A new team that had never shared a room
Sunshine® was still finding its feet as a team. People knew each other through meetings, messages, and their everyday responsibilities, but there hadn’t been many opportunities to get to know the people behind the job titles.
Jarryon was particularly interested in initiative and ownership. He wanted teammates to feel comfortable making decisions and contributing ideas without always looking to him for direction. Before the session, five of the six team members had described themselves as listeners, which made us curious about what might happen if we put them in a situation where nobody was assigned to lead.
Five hours of very serious nonsense
We welcomed Sunshine® to the year 2036, where AI had become so good at solving problems that humanity was running out of useful things to invent. Luckily, the Playground Department had a solution.
The team was split into two groups and given the challenge of inventing, developing, and pitching something completely useless. Our fictional Board of Directors occasionally interrupted with new instructions, forcing the teams to rethink their plans along the way.
By the end, we had two products: Potato Beach™, a luxury beach towel made entirely from potatoes, and Drink Less, a questionable alternative to breastmilk. Both teams took their pitches remarkably seriously.
While they worked, we paid attention to how ideas emerged, how decisions were made, and what happened when the rules changed. We also asked participants to reflect on their experience afterward, which gave us a few perspectives we hadn’t noticed ourselves.
The founder wasn’t needed quite as much as he thought
One of the more interesting observations came from Jarryon himself. During the challenge, he noticed how uncomfortable it could feel to let other people take the lead. But when he stepped back, his teammates continued developing ideas and making decisions. As he put it during our debrief, “These are all people who do jobs and have brains and could think about stuff, and they do.”
We also noticed that the teams seemed happiest at two particular points: when they could brainstorm freely without worrying about whether an idea was good, and when they’d settled on a direction and everyone knew what to do. Humour was another discovery. Jarryon hadn’t expected it to play such a big role, but he noticed how much more of his teammates’ personalities came out when they were joking around.
Five weeks later, we checked in again. Taking initiative had shown the clearest improvement in the team’s self-ratings, rising from 3.50 to 4.67 immediately after the session. The five-week rating remained above the starting point, although other results were more mixed. Some participants had started reaching out to colleagues more often, but keeping those habits going proved difficult. One person summed it up rather well: “I started, then it faded.”
A few things to try on Monday
After the session, we met with Jarryon to go through what we’d observed and discuss how Sunshine® could use it. We suggested introducing short, regular retrospectives where the team could talk about how they were working together, alongside what they were delivering.
We also discussed improving remote meetings so more people could participate comfortably, and bringing small games into the working week to help teammates get to know each other. These weren’t particularly complicated suggestions, but they were based on things the team had experienced and noticed themselves. Whether those habits last is something a single Playground Day can’t tell us.