Klein, who teaches improv at Stanford. A big part of that conversation was this notion of setting your partner up for success, that improv is done as a collaborative endeavor, and that when you have belief in your partner, how much better you both can be.
I was also struck in the book where you talk about how our default sometimes is to take away recess when kids have misbehaved, which is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Again, it speaks to the systems component of the implications of these, what feel like small choices, to say, “Wait a minute. If you take away recess, you’re taking away perhaps the opportunity where that child could grow and could change.”
You’re making some of these initial problems more intractable if you don’t at least examine your assumptions and to look at what’s happening underneath in order to unleash the possibility of every being, every child.
Jill: I had this sort of recognition in writing the book about how reactive schools are, as opposed to being proactive. The one story was about I was once talking to a principal in San Jose, and she was saying, “Your program’s incredible. I got to tell you, I know it’s had this huge impact on our school.” I’m like, “How do you know? What’s the defining thing?”
She’s like, “Oh, graffiti in the bathroom.” I’m like, “Time out. What?” She told the story about how, prior to Playworks arriving, the kids would avoid recess because it was so chaotic. They would go into the bathroom and hide, and they would do graffiti in the bathroom. Their initial reaction was to put up a teacher in charge of guarding the bathroom.
Lisa: Oh, gosh. Right.
Jill: I was like, “Uh-uh.” Then it still didn’t really work. The teacher would get in the way. It came out sideways in other ways. She said, “And then we got Playworks, and kids didn’t go hide in the bathroom, and I didn’t have to have a teacher assigned there.” I was like, “Oh, but assigning someone to guard the bathroom,” to your point, “it’s not taking the steps to understand ‘Why are kids going into the bathroom during recess and lunchtime?’” You see that in all sorts of different societal ways.
Lisa: Yes. You’re reminding me of one of my favorite books about how change happens from Dan and Chip Heath, where they talk about scripting the critical moves in order to get towards the result that you want doesn’t mean prescribing it, but scaffolding it. The other part that they have is that sometimes you have to invent the metric that you’re making the success of the idea.
It’s like, “We have less graffiti in our bathrooms,” is actually a sign that some other things are working well. The other thing that you’re bringing up, and I’m so glad you mentioned it in your book, is work that our colleagues, Barry Svigals and Sam Seidel, did around school safety. This was a number of years ago in response to the just sad, tragic reality of more mass shootings in our schools, led to schools hardening their safety protocols of putting metal detectors and policemen at the front that served to make kids feel less safe than more safe, versus really understanding the difference between being safe and feeling safe and having to make some different choices. I bet we haven’t done the study, but I bet there’s a good correlation between the amount of play and recess and feeling safe.
Jill: And again, this really profound question about what makes us safe, because there’s a lot of play that is risky behavior. In some ways, as a parent, my children are now adults, but as a kid, I had free rein. I roamed all around Washington, DC. I rode my bike everywhere. I took the bus at a very young age; my kids, much less of that.
They had cell phones starting in junior high, when they were self-propelled around the city to the extent that they were. I knew where they were all the time in a way that no one knew. I went off to India when I was 19 and wrote home with Blue Airmail and no cell phones. Anyway, all of it, I think there is a way in which certain risky behaviors and engaging in what could be described as unsafe behaviors are actually essential to us ultimately being able to be safe and to navigate the world, or secure.
I think security is such an interesting-- You go through security in the airport, and I just think, “What makes us safe?” I wish the TSA people well. I feel badly they’re working without getting paid currently. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if we were spending that money on cancer research. It’s what really makes us safe.
Lisa: Those are such important points, and I love that they are continuing to be thread into not just our national conversation, but our global conversation. I just want to point out Jonathan Haidt’s great work in The Anxious Generation, where he talks about the loss of free play during early childhood, like you were saying, is a contributor to children that are suffering from mental health crisis because they haven’t had a chance to practice, in addition to just how much technology is just siphoning off their imagination and keeping them feeling lonely and isolated. Well done, Jill, in starting that conversation.
Jill: Thank you.
Lisa: I want to talk about the last part, where you talk about “We can do this and also continue it forward in some work that’s happened since,” and the work that you’re doing. You really talk about this first invitation to say, “Play yourself. We can do this.” I will say, Jill, I’m so curious. Before we got on this call, my morning was a little stressful.
There was a number of things that happened, calls that didn’t go well, and I found myself getting really tense, my breath short, so I was like, “Okay, Lisa, breathe.” I remember thinking, “You’re going to talk to Jill. What advice might Jill have about how to calm the nervous system with a little play?” Do you ever have that moment where you’re like, “Okay, I’m noticing I could use a little something”?
Jill: My favorite definition is play: any activity undertaken for no apparent purpose. I do think being open to things coming to us sideways, unexpected. It may not seem exactly like it fits the definition of play, but my go-to when I start to feel like that is to go outside. There is just a connection to nature, just a breath of air. When kids were babies and around 5:30 or 6:00, the witching hour would come, and the baby would not stop crying, going outside.
