Playground Department · Pilot Program
The Playground Day
Most leaders can feel when their team is losing its edge. The meetings get quieter. Decisions take longer. Good ideas stop getting traction. But when you’re embedded inside the day-to-day, it’s almost impossible to see exactly why.
A Playground Day is a structured experience that does two things at once. On the surface, your team spends a half-day or full-day navigating a creative challenge together. Underneath, the day is designed to surface how your team actually thinks, decides, and collaborates. You walk away with insights you can act on. Your team walks away differently than they arrived.
We’re running this pilot with three companies. Your team gets the full experience. We get honest feedback that helps us sharpen the output for future leaders.
1. Why this exists
Most teams don’t lose performance overnight. Something smaller happens first. Conversations repeat. Energy drops. Good ideas stop getting traction. Small tensions stay unspoken.
Working as a product designer and founder, I kept seeing the same pattern in every team I worked with. Talented people working together without fully accessing the intelligence of the group. The signals were always there. They were just hard to see from inside the day-to-day.
Playground Department exists to make those signals readable. Through a designed experience that brings the real dynamics to the surface in a single day.
2. Why play works
Play lowers the stakes of being wrong. That’s what makes it work.
When there’s no right answer, people stop protecting their ideas and start testing them. Hierarchy softens. Participation evens out. The real patterns of how a team operates become visible in a way that meetings rarely allow.
The first exercise of the day is intentionally pointless. That’s deliberate. Low stakes lower defenses. Once defenses are down, real thinking starts.
3. What you and your team receive
The Intelligence Session
A private debrief with you after the day. The diagnostic picture, what we noticed, and what to look at next.
Data-Driven Insights
Pre and post surveys. You see what shifted, in your team’s own words.
Next Steps Roadmap
Concrete observations and recommendations to address the friction points we found.
The Playground Day
A half-day or full-day structured creative challenge, tailored to your team’s context.
Dynamics Reset
An immediate, noticeable shift in how the group communicates and collaborates.
Team Reflection Output
A short, shareable document so the team walks away with something real too.
4. How we partner on this pilot
This pilot requires zero budget. Your team’s real-world perspective is what we’re investing in. In exchange, we just ask for your active collaboration.
- Your honest take
- A quick reflection right after the day, and a brief check-in a few weeks later to see what stuck.
- A few short chats
- A casual, 30-minute conversation with you and two of your team members to hear how the experience felt on the ground.
- Capturing the day
- Permission to take a few photos and note down anonymized quotes.
- Shared learning
- If the pilot is a success, we’ll co-author a brief case study together. (Naturally, absolutely nothing goes public without your explicit green light.)
You should apply if:
- You lead a team of 6 to 15 people
- Something has felt slightly off, disconnected, or stagnant recently
- Your team is scaling, reorganizing, or navigating a hybrid or remote shift
- You can commit a half-day or full-day with the full team in the next few months
- You’re open to honest conversation about what we observe
5. Behind Playground Department
Designed by a product founder, backed by social psychology.
I’m Elpida. I have a master’s in interaction design and a background in social psychology and gamification. For years I worked embedded inside product teams at companies like Expressen, Dentsu, and Bralive, and on campaigns with Coca-Cola and Mastercard. I founded Banki, a fintech app for kids to learn about the value of money, that attracted investment interest from Lego and major banks.
What I kept noticing was that the real problem was never the product. It was the team and the environment around it.
Playground Department came out of that. And out of the Useless Hackathons I ran with Changers Hub and Netlight in Stockholm, where teams built pointless things together and accidentally revealed exactly how they think and decide.
Gamification is not the trick. It’s the method. That’s the foundation of a Playground Day.
6. Common questions
We’re refining the method. The exercises are tested. What we’re learning now is how teams from different industries respond, and how the diagnostic output needs to read to be genuinely useful. Your honest feedback is the trade.
Team building is usually about having a good time together. We design experiences that produce a diagnostic output. You walk away knowing something about your team you didn’t know before.
Yes, especially technical teams. The structured nature of the method lands well with people who think in systems.
No. The team experiences the day as a collaborative creative challenge. We’re observing the group dynamic, not evaluating individual performance. The insights come from how the group navigates challenges together.
Because the day is built on gamification and social psychology, a baseline is guaranteed. Your team will have a great time, lower their defenses, and connect in a completely fresh way.
What we are testing during this pilot isn’t the experience itself, it’s the output. If the post-session diagnostic report doesn’t accurately reflect your team’s real-world dynamics, we want to know. Your critique is exactly what helps us fine-tune the tool.
7. How to apply
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1. Quick Application
Spend 3 minutes telling us about your team and what you’re noticing.
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2. Discovery Questionnaire
If the pilot looks promising, we’ll send a more detailed questionnaire to help us understand your context and prepare for our conversation.
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3. Discovery Call
We’ll review your responses together, explore your goals, and discuss whether the pilot is a good fit.
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4. Pilot Planning
If we decide to move forward, we’ll tailor and schedule your Playground Day.
Questions before you apply? hello@playgrounddept.com