ï»ż00:00 - Why we lose our freedom to play as adults
Brad Eather: Hello and welcome to the Selling is Creative podcast, a show exploring creativity's role in sales and business. I'm your host, Brad Eather, a digital communication sales strategist helping established businesses and sales teams sell on social.
Now, I'm sure we can all agree that being a kid was fun. We've all got memories of taking off and building dirt jumps, role-playing characters with our favorite dolls, or simply making up a silly game with whatever materials we could find around us. But as we get older and grow into adults, many of us would argue that life gets subjectively less fun. Well, my next guest would argue that this doesn't have to be the caseâthat play as an adult is actually central to building stronger workplace communities, problem-solving, learning, and leadership. So if having more fun sounds like your jam, please welcome to the show the Chief Play Officer at Lead With Play, Erin Faehrmann. Welcome.
Erin Faehrmann: Hi! Thank you. It is so great to be here, Brad.
01:11 - What is a Chief Play Officer in business?
Brad Eather: I'm glad you could join us. Erin, just to put this conversation into perspective for the audience, your day-to-day expertise is essentially around business change management, is that right?
Erin Faehrmann: Yeah, that's my day job these days.
Brad Eather: With respect to play, I'm sure there are a lot of people thinking, What exactly is a Chief Play Officer? Could you give us a little insight into what your role entails?
Erin Faehrmann: Sure. Lead With Play is my social enterprise. It employs exactly one person: me. It's just me, my cats, and my husband when I rope him in. Prior to my current day job and running this social enterprise as part of a portfolio career, I was the Chief Executive Officer of a national youth non-profit.
You inherit corporate titles when you go to existing organizations; you apply for a job and they hand you a title. But when you start your own company, you can call yourself whatever you like. So, I went from being a Chief Executive to a Chief Play Officer. When I started this enterprise to help adultsâformer kidsâbring more playback into their families, workplaces, and communities, I wanted to truly live and breathe it. What better way to do that than to call yourself a Chief Play Officer? It is essentially just a CEO role, but it sounds cooler, and there are actually heaps of us around the world.
Running this enterprise means I work with adults in lots of different contexts, helping them explore how play can bring them back to themselves, back to more creative thinking, and back to genuine connection and psychological safety. It gets people to a point where everyone is getting real. We aren't just being superficially "too nice" to each other; we are increasing the heat to solve complex problems and navigate difficult conversations. Play is exceptionally great at helping with all of those things.
For anyone who knows what business change management is, I often paraphrase it by saying I just help adults process their big feelings about what is changing. A lot is changing in our worlds all the time. My job is to help folks move through that change in a way that helps the organization achieve business outcomes while ensuring we don't cause human damage along the way. A massive part of that is managing emotional reactions and talking through what the future is going to look like. I am lucky that in my day job, I get to use a lot of playful methods to achieve that.
03:39 - How to introduce play in the workplace gently
Brad Eather: Why do you think we as adults feel like we constantly need to ask for permission just to have fun and play?
Erin Faehrmann: It is simply designed right out of us. Think back to childhood. While it is a very mixed experience for a lot of folks, most of us experienced high levels of freedom and autonomy regarding where we sat and how we behaved. You could hang upside down on the couch or swing from a tree. Then you go to school, and suddenly you have to sit rigidly at desks. I live right near a school, and every time I hear the lunch bell ring, it triggers me. I think, Ah, time to eat!.
As adults, we technically have the freedom to choose these things, just like we did before we entered the school system. But over time, all of that choice and autonomy gets designed out of us. You are handed a school uniform so you can't dress how you want, you are restricted from speaking up when you want, and you are told to "be nice" to people before you even know how to process social interactions as a kid. As we grow older, we unlearn the habit of play during the major part of our day.
We then have to figure out how to be different when we leave the institution; we get to be our "real selves" outside, which directly translates into how we handle work. When we are at the office, we wear a specific "work self" mask. When we leave, we try to reconstruct our personal identity. I call it context switching or personality switchingâthe psychological whiplash of thinking, Woohoo, I'm out of work, now I can go be who I want!. Often, we don't even realize we are fitting into institutional molds so deeply that we fail to switch back. We just stay stuck in that rigid mindset, thinking, Well, I guess this is just me now.
I do a lot of crowdsourced research into workplace celebrationsâlooking at corporate settings where leaders tried to introduce play and it completely tanked, as well as environments where it went beautifully. When I ask why we don't play more at work, what I hear fairly consistently is that there is an entrenched belief that professionalism and human emotions do not mix. The assumption is that it is unprofessional to show raw emotion. People assume professionalism means never openly challenging ideas, never laughing loudly in the office, and never wearing unique clothes. Across many legacy industries, we learn that professionalism and play are oil and water. My core work is to re-blend them so professionals aren't wasting immense daily energy on personality switching, and to bring more of our authentic selves to the everyday.
