Serious play

Dave Rupert posted Play at work. The text is not about having a table soccer in the office and spending time playing during office hours. It´s about cultivating a habit of serious play at work – enjoying what you do, understanding the materials you handle, finding solutions that best serve your users, exploring the tools you have, and fostering meaningful and responsible team interactions. Ultimately, it’s about growing individually and as a team.

I fully agree with the idea of serious play.

One practice that has served me well in my working life is the rapid exchange of ideas between designer and developer throughout the entire product creation cycle. Dave refers to this as The Hot Potato Process, although the name might be misleading. Passing a hot potato implies wanting to get rid of it because it´s hot. In contrast, I want to hold onto it, enjoy handling and playing with it, then pass it to someone else for enrichment before getting it back. A better metaphor might be soccer – passing the ball back and forth with teammates, enjoying the interaction while moving towards a common goal. This is the essence of serious play.

Designing and developing should not follow a waterfall process, where a designer finalizes a design in one pass and the developer merely builds it.

The currently popular tool, Figma, tends to push development teams into the waterfall direction, which is why I avoid Figma in web development projects. Instead, I prefer to work with the materials at hand, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (TypeScript). This avoids design handoffs and allows us to stay true to the materials.

Agile methodology can be seen as an interpretation of serious play – collaboratively working in short feedback cycles to learn and improve.

The first value of the agile manifesto states:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Agile teams are encouraged to actively evolve their working methods. Viewing it this way, a team role like Scrum Master can sometimes be an impediment, hindering team evolution, because the master is directing the team. I’m not saying Scrum is flawed or not agile. Scrum is agile and can work, but practicing it rigidly without real connection and understanding leads to “theater communication.” Teams then protect themselves against corporate nonsense, resulting in faux-agile – rituals without values, essentially waterfall with standups. Industries profit from agile certifications and frameworks that disguise waterfall processes with new terminology.

Martin Fowler is addressing this in his talk The State of Agile Software in 2018:

• Eliminate the agile industrial complex and stop imposing agile processes on teams.
• Raise the importance of technical excellence.
• Organize around products, not projects.

Martin isn’t advocating for abandoning agile but for practicing it as it was intended.

It’s unfortunate that agile has been co-opted by corporations emphasizing processes over individuals and interactions, but perhaps this was inevitable. Once agile gained popularity, money-making opportunities emerged, and many jumped on the bandwagon. The same managers who once dismissed agile as “Kindergarten software development” began to adopt it to keep up with other corporations marketing their agile processes.

If you find yourself in a context where agile is used to exert power over developers, squeezing more features from the team, I sympathize and hope you find a way to change. However, this misuse doesn’t invalidate agile values. Agile is serious play, and striving for this way of working is worthwhile – you don’t need to call it agile, and it probably won’t help to name it serious play either. Instead, focus on building something beautiful and meaningful together with your colleagues.

Dave concludes with Maybe we need more play at work. This is not a question to me. In software development, it´s the way forward.