Whether it was raining or cold, it sounds a little like parental abuse, but there was a way of shocking the system into, like, “Okay, be present.” Levity and noticing yourself, it’s an indictment I have of the nonprofit world that we are so busy. It was Thomas Merton who wrote about there being almost a violence inherent in the busyness of the system. I do think when I get going like that, and I get agitated, asking myself to slow down. I will doodle. I will play the guitar, like giving yourself permission to not contribute, not ramp up.
Lisa: Yes, I like that, not contribute. I sometimes will throw an impromptu dance party and be like, “Okay, let’s just get it. [crosstalk] Let’s just get it on.” Well, I love in the opening of that part, you have a great quote from George Bernard Shaw, the one that says, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” I think that’s so powerful because going back to your point about the nonprofit, I work a lot with leadership teams who have a serious issue, require serious thinking, and serious ways.
They lock themselves up in a windowless conference room to get very serious when, in fact, what they should be doing is loosening up in some ways to get out of that defense mode of fight or flight, but to get into a more generative and generous mode. I think your work really speaks to that, that it doesn’t have to be this binary, right? We would all be well-served if we could figure out a way to tap into that.
Now, I know also that for a number of years, you helped teach the Design for Play class at Stanford. Again, “You don’t go to Stanford to play, Jill,” but you’re like, “Yes, we got to reintroduce play.” Can you tell me a little bit about that class and what you took away from that?
Jill: Yes, it was Brendan Boyle’s, who was forever the toy designer at IDEO. It was a great collaborative effort. Stuart came in. It was a guest lecturer. Basically, it created thinking about the role of play in design processes, so starting with everything from Stokes and how you create the preconditions that contribute to more out-of-the-box thinking, fantastical, inviting the orthogonal thought to come in, thinking about serious things.
We used to ask our kids when they would first come back to school, “Which of your teachers would survive a zombie apocalypse?” which doesn’t necessarily sound like you’re asking your kids about their academics, but your kid, it was so funny, not coming at them hard, “How’s English?” We’re like, “How’s English?” would never get anything more than a one-word answer. “Good, fine.” “Which of your teachers would survive a zombie apocalypse?”
Lisa: So unexpected.
Jill: Right. Doing that with grown-ups, inviting, again, the sense of possibility. The class, we had all sorts of different modalities between group work. People had personal play projects where they created and designed their own thing they were going to do while being a very serious student at Stanford, but what was going to be their personal play path, and incorporating other students, and again, the way that play invites experimentation, and then really basically mapping play in ways that it might infuse and inform the full design process.
It was so fun. I swear, I’ve taught social entrepreneurship at Haas, at the School of Cal, and I’ve taught play. The way people show up if there’s a class on play is very different, and so it was a delight.
Lisa: We just had a reunion at Stanford, and I can imagine some students come back and be like, “You know what class I really remember? The Designing for Play one.” I remember talking to Brendan about how intentional he was about scaffolding and about inviting students to take play seriously. He talked about one of the rituals that he starts from the very first day of class, is that the entranceway to the door to the class was a game, and how he kicks it off with hopscotch, and one of the assignments is for students to invent their own game that marks the difference between outside the classroom and in the classroom. Again, makes me think, I can imagine if we start board meetings with a different approach that says, “This is the kind of behavior or the way we want you to show up here.”
Jill: I think to that point, I do think that maybe it’s not right to start every board meeting with a hopscotch game, but I think the bigger thought there is how we invite people into processes. You talk about doing these very serious conversations with workplaces that are having very serious-- how you even invite them to come and participate in a conversation, and not being in a windowless room, there are all these ways in which you don’t have to be silly.
You have to design play experiences the way you do anything. Honestly, that was our experience of running programs in the schools because there were kids who weren’t going to be vulnerable and feel silly. You had to figure out a breadth of options and points of entry for kids who were carrying-- they’re bringing all their past experiences around what risks they’re willing to take in terms of their peers, or whether grown up, they don’t know.
So many of the things that I do as a grown-up working with other grown-ups have been informed by things I learned about working with kids and creating conditions that really invite everyone to participate and pay attention while participating to their experience in a way, and give them choices to opt in or opt out. It’s not play unless there’s volition involved. I think that choice and giving people that level of control, it’s valuable in schools, and it’s valuable in workplaces as well.
Lisa: One thing I didn’t realize until you started to share that is this notion that kids will give you feedback so fast, as opposed to adults that will silently stew and not realize. Kids, they’ll tell you, so those reps of seeing, “Wow, I have to really think about the context here. What is the context in which I’m operating to figure out what might be a great intervention? What is the actual content? What’s the game, or what’s the offer, invitation? How do I do it?”