06:09 - Reclaiming adult freedom and autonomy at work
Brad Eather: You've touched on the critical freedom to be yourself in the workplace, which boils down to organizational culture. You gave me a few resources to look over before we jumped on the call...
Erin Faehrmann: Did I give you homework?
Brad Eather: You did! And what I learned about integrating play into the workplace was centered around four core pillars: leadership, motivation, collaboration, and resilience. All of those directly dictate a positive workplace culture. What advice would you give to corporate leaders who are perhaps hesitant to introduce play and that level of freedom into their organizations?
Erin Faehrmann: Ground yourself in the fundamental why. You are doing this to help your people show up authentically and have completely honest conversations so you can extract the best outcomes from the most people. If you are deeply anchored in that purpose, play simply becomes the vehicle to get you there.
A lot of facilitators in the professional play space focus almost exclusively on the mechanics of the play itself. I focus heavily on the underlying business goal. Leaders will approach me and say, "Erin, we want you to come in and run a Lego workshop." I tell them, "I absolutely can, but why? What commercial outcome are you trying to achieve?" If you just want your people to play with Lego at lunchtime, I can just mail you the bricks; it's fun, and they can just mess around with it.
What I much prefer to deliver is purposeful playâlet's solve a real business challenge while changing the format of how you execute normal work. Leaders must identify the cultural target. Is it to build cross-functional connection and psychological safety in your teams? Is it to flesh out highly creative strategic ideas? Or is it to ensure people feel safe speaking up honestly when times are commercially tough? Once you isolate the why, then you can select the correct play modalities, games, and diagnostic tools.
If you don't know your objective, it becomes just like any generic corporate culture initiative. You see another company doing yoga, so you roll out yoga; Google buys beanbags, so you buy beanbags. You end up having no idea if your financial investment is actually achieving a cultural return. Yoga and beanbags are only useful if your explicit goal aligns with what yoga and beanbags actually deliver. My core advice to leaders is to get crystal clear on what you are trying to transform in your culture first, and then build the interventions that will take you there. There is a million things we can try.
09:48 - The 8 adult play styles in business explained
Brad Eather: From a sales perspective, that diagnostic approach is identical to identifying a customer's core problem. B2B salespeople looking to adopt a collaborative selling methodology could deploy these exact exercises to uncover mutual outcomes for clients in a more engaging way. Another element regarding leadership that I found fascinating was the concept that every individual possesses a distinct adult play style. Could you talk us through these play styles and explain what they teach leaders about managing teams?
Erin Faehrmann: Leaders will often come to me looking for a generic team-building activity because an internal culture pulse survey indicated team energy is at an all-time low and stress is at an all-time high. That is a concrete problem to work toward. Great leaders ask, "What do I practically do with that data?" I usually start by introducing the eight adult play styles.
These styles were originally frameworked by Dr. Stuart Brown in his book Play. A practitioner named Louise adapted his research into a brilliant online personality profiling quiz with around ten simple questions that instantly pop out your dominant play style. Like any corporate personality profiling tool, you should take it with a grain of saltâdon't go getting the result tattooed on your foreheadâbut it serves to remind leaders that not everyone on your team is wired the same way.
Crucially, fun is not fun if it's not fun for the person experiencing it. I never promise a corporate room that they are going to have fun. I say, "I am going to invite you to play. It might be fun, it is definitely going to help us work toward a business outcome, and it will be highly memorableâI can guarantee that. But you actually might not have fun, because choosing professional growth is often uncomfortable."
The play styles exist to remind leaders that preferences for bonding vary wildly. Often, well-meaning leaders will continually enforce generic "forced fun" activities like Pizza Fridays or an Amazing Race adventure game. Then employees call in sick to avoid them, people don't turn up, and the environment gets incredibly cliquey. The same six highly extroverted people have a blast, while everyone else rolls their eyes and hates it. That isn't an inclusive team building situation; you are just reinforcing existing workplace silos.
To counter this, we map out the team's play styles on a visual poster containing the eight profiles to see what we are working with. For example, do we have Competitors or Directors?
* The Competitor: Competition is a legitimate play style. Some people thrive on competing against others or beating their own personal metrics. They absolutely love the Amazing Race style challenges. Personally, I don't have a competitive bone in my body, despite having played competitive sports in the past.
* The Explorer: I am an Explorer. Explorers love to meet new people, discover fresh frameworks, and listen to diverse insightsâwhich is why I listen to your podcast, even though we operate in different industries. I am driven by deep curiosity.
* The Creator: These are your artsy, crafty individuals who love to physically build, design, and make things.
