I spent three days at Duke recently at the Serious Play Conference, in rooms full of researchers, educators, and therapists studying what play does to people.

One of the most interesting topics tackled was how play can change behavior and cultural norms. So let’s dig into it and what that means for businesses that want to build (and maintain) a freaking awesome culture.

In 1948, researchers began tracking the health of about 5,000 people in Framingham, Massachusetts, and kept tracking them through three generations.

They were studying heart disease, and the common factors that led to it. Because they'd tracked the same community for decades, researchers could map who was connected to whom and then watch what traveled through those connections.

The results of this groundbreaking project have had ripples into understanding smoking, obesity, and even happiness.

What researchers found is that our behaviors are not solely personal choices. The people around us turn out to be a strong predictor of what we do, from whether we quit smoking to whether we describe ourselves as happy. All of it moves in clusters of friends.

Changes in behavior don't spread solely through information. And habits don’t form solely because an authority figure (or influencer) said it.

Behavior change actually spreads through your friends and communities.

What does this have to do with work?

Keep reading…

Right now we're in one of the biggest shifts in how work is done in the last thirty years. AI is changing how the work gets done, and remote and hybrid schedules changed how we connect.

While AI can help us work more efficiently, what your competitors cannot copy is the judgment, curiosity, taste, and creativity of the people you've hired.

But in order to take advantage of that human edge, you need a high-trust culture where people are willing to speak up, share opinions, have hard conversations, and hold one another accountable.

Leaders can signal the culture they want, much like the influencers in the Framingham research.

But setting the tone and spreading the behavior are two different jobs. The connective tissue between your people is the delivery system to build that high-trust culture.

So if you want a team that leverages its human edge, innovates faster, and moves well in concert, what's the first thing you need to do?

(Hint: It isn't another PowerPoint on having hard conversations.)

Remember what the Framingham data showed. Behavior travels through clusters of friendships, so you have to create an environment where those clusters can form. Which means helping people become genuine friends, not just colleagues who share a Slack channel.

That sounds soft until you look at the research on how friendships actually form. Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas measured it, and found it takes about 50 hours together to become casual friends, 90 to become friends, and over 200 to become close friends. But the hours are not interchangeable.

What moves people toward friendship is play. Hall found the hours that counted were the ones spent hanging out, joking around, and playing games. Joking around was one of the two strongest predictors of a friendship forming. Small talk did almost nothing, and time spent working side by side barely moved the needle at all.

Which puts most companies in a bind. You can't send people off to become friends, and you can't wait fifty hours for it to happen on its own. What you can do is design the hours so they count.

That's what we do at Once Upon a Roll. We put teams around a table and give them something to solve together that has nothing to do with quarterly targets.

People joke, negotiate, make questionable decisions, and laugh at each other's terrible ideas. It's the exact kind of time Hall's research points to, compressed and pointed at the people they actually work with.

Two hours of purposeful play builds trust that a year of meetings never produced. It isn't a break from the work. It's the practice field for it.

Those moments used to happen on their own.

Then we went hybrid, and there's no hallway to run into anyone in. Then we started asking AI the questions we used to ask each other, and the last of the small exchanges went with it.

The serendipity isn't coming back on its own. If you want to build high-trust teams, you have to do it on purpose.

Ready to build that on your team? The Make the Case Kit walks through what purposeful play looks like inside a company and gives you what you need to pitch it internally. Download the Make the Case Kit

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