For the second installment of the IDEO Play Lab mini-series on how to empower creative teams in the workplace, we captured a conversation between Play Labbers Elise Granata and Matt Hovde as they chatted about our team’s secret sauce for making people feel seen.

It’s a more casual format that we hope you’ll enjoy. Not to get too meta, but that’s also part of the secret sauce: making the stories we share with you feel joyful to produce.

As always, reach out at helloplaylab@ideo.com if your team could use some play in their day.

Matt: All right—welcome back! My name is Matt, and I’m a Game Designer and Experience Designer at Play Lab. I’m here with my colleague Elise.

Tell the folks out there who you are and what you do.

Elise: Honored to! My name is Elise, much like Matt’s name is Matt. I’m a Community Lead here at IDEO Play Lab. I’m a little obsessed with community building, and I love that my days include designing the gatherings, experiences, and tools that help others feel connected and playful. 

Matt: This feels like it aligns very nicely with our mission today, don’t you think? 

Elise: Big time. 

Matt: In our last article, I introduced this framework for what creative teams need to feel successful and seen, and to do their best work.

In this article, Kezie Todd, one of our Play Lab Game Designer colleagues, and I looked for inspiration from game design. We talked about mechanics such as feedback loops, progressive skill synthesis, and onboarding.
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Today, Elise and I are going to talk about the concept of feeling seen on our teams.

Matt: So, first of all, I see you, Elise. In that, I’m literally seeing you. 

Elise: I see you, Matt.

Matt: On the surface, we think of being seen as being acknowledged and appreciated. And that certainly is important—getting credit where credit’s due, and receiving kudos. 

But today, we’re trying to think more deeply about being seen. I’m talking about feeling able to manifest your humanness, to embody and bring your many identities and perspectives into your workplace.

Elise: Loving it. We often hear this story about “bringing your whole self” to the workplace, which is a pretty tall order. That’s why breaking it down in the way you have is so great.

Matt: And “bringing your whole self to work” is sort of a myth anyway, right? You can't bring your whole self to work because your whole self lives 24 hours a day and intersects with many things outside of work that you may choose not to bring into the workplace.
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On Robert Putnam’s bonding and bridging social capital framework—and how we can use it to build stronger teams

Matt: Elise, you mentioned a framework to help people think about both sides of that experience. Could you explain more about that?

Elise: Yes! There’s a wonderful author named Robert Putnam who wrote books such as Bowling Alone and Better Together, which explore the social infrastructure of the United States and what has historically made our sense of community feel stronger than it does today. One of his core frameworks—bonding and bridging—is very similar to what you’re describing. 

Bonding happens when you connect deeply with people like you. That could be due to a shared hobby or because of a common identity across age, race, or gender. Or maybe there’s a specific activity you do together in the workplace. Of course, that might mean somebody on the same team as you or somebody at the same level. Bridging occurs when you connect with people who are different than you. When it comes to community building, bonding is great, but bridging is basically super glue.
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On Kraftwerks as a recurring ritual for nerding out

Elise: We experiment with so many rituals to support team bonding and bridging in Play Lab. What’s a team ritual that comes to mind for you?

Matt: One of the things that we do that I really get a lot of energy out of in Play Lab is called Game Design Kraftwerks—and we spell it with a “k” and an “e,” but I’m not going to tell you where the “k” is and where that “e” is! [Editor’s note: This is funnier when spoken.]

At Kraftwerks, we focus on Game Design. We meet once a week. Sometimes it’s 15 minutes, sometimes it’s an hour. We talk a lot about what games we’re playing and game trends we’re seeing in the world. We discuss our current projects and how we are bringing the lens of game design to each one.

The benefit of these Kraftwerks sessions is that you feel like you’re talking to your people. Talking shop with people who get it makes you feel so comfortable.

Elise: I love that. One thing that came up for me while you were talking about the magic of Game Design Kraftwerks was that bonding moments like that eliminate the need to contextualize or explain jargon. And that is so important when you want to go deep into a topic area you care about. That can also apply to meeting with a group of other directors in your organization. You might have shared languages and experiences that may not be as easily understood by people below or above your level. 