* The Kinesthete: These people need to physically move their bodies. Sticking a Kinesthete in a dark room for a corporate movie night is psychological torture; they will be fidgeting within five minutes. They want to go for a strategy hike, run around, and actively move to process thoughts.
* The Director: Directors find it genuinely fun to organize, orchestrate, and plan logistics.
If you have a dominant Director on your team, they are the exact person who should be planning your team culture days, because it is inherently fun for them. Hand them the team's play styles profile and say, "We have an upcoming agile sprint or an annual sales huddle. I want you to design the day's flow, ensuring you hit the play preferences of everyone on the chart." Let that person run with it, because they will have a brilliant time executing it.
15:09 - Unlocking everyday creativity beyond artistic skills
Brad Eather: A core question I ask every guest on this podcast is what it means to be creative. Breaking down these play styles, I am discovering that creativity manifest differently for everyone. The legacy assumption is that only the "Creator" or the traditional artist is truly creative. I want this show to challenge that stereotype and prove that creativity exists in smaller, highly practical waysâwhether it's the Director's ability to orchestrate people, or the Explorer's ability to research disparate concepts and thread them together to solve a problem. There are direct parallels between these play styles and how people choose to apply creative thinking.
Erin Faehrmann: Absolutely. Many of the most successful salespeople I know are dominant Explorers. They are constantly exploring how a customer's complex needs can be met by stitching together different product and service combinations. They want to map out what is hard for the client, what is working, and where the client's business is headed. It is deeply fun for an Explorer to uncover those details and solve the creative problem of how to support that trajectory. They creatively engineer the price point and the partnership terms.
In my change management consulting, I am essentially selling abstract visions of the future or solutions to organizational problems that leaders might not even realize they have yet. I have to look at a team and say, "I know you feel completely comfortable where you are right now because you understand your legacy systems, but for macro reasons we must pivot." You are selling a future state to people who are actively resisting and saying, "But I don't want to change; I want to stay exactly where I am."
17:55 - Helping teams process big feelings during organizational change
Brad Eather: Progress can be incredibly uncomfortable, so putting yourself in a position to improve naturally introduces friction. I love the strategy of bringing play into that environment. If an organization has been executing the same workflow for a long time and it has stopped working, aligning a large group of people to march in a new direction is highly challenging.
I've been in corporations where the word "change" was simply a euphemism for mass redundancies. Having a facilitator step in to guide, inspire, and encourage people toward a shared goal brings the entire workforce along for the ride, allowing you to leverage internal resources rather than paralyzing everyone with the fear of layoffs.
Erin Faehrmann: In change management, we cannot act as false prophets; we have to be entirely real with people. There is a widely used framework called the ADKAR model, which emphasizes that collective organizational change is purely the mathematical result of concurrent individual changes.
Let's address that exact corporate scenario. Sometimes strategic shifts do result in structural redundancies, and employees know it. They might not know the exact details yetâthey are sitting there wondering, Is it going to be me, or is it going to be Brad? One of us is going to get cut. That triggers a massive, completely valid emotional response.
The change we are helping inspire must focus on the individual. The organization has determined it must move forward to survive, and it will end up with fewer roles at the end of the day. You cannot ask an employee to enthusiastically support a corporate restructure by saying, "Hey, I'm really glad the company is operating more efficiently, even though I've been thrown out of a job!" That is an impossible ask.
What you can do is ask them: "What does this transition mean for you personally? If your long-term future isn't inside this specific department, where is it? How can we use this pivot as an absolute catalyst for you to upskill, reskill, and pursue fresh paths elsewhere? Where is the personal opportunity for you within this macro disruption?" The disruption is happening to them regardless, so the creative play lies in opening up their peripheral vision to alternative options.
19:12 - Building resilience through business simulations
Erin Faehrmann: Whether an employee stays or leaves, the corporate landscape will be entirely different. If they stay, they might be upgrading to a new system, moving locations, or combining business units. There are hidden opportunities embedded in all of those changes, just as there are downsides, and you have to learn to live with both.
Brad Eather: We're talking about building resilience. How does play practically influence an individual employee's capacity to adapt to massive change, like a large corporate merger?
Erin Faehrmann: Let's look at the animal kingdom. Young mammalsâlion cubs, bear cubs, puppiesâengage in non-stop play because it is the biological mechanism for learning social norms. A cub learns exactly how far he can push his brother before his brother bites him back. They are running low-stakes scenarios and simulations to test environmental boundaries.
Play is a psychologically safe way to experiment with a volatile reality. I can run a workshop where we simulate the upcoming corporate merger and acquisition. We play out exactly what the toughest scenarios look like, but we also deliberately open doors to explore the hidden upsides. Because we are running a simulation, nobody is under the pressure of having to make a binding sign-off at the end of the hour. It isn't a high-stress decision-making meeting; it is an open exploration conversation designed to map the boundaries, view the landscape from different angles, and hear diverse peer perspectives.
