MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Tackling Disruption Playfully

Purposeful play helps foster innovation and learning beyond mere goal achievement, transforming disruption into opportunity.

Purposeful play is a critical behavior for executives facing disruptive change. In good old-fashioned play, the goal isn’t to win or lose. It isn’t to achieve against an objective standard. It’s to have fun. To experiment with different approaches. To see what feels good and what doesn’t. And in so doing, to learn and begin to build new capabilities that help turn disruption from a threat into an opportunity.

In my interview with Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson exploring the intersection between her research on psychological safety and disruption, she contrasted learning environments and performance environments. “If you’re on stage on Broadway each night, you hope that the performance is absolutely as good as it could be,” she said. “You want it to be close to perfect. If you’re in a classroom environment and things seem perfect, it’s not learning.”

About the Author

Scott D. Anthony (@scottdanthony) is a clinical professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and a senior adviser and managing partner emeritus at growth strategy consultancy Innosight. He is a coauthor of Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

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