21 Feb Happiness at work
We’ve often written about how to apply the principles of positive psychology in the workplace and in fact much of our work here at The Happiness Institute, and our Executive Coaching & Consulting division Positive Leadership Development, is within organisations and/or with teams.
So when Prof. Sharp stumbled upon this interesting article he thought it would be of relevance to many of you…
…now although it’s primarily focused on design there’s no doubt the principes should be given serious consideration by everyone so we’ll give you a short sample below, then a link to the full story, and then we encourage you to think about how you could put this into practice in your own office.
Cultural Values that will Make your Office an Ideas Factory
In the first part of this series, I wrote about some immediate tactics you can take to encourage more design synthesis in your ethnographic research work — to help your teams make sense of chaotic and often incomplete or conflicting research data. In this next part, I’ll offer some suggestions and recommendations on changing the culture of your company to embrace the types of thinking that occur during synthesis. Arguably, this is a harder — but much more important — part of exposing the magic of design.
Building a Playful Culture
It_ã_s unfortunate; when people speak about a playful office environment, they often describe Nerf darts, beanbag chairs, and funny hats. This stereotype, reinforced by lavish dot-com and web 2.0 spending, comes from poor consulting cultures that positioned juvenile behavior as necessary for those coming up with new and novel ideas. This only serves to reinforce the view of designer as magician — that somehow, while playing hours of foosball or XBox, designers are busy dreaming up the next Twitter, Apple, or Nike.
In fact, playfulness in culture can be designed, and it doesn’t require any Nerf toys at all. But it requires some top-down qualities that will challenge traditional corporations and financially-strapped agencies. To be playful, an organization needs to embrace dynamic constraints, provide a runway to explore deviant ideas, and support and encourage flow.
…If you’re enjoying this then keep reading HERE
And if you have any thoughts or comments you’d like to share on this topic then please do so on our Facebook Page.