Often, employees step out of those playful sessions thinking, Okay, that big, awful corporate threat was openly acknowledgedâit's still thereâbut we've also mapped out 20 potentially brilliant opportunities that I hadn't even considered because I was completely blinded by fear.
Compare that to a traditional corporate consultation meeting where management reads a list of bullet points and demands immediate sign-off. In a play workshop, we intentionally design more freedom and less rigid structure. We aren't writing down their inputs to hold against them later. This process directly builds resilience because the very core concept of resilience is the deeply rooted self-confidence that I will be okay, no matter what environmental disruption comes my way. When you simulate and talk through volatile futures alongside your peers, you dramatically increase your confidence and readiness for whatever lands.
22:02 - Autonomy, mastery, purpose, and employee motivation
Brad Eather: That is a perfect framework for diagnosing a problem and moving an organization forward. Once an organization establishes where the friction lies, the next hurdle is sustainable motivation. How does integrating play contribute to fostering deep intrinsic motivation among employees?
Erin Faehrmann: This directly invokes the seminal work of Dan Pink on human motivation, which outlines three core pillars: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. When an individual human experiences autonomy, mastery, and purpose, they are naturally intrinsically motivated.
This aligns tightly with my past work at the youth non-profit, where we worked with teenagers caught in incredibly volatile, high-risk environments. There was some truly awful stuff happening around these kids. We utilized intense leadership programs to teach them that regardless of the external chaos, you must take absolute control and lead yourself forward in life. You can navigate whatever lands. A massive part of that training was systematically building their autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
If an employee knows exactly what their unique piece of the corporate puzzle is and why it matters, playing the game becomes effortless. But if an employee feels that they could completely skip work today and not a single soul would notice, that is culturally devastating to motivation.
* Mastery centers on skills. It's the feeling of, I am exceptionally good at my job, I am continuously growing, and I am not drowning out of my depth. You are competent and continuously challenged. Play helps build mastery because it allows you to simulate variations of execution. This is precisely why elite sales organizations use role-play scenarios; you are safely building a rep's mastery so that when they are performing live in front of a high-value client, they are completely ready.
* Autonomy is about control. Do I have personal control over how I execute my daily tasks, where I work, what I wear, or whether I work from the office or home? In a sales environment, it's asking: Do I have the localized autonomy to offer a strategic discount to save a customer relationship in the moment, or do I have to get three layers of management to sign off on a basic concession? The more an organization expands localized autonomy, the higher the baseline motivation.
Through my play workshops, I facilitate deep conversations around purpose and team mechanics by asking: Why are you here? What are your unique strengths? What do you explicitly need from your peers when you are not operating at your absolute best?
26:47 - Using parallel play for adults at work to lower stakes
Erin Faehrmann: All of that interaction crystallizes their shared sense of purpose. I frequently run a specialized Lego Serious Play workshop centered around those exact diagnostic questions: What do you need to be at your best at work, and what happens when you aren't? It gives employees a structured canvas to communicate their boundaries and the operational support they require to succeed.
One person might state they need the flexibility to work from home with their dog at their feet on a high-stress day. Another person might say, "I don't care about dogs, but I want the autonomy to turn up late on Wednesday because it's leg day at the gym and my commute takes longer."
At the end of the day, building workplace cultural safety is simply about recognizing that everyone is fundamentally different. If we can hit our key performance indicators while allowing people to show up in a format that lets them be at their best, you will quantifiably get more done. Employees will be infinitely more motivated because they aren't burning massive daily energy trying to squeeze into someone else's rigid mold of how a job should be executed.
Play allows teams to explore these deep operational dynamics in a much safer way than a standard corporate review. If I sit down, look you dead in the eye, and snap, "Right, Brad, what exactly do you need to do your job? List it out for me right now, mate," the stakes feel incredibly high and defensive walls go up immediately. A playful format lowers the stakes, invites natural banter, and makes deep communication effortless.
Brad Eather: You just perfectly role-played what a strict, traditional corporate manager looks like! When employees are hit with blunt questions like that, they often don't even know how to accurately articulate what they are feeling or what they actually need in the moment. If you demand an immediate answer on the spot, they will just throw out a superficial response just to clear the air.
Erin Faehrmann: Exactly, or they will completely crack open emotionally and you'll think, Oh my goodness, what box have I just opened? It swings aggressively between a complete wall of "everything is fine" and a ten-hour deep history of their life.
Brad Eather: Providing the psychological space to safely explore those questions is highly beneficial. Even if an individual takes the time to reflect independently before bringing their needs back to the corporate table, it changes the dynamic completely.
