As we have seen, play can revolutionize market research, help to understand customer needs and identify what will create value. Your transformation strategy must have solid mechanism to involve your people and engages them to create value for your customers.

Now, you should reflect on ideas that you found interesting, and suggest your team members this book & reflect on these ideas to get triggers for generating more insights to solve business problems. Later on, you can brainstorm with your team, use post-it notes to prioritize the ideas and identify the next steps to develop a proof of concept.

Remember: “one size doesn’t fit all”; the play must be personalized based on different cultures or different personalities. There are various challenges faced by organizations and implementing a playful approach requires careful thought as your senior members who see themselves as professionals, may feel that the play is suitable for kids, not for them. It is essential to identify the issues or challenges we are trying to fix and identify the financial benefits before implementing any of such initiatives. 

Many people believe that digital transformation is about disruption. It can be both incremental innovation and radical innovation. Incremental is about adding value to existing services or continuously improving the process; so, if you are using a small play element to bring change, you are contributing to digital transformation vision.

While traditional approaches to improving one thing at a time, and then moving to the next initiative may sound sensible, they do not work well. Rather than going through isolated initiatives, setting up a digital playground is the step towards improving the chances of generating value across various functions for well-managed, enterprise-wide transformation programs. Does your organization have a digital playground that integrates all the ‘playful experiences’ to transform and grow the business? Designing the right playful experiences is hard, and it comes with practice; one needs to spend enough time in playtesting those ideas.

According to IDC, direct Digital Transformation investment is going to be around $7.4 Trillion Between 2020 and 2023.[i] And now, some organizations have already started understanding the importance of using play to make those spending fruitful. The trend of hiring a chief engagement officer for building a strong engagement strategy for both employee-facing and customer-facing roles has also started. It is worth it for an organization to create a new position whether you call it ‘Chief Play Officer’ or ‘Chief Engagement Officer’ – who can look at the transformation from new perspectives, bring fun & excitement to get the desired business outcome. Digital playground (or you may want to call it a transformational playground) can surely bring “Aha!” Moments to your Digital Transformation.


[i] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45617519