I think about, “What’s the craft? How do I do it in a way that connects to meaning that it’s not some throwaway thing, but it’s actually an on-ramp to where we want to go?” Jill, you’re just genius. I will say there was a couple of years ago, where we were inviting athletes to explore how they might engage civically in new ways. We had about 200 athletes. I invited you to come and talk about your work at Stanford and the Designing for Play, and, of course, all of your great history. You started off with one of the most amazing experiences I’ve seen to date. Do you remember what it was?
Jill: It’s a single-elimination Rochambeau tournament.
Lisa: Rock, Paper, Scissors, by the way.
Jill: Rock, Paper, Scissors for those that are regionally challenged by that, yes. You find a partner, you do it, and then with each person who is victorious, then the people they have vanquished become their ever-growing cheering sections. I once did it at a conference in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia or DC, and I had 6,000 participants.
Lisa: Amazing.
Jill: Because of the magic of math, it only took seven minutes because you go half and half and half, and it goes very quickly when it came down, I think, to the former mayor of Philadelphia was playing against a high school student.
Lisa: Oh my gosh, that’s so fantastic.
Jill: Happily, the high school student won. [crosstalk] I was like, “Phew, shwoo.”
Lisa: I know, but the room is like raucous.
Jill: The room is, oh, yes.
Lisa: Again, seven minutes changes everything, all about how you feel.
Jill: Yes. Again, it’s like we started playing it on elementary school playgrounds because it’s completely arbitrary. Anyone can win. In that, there’s this moment.
Lisa: The stakes are low. The stakes are low.
Jill: The stakes are low, and when you’ve lost, you become part of the cheering section. You keep going. There is this moment when whoever has won, and everyone’s just going, “Yes, Lisa, Lisa Lisa.” It’s like, “Ah.” It’s like--
Lisa: I’m waking in a delight. Oh my gosh, Jill, I could talk to you for hours. I just want to maybe close with a little bit of the work that you’re doing now, which is taking this incredible treasure trove of experience and wisdom and belief in humans, and applying it towards helping leaders that are navigating some very complex moments of transition. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about your work these days.
Jill: Yes. When I laid myself off at Playworks, I started really exploring this world of transitional leadership and how to transition. What do successful transitions look like, and what are the models? Seeing a lot of leaders who are also transitioning and talking to them, I got really curious about-- a lot of religious traditions have a practice where when a minister or a rabbi is leaving, they bring in someone who has their whole career as being an interim minister or interim rabbi.
In some ways, they’re like substitute teachers if substitute teachers are held up as like, “No, this is extra hard. We’re going to put our most experienced humans into this moment of transition.” They would care for their congregations as well as the organizations. It would intentionally carve out a space for people to work through their feelings about what’s come before and this present moment and this messy middle, and then to collectively imagine the future they want to move into in a way that ultimately created, when it works well, the most optimal conditions for a successful transition, as you were saying earlier, setting that next person up to succeed.
I’ve been doing a lot of work in that area, was an interim executive at UC Berkeley at the business school in the Center, and then I’m helping other groups figure out succession planning and navigating transitions in a way that’s thoughtful and loving. I actually think bringing a certain amount of love and a willingness to slow down to these processes is really key to them ultimately having the organizations that we need.
Lisa: Yes. Again, I’ll say pointing out to “What are the lever points to really having outsized impact? How can we support people that are in positions to make choices that have amplified effect?” which is, again, so much of what this podcast is trying to do is to remind people that we don’t have to have the future happen to us, that we can lean into an opportunity, a leverage point, a relationship, a choice differently, and when we do that, it really might have ripple effects beyond ones that we didn’t know.
Maybe it’s less graffiti in the bathroom walls, Jill. Maybe it’s the opening of a conference with 6,000 people, that when they go home after 2 days of conversations, what they’re going to talk about is the Rochambeau tournament that had the entire room cheering and fully raucous. Maybe it’s reminding themselves that taking a walk outside, allowing themselves to take a breath, and to reconnect with who they are and who they want to be, even amid the complexity and change, is one of the best things that they can do for themselves and others. Jill, thank you so much for being here. We are going to put so many links in the show notes, including an opportunity we didn’t even talk about, which is your new T-shirt shop.
Jill: Oh, yes. It’s always playful [unintelligible 00:43:09].
Lisa: Always playful. Always playful.
Jill: Play with cotton, yes.
Lisa: Play with cotton. Put it on your shirt. Wear it about. Remind others. Ever the futurist, Jill, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jill: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: It turns out that starting your next gathering with a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament may be the most effective way to foster memorable learning and engagement. Play is for everyone. Here’s something worth trying. Pick a small moment in your day, a work meeting, a family dinner, maybe even your commute, and ask yourself, “What small tweak could make this feel more open, more joyful, and more fun?”
Small moments, when designed with care, can transform life. If you enjoyed this conversation with Jill as much as I did, I’d love for you to leave a rating or a short note about what stood out. It helps others find these conversations, and it grows this community of people who care about shaping a more playful, humane future. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.