Erin Faehrmann: Yes! It would be wonderful if everyone had immediate clarity on their internal drivers. On my absolute best days, I can articulate my needs perfectly, but on many days, I will just sit there like a stunned rabbit and mutter, "I don't know, everything is fine."
Here is a brilliant tactical hack that a lot of your listeners likely execute without knowing the formal clinical term for it: parallel play. A significant portion of my corporate play design draws directly on the structural principles of parallel playâwhich dictates that communication is infinitely easier when two humans are not staring face-to-face, directly into each other's eyes.
This is precisely why parents find it much easier to have deep, breakthrough conversations with their teenagers while driving a car; you are sitting side-by-side, looking at the road, not locked in intense eye contact. It's why managers use "walk and talk" meetings, and it's why massive business deals are successfully brokered on the golf courseâprofessionals are golfing alongside each other, focusing on an external object.
If you need to have a high-stakes conversation with a colleague, skip the formal boardroom table. Go sit side-by-side on a park bench looking out at a lawn; it will automatically lower defensive guards and skyrocket the psychological safety of the dialogue. Locked video calls on Zoom or Teams force aggressive, non-stop eye contact, which naturally spikes social anxiety. I keep an array of fidget toys on my desk during virtual calls; if someone hits me with a complex question, I drop my gaze, play with the toy, and process my thoughts without feeling pinned by a camera glare.
33:34 - How Lego Serious Play reveals structural interdependencies
Erin Faehrmann: Modalities like Lego Serious Play or nature-based strategy days force people to work alongside each other, which completely neutralizes interpersonal tension. Another framework listeners might know is Liberating Structures, specifically the "1-2-4-All" method, which guarantees everyone has time to actually think.
In a Lego Serious Play session, I allocate two to three minutes of absolute silence for building. I ask a prompt, and the participants physically assemble bricks. You aren't expected to speak or listen to anyone else; you just think with your hands. If a prompt is completely new, you don't have to panicâyou just start clicking bricks together to see what emerges.
Then, we pair up in tiny groups of two to share. It's just Brad and Erin having a low-risk chat, not a performance in front of 50 executives. Gradually, we scale it up to the wider table to capture key thematic insights. You are systematically lowering the risk of personal sharing while building deep trust.
If a leader walks into a stressed room and demands, "Why is everyone so angry today?" they will trigger two highly destructive reactions: either total defensive shutdown or an explosive, adversarial rant that ends with HR. Both outcomes are terrifying for a leader.
36:04 - Ganging up on the problem, not each other
Brad Eather: The themes of autonomy, mastery, and purpose are heavily echoed in elite sports leadership frameworks when managing championship teams. Autonomy and clear structural definition breed deep trust. You have total trust in your specific role, and you have complete trust that the person standing right next to you knows their role inside out. You march in unison because the execution framework is crystal clear.
Sports books document the top 1% of athletic performers, and while we might not always frame everyday business as a top 1% athletic sprint, that structural clarity highlights how we can collaborate infinitely better across corporate divisions. A classic corporate friction point is the alignment between the marketing department and the sales team. What specific play frameworks can facilitate seamless communication and collaboration between these diverse, often warring work units?
Erin Faehrmann: I would immediately bring them back to the core diagnostic why and ask: "Collaboration is a solution to exactly what problem?" Why are you trying to force collaboration in this specific silo? If I am trying to figure out what I want for dinner and my husband steps in to aggressively "collaborate" on the menu, I snap, "No, go away, I am just buying what I want." If an executive leader receives a non-negotiable directive straight from the CEO, they don't want to collaborate on it; they have their marching orders and need to execute.
In the scenario you are framing, collaboration is mandatory because multiple departments must seamlessly interlock to drive commercial success. One human or one single silo cannot win the game alone; you need full field coverage, just like a football team. If the goal is to build ironclad cross-functional trust that each unit is flawlessly executing their piece of the puzzle, we need a visual intervention.
I deploy Lego Serious Play to introduce radical humility into the room. You cannot scale the business by yourself, regardless of how long you've been at the company or how smart you think you are. We must visually demonstrate that every single puzzle piece is required for victory.
I will tell the room, "Brad, build me a physical Lego model that explicitly represents your specific role in the customer acquisition lifecycle." You build your model, and the marketing director builds her model. Then, I issue the real creative challenge: "Now, combine all of your individual models into one singular, unified structure."
Suddenly, the systemic realities reveal themselves. We watch the group struggle to fit the pieces together. I can step in and observe, "Brad, why are you trying to violently stack your sales model right on top of marketing's model? Do you think sales is the sole king of the castle? Look closely at marketing's modelâshe is bringing in top-of-funnel brand strategy that isn't represented anywhere in your bricks. Your models must interlock side-by-side." We physically connect the bricks using chains, gears, and links.
