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Lynda Gratton Professor of Management Practice at London Business School. As innovation becomes the stamp of high-value work, so work will have to provide an opportunity for creativity to flourish
Remember that old cliche that school days are the best days of our life? Why is that? Partly it's the fact that we don't have the responsibilities of being an adult yet, but mostly it's because we are still allowed to play. The good news is that in the future, playing and work will no longer be mutually exclusive. In fact, play will be a vital part of work. Trouble is, most of us have forgotten how to play.
Work becomes play when we do something we normally don't; when we stop doing something we normally do; when we carry to the extreme the behaviours we normally regulate; and when we invert the patterns of our daily social life.
We play when we move out of our day-to-day life, when we are not constrained by the normal boundaries of time and space; when we feel free and unconstrained; when we are flexible and lose our normal association between means (what we do) and ends (the result of our actions). These are not antecedents, consequences of something else that is play; rather, they are the very stuff play is made of.
The creative classes, such as advertising agency creatives, creative writers, designers, planners and social theorists have typically used fantasy and imagination to...