When I first joined Play Lab, I loved seeing how many of our team rituals go deep and broad at the same time. Kraftwerks is a wonderful way to let people nerd out together and build that sense of safety, which is awesome.

Matt: Nerding out together is a perfect way to feel seen. 

Elise: When looking at it from the lens of Experience Design, the power of Kraftwerks is that it’s a meeting that elevates game design to what it is for Play Lab—a craft.

Not to get too meta, but these moments are all signals from leadership, too. The way we show what we value is demonstrated by how we spend our time. By making space for activities like Kraftwerks, we demonstrate that Play Lab really cares about craft.

Matt: Because if you’re not spending time thinking about craft, like, where else will we really develop our play perspective? And it’s a great way to foster this bonding you mentioned.
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How Play Lab’s weekly team meeting sparks crossover connections

Matt: Maybe you can talk a bit about how you’ve helped build bridges between members of our team.

Elise: We joke that the structure of Play Lab is like a fried egg. The yolk is our toy-invention offering, where we design toys, pitch them, and sell them to major toy companies and distributors. That’s where we learn a lot about play principles and youth insights, and we playtest extensively. And then there’s our consulting practice—the egg white, if you will—where we really apply the craft of play through Game Design and Experience Design, as you’ve been saying.  

Every Monday, we bring the entire team—both the toy-invention and consulting sides—together for our Monday Catch-Up.

That structure might seem pretty standard, but our principles make it special. We always begin with a game or creative warm-up to play together, which, especially for us in Play Lab, means quite literally practicing what we preach. We then move into business updates and shoutouts, then close with shared gratitude for each other. A core piece of this ritual to me is that other people are talking way more than I am, even though I’m the host of the gathering. I’m there to set up the potluck and tee other people up to talk about a toy concept they’re tinkering with, or to go really deep on a project they just wrapped and share how that went and what they learned.

👆 Actual footage from our weekly Catch-Up where the team playtested a party game!

For example, a designer might share a warm-up they led for a client meeting that included role-playing elements of Dungeons and Dragons. And that might spark ideas for our toy inventors, who are constantly thinking about game design and creating new products. 

By elevating people equally across both sides of the team and ensuring we mix speakers by levels, tenures, and disciplines, the meeting becomes a bridging moment. 

Matt: It’s so fun how that builds an identity of the team as a whole. We practice play together, learn from each other, and then return to our own worlds, inspired by what we’ve seen.

Another example of an experiment that really paid off for us: We held an in-person team-building week. We had just brought on several new designers, and we wanted everyone to get excited about the work we’re doing and to understand what each person was bringing to the team.
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Using novelty to learn about your coworker’s hidden opera talent

Matt: And we did an exercise during that week called PechaKucha. Do you know what PechaKucha is? 

Elise: I think I do, but explain it to me again. 

Matt: Okay. PechaKucha is a Japanese term meaning “chit-chat” or “chatter,” and it’s structured as a fast-paced PowerPoint share. Does that sound horrible? It probably does. But no, it’s not! It’s brilliant. Legend has it that it was designed by two Tokyo architects who wanted their students to give more dynamic presentations. They developed a systematic set of rules for how a presentation can free people from the long-text-reading-from-your-notes style, which most people find boring and unengaging.

The rules are to create a slideshow in Google Slides, PowerPoint, or whatever. You have a set number of slides and a set amount of time for each slide. This could be five slides for one minute each. Or 20 slides each for 20 seconds. Up to you.

The second thing is, you’re not allowed to read off paper or read directly from the text on the slides. It forces you to speak authentically. You have an idea of what you want to discuss, and you’re using the images to guide your approach, which forces you to consider your audience and makes the presentation feel more natural.

So does that sound like the worst thing you’ve ever done? 

Elise: No, no—that actually sounds fun. I’m in.

Matt: Well, public speaking isn’t everyone’s favorite thing. I think it’s the world’s number one fear or something. So this needs to be built by a team that trusts one another, where people feel comfortable.

I bring this up because, in a team exercise we did almost two years ago, we each had the opportunity to discuss any topic we wanted. To this day, we still talk about what we learned from each other and how everyone showed up differently. Some people were very visual. I’m a terrible visual designer. My slides looked like a hilarious PowerPoint or a 1990s Photoshop job. Like, they were terribly made. But what I like to do is have fun with that and make little jokes. 

