How do we strengthen the structural fiber of our teams?
That's what I was tasked with as I landed at LaGuardia, prepared for the drive out to Long Island to run a game day for a corporate supplier.
I'd met the president of the company the month prior at Dungeon Master University, where we bonded over our shared love of games. But something else came up in that conversation. He was being kept up at night by the cultural divide between his warehouse and office workers, two groups of people working in the same building who had somehow never found their way into the same world.
Then someone put a note in the suggestion box that stopped leadership cold: "No empathy."
Which was the confusing part, because this wasn't a company cutting corners on its people. They had profit sharing, a generous benefits plan, and by every measurable standard they were doing the right things. And yet somehow, none of that had bridged the gap between the people who worked in the warehouse and the people who worked in the office.
I shared how games can help build or mend the cultural fabric of a company, and a few weeks later I was on the Long Island Expressway, crawling through Queens, headed east.
The company had launched an initiative this year called Better Together, and I was there to help make good on that name with 32 employees and a full day together.
We didn't do a town hall, or trust falls, or pull out a PowerPoint deck on company values. We already know that stuff has very limited value.
You can't talk people into feeling connected to each other, and handing them a slide deck that explains why connection matters doesn't get you any closer to actually having it.
Instead, we played games, which from the outside just looked like fun.
We deliberately split people up so they couldn't just gravitate toward their usual crew and designed experiences that put them in the room, really in the room, with people they'd never actually talked to, not as job titles but as full human beings.
Together they had to figure out how to land a plane without crashing it. That was Sky Team, a cooperative game that requires you to communicate under pressure and trust the person next to you completely.
Then Dixit, which surfaces something quietly profound: we all interpret the same information differently, and most of us are quietly convinced we're the one seeing it clearly.
And Telestrations, which shows how a message can get completely scrambled between sender and receiver through no fault of either one, because culture, generation, and life experience all shape how we hear things in ways we rarely stop to consider.
By mid-afternoon you could see it in how people were moving through the room, the easy back and forth between people who had probably never exchanged more than a nod in the hallway.
We wrapped up around 3, said our goodbyes, and I got back in the car for the drive to LaGuardia feeling like the day had done what it was supposed to do.
The next morning I had an email from the president who had been taking a survey of how the day went.
"Something has changed. If 30 people here saw just two coworkers more fully as humans today, that's 60 new stitches in the fabric of this company."
I've been thinking about that line ever since. Not because it was a nice thing to say, but because he was right about what it means structurally.
Culture isn't one big thing you fix with an announcement or a vision statement. It's hundreds of small connections between individual people, built up over time, that either hold the organization together or quietly let it pull apart.
Real culture change comes from creating new experiences that actually replace the old ones.
People have to do something different together before they start being different together. Play creates those moments on purpose.