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    Playing

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    💭 I have a favourite trick question in my trainings: “what do you call people whose job it is to conduct experiments all day?” The obvious answer might be “scientists”, but I’m going for… did you guess it … children.

    You know, what we call playing is nothing but a continuous stream of experiments they conduct. They build a model of the world as they understand it, and then they run that model and observe.

    And, being followers of the scientific method, they form hypotheses beforehand. This has been observed in infants as little as a few months of age, who fixate surprising situations much longer than situations whose outcome is as they predicted.

    It has been shown that exercising a new skill (“playing”) will make the learning effect far, far stronger any other kind of information intake.

    So, why don’t we grownups play constantly?

    I don’t know, but I know one thing: playing should be a thing taken utterly seriously.

    My favourite training of all times is a business simulation (created by Jan Schilt and Paul Wilkinson) aligned with the story of the well-known DevOps book Phoenix Project.

    The explosion of knowledge in the participants, and their massive growth as a team after a single day is amazing. It could not be achieved in a conventional classroom in weeks!

    (Photo by Matthew Bowden from FreeImages)