The teams look at the table and receive an immediate visual realization: We are a highly connected, interdependent ecosystem of different skills and roles, and we cannot successfully support the client tower if any piece is fractured. Then, we run live simulations. I physically pull Brad's model out of the structure and ask, "What happens to the customer journey if we completely remove sales execution for a week? Remember last quarter when marketing went on leave and lead flow fell over? Let's pull that brick out and simulate the impact. Let's build a new buffer model to solve that systemic vulnerability."
38:47 - The importance of upstream thinking for leaders
Erin Faehrmann: This immersive simulation forces people to move past purely intellectual data and experience the interdependency spatially and emotionally. In these corporate standoffs, the roadblock is rarely a lack of information; it is a fundamental misalignment of beliefs, often driven by a hero complex or extreme burnout. Sales and marketing know they must interlock, but play is what lets them map out how to execute that synergy safely.
Brad Eather: Exactly. The individual reps frequently don't understand the daily operational realities of the neighboring department. If sales doesn't understand what marketing actually executes, they cannot define the exact data handoffs required to pass leads seamlessly. Instead of a continuous, rapid communication thread moving toward a shared goal, reps sit around twiddling their thumbs and firing off passive-aggressive emails snapping, "As per my previous email, you failed to execute X," simply because they don't comprehend what they were asking for in the first place.
Erin Faehrmann: Spot on. If a corporate client asks me to resolve a conflict between sales and marketing, I diagnose the root friction. Are we solving a process problem where they don't understand how their workflows interlock? Are we solving a tactical problem where they know they need to align but lack the tools? Or are we facing a deep cultural silo problem where they are actively blaming each other, with marketing shouting, "If sales just followed our documentation!" and sales yelling, "If marketing actually understood how the real world works!"
Once I map that friction, I tailor the Lego prompts and coaching questions accordingly. If I am working with engineers or sales professionals, I assume a baseline profile. Sales reps are highly competitive, so I build an explicit element of competition into the day for fun. Engineers love structural optimization, so I hit them with a complex tower-building challenge. For sales teams, I might prompt them to "build a physical model proving why your specific unit is the absolute best, and we will let ChatGPT analyze the models to crown the winner."
You introduce play and healthy competition to create a safe space for the real diagnostic questions: What structural bottlenecks truly grind your gears? How can we realistically execute better as a unified force ? There is a powerful concept in complex adaptive systems thinking that dictates: we must gang up on the problem, never on each other. The moment you hear reps throwing around adversarial blame, they are ganging up on each other rather than attacking the commercial vulnerability or the market opportunity.
In professional sales, you should operate entirely in the opportunity space. But when silos war, teams miss massive opportunity costsâthey fail to capture accounts they easily could have won. Play shifts the culture from defensive preservation to asking, "We are performing okay, but what would it look like to be in the absolute top 1% of our market, and what collaborative leverage do we need to build to get there?" You get the team excited to test bold options.
42:49 - Dopamine dressing and low-risk team building games
Brad Eather: The irony is that because sales teams are driven by intense monthly activity targets, reps are often highly hesitant to engage in a culture or play day. They view a workshop as a day off the phones that will directly dent their commission checks. Sales teams need to get their heads out of the sand and recognize that if the wider organization operates at peak collaborative health, it massively accelerates their localized sales conversion velocity.
Erin Faehrmann: That is a profound reflection, and it invokes a brilliant quote by Desmond Tutu: "There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We must go upstream and find out why they're falling in." This maps directly to the Eisenhower Matrix of urgency versus importance.
A massive amount of sales professionals spend their entire career trapped in the "urgent and important" quadrant. My husband works in IT incident management, so he thrives on that high-adrenaline, urgent firefighting space. Recently, someone offered him a role in long-term project management, and he turned it down instantly, saying, "Project management is important but not urgentâthat's boring to me. I need the live, minute-by-minute fire."
Corporate leaders are trained to handle crisesâwhen the crap hits the fan, it is urgent and important, and you must act. But true strategic leadership requires you to spend the majority of your time in the important, non-urgent quadrant. That means proactively building cross-functional relationships, refining process flows, optimizing upstream systems, and ensuring team integration runs flawlessly. If you manage the upstream indicators perfectly, you prevent the urgent downstream fires from ever happening. If you are constantly trapped firefighting down in incident management, you aren't leading effectively; you are just drowning in the river.
Investing time in an offsite strategy day or a monthly peer coffee alignment is an investment in the important, non-urgent quadrant. You are building relational capital to avoid systemic failures and discover massive collaborative leverage.
