Play Time… What is it Good For?

Try this experiment: Give your teams time and space to play.

That’s it. Don’t expect something shippable. Don’t plan to judge their output on the basis of business value. There will be no “right or wrong.” There will be no award for “the best idea.”

Strive for few defined goals other than engaging, exercising, and letting their creative and innovative spirits run free.

Pure exploration – like kids with endless reams of paper and a full box of crayons.

Every good work of software starts by a developer scratching a personal itch. Share on X

If you feel the need to establish some constraints, put a timebox around things.

If you need some game props, check out a few idea starters online.

What Good Could Possibly Come of Play Time?

The idea of exploration time is not new. You’ve no doubt heard of Google’s 20% time, Atlasssian’s ShipIt Days, Adobe’s Kickbox, LinkedIn’s 20% Time, and the list goes on. What you might not know is that 3M launched a 15 percent program way back in 1948.

As Jurgen Appelo points out in “Exploration Days” – Chapter 5 of Managing for Happiness, we need to let our “self-organizing teams” also be self-developing and self-educating too. All work and no play…. we know where that leads.

100% utilization drives unpredictability. —Don Reinertsen Share on X

The benefits of tinker time are many:

Sparked creativity
Freedom to innovate
Time to sharpen the saw
Cross-team pollination
Opportunity to exercise autonomy, mastery, and purpose
Reduced risk of burnout
Making failure acceptable

Go Ahead, Take a Risk

Yes, I’m sure somebody (maybe even you) has plenty of objections to “playtime”:

The team has much more urgent things to do
They have project deadlines to meet
They have too many meetings to attend already and not enough dev time.
What if they don’t actually produce something during playtime that’s worth shipping?
What about all the carryover from the last sprint….?

If the above “impediments” are getting in your way of getting started, try reframing the experiment:

Allow time during “work hours” to have “a book club”
Consider attending a conference “exploration” time
Set aside some slack time in the next iteration to experiment with a new technology
Build a quick proof of concept or a prototype – one that you promise, promise, promise you don’t intend to ship.

Just do something that involves collective learning.

From Failure Comes Success

After that “safe small experiment,” proceed to expand the playing field. Provide space for uncaged innovation, unbridled creativity, and true experimentation. Give the teams the opportunity to build something just to throw it away without “sunk cost” concerns. Allow all teams unfettered freedom to bomb miserably, without the possibility of repercussion.