Others focused on a small part of their identity. Kezie did a whole PechaKucha on Irish slang. We were all laughing and sharing, and now we have these like phrases that she taught us from Irish slang.

We still remember that share. PechaKucha was a way for us to show our specialness, our uniqueness, something that mattered to us. And then you’re just appreciating other people’s passions, interests, and style, and all those things made us feel like, “I can’t wait to work with this person.”

I even use PechaKucha outside of Play Lab internal stuff. I teach comedy at Second City and DePaul University, and I have my students present their own PechaKuchas in character to try out the characters they’re developing.

Like, I love this thing. Have I sold you? 

Elise: I’m sold. And I think that to your point earlier about novelty—I remember a colleague once talking to me about having just reinvented some kind of meeting structure, and it was like six weeks after they introduced the new format. He started to notice a decline in excitement, engagement, and attendance. He was like, “I feel like people only really like a thing when it’s new!” And I agreed, and we sort of lamented over it for a moment, but then we realized: That’s true. And it’s not a bad thing. It’s actually an interesting constraint.

I think for us all—as culture makers, as leaders, as Experience Designers within our workplaces or, you know, in the world, we should think of novelty as a requirement for ritual design. Which is what makes the PechaKucha format so interesting. It takes something that could be very boring and adds structure to it to make it novel.

Matt: On the flip side, Game Design Kraftwerks is a repeatable ritual, so we know what to expect. Part of the benefit is its familiarity. We know what to expect, and we kind of get excited. The same goes for our Weekly Play Lab Catch-Up; we look forward to it every week.

PechaKucha was a one-time experiment, not intended to be repeated weekly or monthly. We did it once. It stood out and was very memorable. 

Maybe it’s a balance of things that become ritualized and things that become spontaneous, like the “see what happens” kind of thing.
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Follow the excitement to keep your workplace rituals fresh

Elise: Yes! And that spontaneity reminds me of another ritual we just began. A project team was working on a gaming project and had a weekly meeting to play games together. Y’know, keep the brains warm and silly. When they shared that with the rest of the Play Lab team, everyone loved it. We’ve since added that as a Play Lab-wide team ritual twice a month. It has the effect of practicing what we preach—by playing games, sure—but also by experimenting with something new and following the heat of excitement.

Identifying that heat is important in my role. It’s also very basic at the same time, because it’s actually just about listening to the things people are saying and then supporting that with structure, consistency, and reflecting back what I’m hearing from others, versus applying what I think might be best, which might be different or might be the same.

👆 Celebrating the release of Barbie and a movie cameo of a Play Lab invention (the Chelsea treehouse)!

Matt: It's a blast. We’ve talked a lot today about the internal initiatives we create to help our teams feel creative and powerful, and the benefits. But these techniques have been applied to project work with great success over the years, too, helping clients feel like they’re breaking out of their ruts, their status quo.

You know, people get very used to doing business in a certain kind of way, and it’s led to a certain kind of success. But they also know that if they keep doing things the same way, over and over again, they risk falling behind. They run the risk of burnout.

We do a lot of work with game companies and toy companies, but the bulk of our consulting work is done across industries that don’t seem to have anything to do with play overtly. In those cases, we help them think in new, creative ways about their challenge. We help teams who are doing really important work, like on climate change, or sustainability, or corporate culture behavior and equity—things that really matter—and help them create moments of feeling seen and connected to other people who care about what they’re doing in a playful way, which lowers the barriers of stress and enables innovation. All these great benefits.

All of what we’re talking about today may sound like: Okay, you know, fun people are doing fun things. But it’s always in service of the work that we’re doing to help clients who are tackling these very, very important, awesome, worthy things do their jobs a little bit better, too. 

To our readers: If any of this sounds intriguing and you would like to hear more, please reach out to us at helloplaylab@ideo.com.

We love to have conversations about this kind of stuff. We’d love to help you think through how to build these rituals and processes into your problem-solving across your teams. Thanks, Elise. 

Elise: Thank you, Matt. Keep it playful!

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