It is easy to tell a drowning sales rep to "go upstream," but they are literally gasping for air. It requires a conscious leadership decision to break the frantic tide. In the non-profit sector, we were frequently trying to sweep back the oceanâgive us a thousand dollars, we pull one youth out of the river, but there are six million more drowning. Pulling people out of rivers is vital, but sustainable growth requires game-changing upstream interventions.
Leaders must understand play styles and alignment. Keep your high-adrenaline, transactional sprinters on the phones, deploy your relationship builders to enterprise management, and place a highly collaborative strategist right at the intersection of marketing and sales to orchestrate the information flow. Stop trying to force professionals to operate outside their natural genius zones.
48:49 - Fostering psychological safety in virtual environments
Brad Eather: Let's pivot and put play into real-world context by actively playing a live game right now.
Erin Faehrmann: I love that! The absolute best way to get professionals to understand play is to invite them into it; you have to experience it firsthand. Let's play.
For anyone listening to the audio version, Brad and I are both wearing greyish jumpers today. The difference is that my jumper is covered in bright sparkles. This introduces a simple micro-play strategy anyone can execute individually: dopamine dressing. For some, that means vibrant colors and sparkles, but fundamentally it means wearing whatever makes you feel deeply comfortable, confident, and happy. If that means wearing fun, colorful socks hidden beneath a sharp corporate suit, or wearing Superman boxers to a high-stakes pitch, do it. It is a simple daily way to spark play on your own body.
When building trust relationally, we can run low-stakes games. I have one game designed to build deep mutual connection, and another silly game designed to stretch your lateral creative thinking muscle. Which one do you want to play?
Brad Eather: Let's play the connection game to get to know Erin a bit better.
Erin Faehrmann: Perfect. This game is called Two Things in Common. We will fire questions back and forth rapidly until we uncover exactly two non-obvious things we share. If you want to cheat and sprint through the game, I could ask, "Brad, do you breathe oxygen?" and you say "Yes," and we are halfway done. To do it properly, we ask unique questions. I'll fire first: Brad, have you eaten breakfast today?
Brad Eather: Yes, I have.
Erin Faehrmann: I haven't, so no match. Your turn.
Brad Eather: Erin, have you ever traveled to Iceland?
Erin Faehrmann: No, I haven't! Have you? Amazing. My turn, and I'm going to leverage some past data here: Brad, have you trained with kettlebells in the gym this week?
Brad Eather: Yes, I absolutely have!
Erin Faehrmann: Me too! That is one matching thing in common. Your turn.
Brad Eather: Erin, have you mowed your home lawn yet this week?
Erin Faehrmann: No, I haven't! It is growing like crazy out there, but I haven't touched it. Have you?
Brad Eather: No, I haven't either! So we have our second thing in common.
Erin Faehrmann: Brilliant! Look at that! We both train with kettlebells and we are both neglecting our lawns this week.
You can deploy that rapid game in a massive corporate conference room, and the room's energy instantly spikes. It breaks the ice completely.
Brad Eather: I've been to countless corporate events where the facilitator drones, "Turn to the person next to you and introduce yourself," and it falls completely flat. This tit-for-tat format is infinitely better because it forces immediate, active engagement.
Erin Faehrmann: Yes. In a non-podcast conference setting, the game naturally sparks deeper organic conversations. The moment you mentioned Iceland, we would ordinarily pause to unpack your travel highlights, or laugh about our messy gardens. It maps a path to mutual connection.
Let's look at the mechanics of virtual parallel play. In the mammal world, a puppy initiates play by executing a "play bow"âdropping its front paws and wagging its tail. In the adult human world, our universal play bow is simple eye contact. If I am running a large sales meeting with 30 or 40 people, I will say, "I am inviting you all to play a quick game. Participation is completely optional. If you want to play, look around the room and make active eye contact with a peer. If you don't want to participate, simply look down at your phone, pretend you are checking an urgent message, and opt out."
I never, ever force people to have fun, because forced corporate fun is an absolute nightmare. If you are running an immersive 40-minute Lego Serious Play session and a few people refuse to engage, it feels incredibly creepy to have them just sitting there silently watching everyone else build. I will tell them out front, "If you don't want to participate today, you have the full autonomy to leave the room, go clear your inbox, and handle your calls. It is much better for the room's dynamic if you aren't here.". That respects their autonomy. Trapping someone in a workshop against their will completely kills motivation for them and everyone sitting at their table.
Brad Eather: I've seen a brilliant variation deployed during large 50-person video calls called the Agree or Disagree game. Everyone keeps their cameras on but completely covers the lens with their hand. The facilitator asks a polarizing question, like: "Erin, do you think this is the absolute best podcast you've ever been on?" If you agree, you whip your hand off the lens. It gives the leader an immediate, powerful visual representation of the exact temperature of the room.
Erin Faehrmann: That is brilliant! I am definitely stealing that and adding it to my box of facilitation tricks. It is a fantastic mechanism to encourage people to turn their cameras on, because you are using a physical, tactile gesture with your hands to play.
Brad Eather: Sitting behind a digital screen all day can feel highly isolating. Introducing a physical, real-world action completely breaks up the monotony of the digital environment and draws people into active participation.
Erin Faehrmann: I love using virtual scavenger hunts to kick off meetings. If the team is all working remotely from home, I will announce, "We are starting today's session with a lightning scavenger hunt. You have exactly two minutes to run through your house and bring back three items: one profound memory, your favorite childhood toy, and your absolute favorite piece of clothing to wear." The entire team literally sprints away from their desks and runs through their houses. When they return, we drop them into small virtual breakout rooms to execute a rapid show-and-tell.
It instantly humanizes everyone and reveals their real lives. Once a manager has just witnessed an employee passionately show off their favorite childhood toy, it becomes psychologically very difficult to turn around five minutes later and bark, "Brad, as per corporate policy section four, you have breached protocol for the fifth time!" You've built an authentic human connection that bridges the professional divide.
Brad Eather: As corporate communication shifts increasingly online, leaders must actively deploy creative strategies to break out of the literal digital "box." You lose a massive amount of physical communication cues over video, but these micro-interventions restore a powerful feeling of intimacy and trust.
52:58 - Defining creativity and its many forms in daily life
Brad Eather: To bring us to our final signature question: from your extensive professional experience in change management and play architecture, what is your definitive definition of creativity?
Erin Faehrmann: I define creativity as using your imagination to bring to life something that did not exist before. I love that your podcast actively challenges the legacy assumption that creativity is strictly synonymous with artistic skill. Artistic talent and creative thinking are completely different things.
Growing up, I was consistently told I was terrible at art; I routinely received Cs and Ds in art class, even though I loved the process. It wasn't until my late 20s that a mentor looked at me and said, "Erin, just because you can't sketch or paint perfectly doesn't mean you aren't creative. In fact, you are the most profoundly creative person I know because you are constantly diagnosing complex problems, inventing fresh strategies, and combining resources in unique ways." That was an absolute epiphany for me. I realized I had locked my creativity away since I was 12 years old because of an art teacher's grade.
Anytime you deploy your imagination to manifest an entity that didn't exist an hour agoâwhether it's building a new relationship between two hostile managers, discovering a non-linear way a product solves a customer's pain point, painting a canvas, or designing a team gameâthat is pure creativity.
Brad Eather: Years ago, a mentor told me about a daily creative exercise he executed: he committed to doing just one unique thing every single day. Even if he went on his standard evening walk, he would consciously turn left instead of right just to explore an unfamiliar street and see what was down there. Those micro-detours to reach a destination are the exact creative elements you are describing. We even execute it when choosing new restaurants. Exploring a brand new menu is a form of daily creativity. There are people who will go to the exact same restaurant and order the exact same dish their entire lives, and then there is the camp that rarely visits the same venue twice.
Erin Faehrmann: Exactly, and because you possess an Explorer play style, it checks out perfectly that you fall squarely into that second camp. There is also a distinct Collector play style. My husband and I are currently collecting "park runs"; every Saturday morning, we travel to a completely different location to tick a new park run off our master list.
Conversely, a dominant Storyteller play style will continuously return to the exact same family restaurant for decades because they know the owners, they love the history, and it acts as their emotional safe haven. Both paths are completely valid.
Brad Eather: We share another thing in common: we both live in South Australia, which makes collecting world-class wineries an absolute breeze! If anyone is planning a holiday retreat down here and needs elite winery recommendations, hit me up.
Erin Faehrmann: You are in the absolute vineyard capital, my friendâplenty of economic support to distribute local businesses there!
Brad Eather: Erin, if anyone wants to connect with you, book a session, or follow Lead With Play, where is the best place to find you?
Erin Faehrmann: I hang out almost exclusively on LinkedIn under Lead With Playâlook for the distinct black-and-white pinwheel logo. My last name looks like a challenge to spell, but it's right there on the screen. You can also drop me a direct email at [email protected].
Reach out on LinkedIn; I have a Calendly link where professionals can book direct, one-on-one play coaching sessions. Because Lead With Play operates strictly as a social enterprise dedicated to getting more adults playing globally, the vast majority of my introductory corporate work is done pro-bono or low-bono. I want to spark the play habits in your culture so that you quickly gain the skills to run with it independently. Let's have a chat.
Brad Eather: Brilliant. I will drop all of those links in the description below. Thank you for tuning into the Selling is Creative podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please remember to like and subscribe, and in the meantime, happy selling.
Erin Faehrmann: Thank you!
