PART 1: The Design and Strategy of Play: New Approaches for AI-Curious L&D Teams
A 4-part series exploring the use of play, playful techniques and AI for learning designers and Learning & Development teams
Links to the series: Part 1: The Science and Strategy, Part 2: Modern Applications of AI in Adult Learning: The State of Play in L&D, Part 3: 12 Approaches for Designing Play with AI, and Part 4: P.L.A.Y. Build Framework
Photos by Xavi Cabrera on Unsplash, Luke Jones on Unsplash, and Alex Guillaume on Unsplash
Part 1: The Science and Strategy
The intersection of artificial intelligence and playful learning offers exciting possibilities for developing new skills. While we've long understood that children learn through play, continuing evidence shows that adults also benefit significantly from playful approaches to learning. As AI tools become more sophisticated, we now have new opportunities to create personalized, engaging learning experiences that feel playful, and productive.
This article explores how Learning and Development teams can harness both the science of play and emerging AI capabilities. We'll examine the cognitive and emotional benefits of playful learning, discuss how AI can enhance these approaches, and provide practical frameworks for implementation.
The Science
Play isn't child's play anymore. Research increasingly demonstrates that playful learning offers substantial cognitive advantages for all ages. When workers for example engage in play-based activities, they experience notable improvements in mental acuity, memory retention, and problem-solving capabilities that traditional learning approaches often struggle to match.
Game elements in learning don't just make the experience more enjoyable—they fundamentally enhance how information is processed and retained. Play creates an optimal state for learning by generating positive emotions and reducing the stress that often inhibits cognitive processing. This playful mindset opens neural pathways that facilitate deeper understanding and more flexible application of knowledge.
Perhaps most compelling is play's potential as a cognitive maintenance strategy throughout adulthood. That is, the mental flexibility developed through playful activities appears to strengthen neural resilience, potentially offering protection against age-related cognitive decline. In our knowledge-based economies, where adaptable thinking is paramount, play represents a powerful yet underutilized cognitive enhancement tool.
Organizations investing in playful learning approaches aren't just making training more palatable—they're strategically enhancing cognitive performance across their workforce. The evidence suggests that structured play in professional development creates more adaptable, creative, and mentally agile professionals better equipped to navigate modern challenges including socio-economic and labor challenges, and even crafting and maintaining quarterly OKRs. What the science is telling us:
Enhanced Learning and Memory: Studies show that gamified learning experiences lead to 40% better knowledge retention compared to traditional methods, with brain imaging research demonstrating that playful activities increase connections between neural networks, enhancing overall cognitive function. According to Laura Berk and Adam Meyers in their article "The Role of Make-believe Play in the Development of Executive Function," play activities strengthen "cognitive flexibility and self-regulation—the ability to control attention, emotions, and behavior in the service of goals and standards". [1]
Psychological Optimization: Play decreases cortisol levels by up to 30%, removing significant biochemical barriers to effective learning while simultaneously inducing flow states—optimal performance conditions where focus intensifies and cognitive processing becomes more efficient. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology, "The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times... The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."
Creativity and Attention Enhancement: Meta-analyses confirm that adults engaging in regular playful activities score 26% higher on divergent thinking assessments while also experiencing 35% longer periods of sustained attention compared to conventional learning approaches. This combination of creative capacity and focused processing power represents a significant cognitive advantage in complex problem-solving scenarios. [2]
Motivation and Long-term Cognitive Health: Beyond immediate cognitive benefits, play elements in learning increase voluntary participation in continued education by 60% and course completion rates by 34%. Even more promising, longitudinal studies suggest that older adults who regularly engage in mentally playful activities demonstrate measurably slower cognitive decline, maintaining mental acuity significantly longer than non-playing peers—suggesting play's potential as a lifelong cognitive enhancement strategy. Research published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest emphasizes that "participating in intellectually challenging activities serves as a primary mechanism for enhancing cognitive functioning throughout life."
Social Play: Building Collaborative Advantage Through Shared Experience
Play transforms collaboration. Beyond individual cognitive benefits, play creates powerful social learning environments for adults—regardless of work (or not working). When learning activities incorporate playful collaboration, they foster interpersonal connections and communication skills that traditional training approaches often neglect. The social dimensions of play create psychological safety that enables more authentic interaction and knowledge sharing.
Collaborative play experiences serve as low-risk rehearsals for workplace challenges, allowing teams to develop coordination and communication patterns without the pressure of immediate consequences. This playful practice builds both explicit skills and implicit trust that transfers to real-world performance. The shared emotional experiences during playful learning create lasting social bonds that strengthen organizational cohesion.
In today's hybrid and distributed work environments, where authentic connection has become increasingly challenging, play offers a vital mechanism for building team identity and identifying your team’s purpose. The digital transformation of work has created efficiency but often at the cost of human connection—a deficit that well-designed social play experiences can effectively address.
Organizations that strategically incorporate collaborative play into their learning ecosystems aren't just developing individual competencies—they're cultivating the collective intelligence and social capital that drive sustainable innovation and adaptability.
In a business landscape where team performance increasingly determines competitive advantage, social play represents an underutilized strategy for building collaborative excellence. Suggested evidence:
Enhanced Psychological Safety and Communication: Studies demonstrate that playful team activities significantly increase psychological safety and improve communication patterns among team members. Research shows teams engaging in collaborative play demonstrate more equitable participation and more constructive handling of disagreements, creating environments where members feel more comfortable sharing ideas and taking risks. According to Amy Edmondson and Zhike Lei in their comprehensive review Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct, "psychological safety describes people's perceptions of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks in their work environment," and is essential for enabling collaborative learning.
Trust Development and Network Building: Longitudinal studies indicate that playful team-building activities accelerate trust formation by approximately 60% compared to conventional work interactions, while also creating more diverse workplace connections than traditional training approaches. This expanded network increases access to organizational knowledge and resources, particularly important in newly formed teams. [3]
Reducing Hierarchical Barriers and Enhancing Creativity: Play-based learning environments reduce perceived status barriers by 52%, encouraging contribution from all organizational levels. This democratization of input leads to enhanced team creativity, with analyses showing groups engaged in playful collaborative activities generating 41% more innovative solutions to complex problems than control groups using conventional approaches. [4]
Conflict Resolution and Stress Management: Research demonstrates that teams trained through playful collaborative activities show significantly more constructive approaches to conflict resolution, transforming potential friction points into growth opportunities. Studies of high-stress workplaces further show that regular social play reduces reported workplace stress by 29% and increases resilience in responding to challenging situations. [5]
Transforming L&D Through Play-Based Approaches
The implementation of play and playfulness in corporate training represents a significant evolution in workforce development strategy. Forward-thinking organizations are increasingly leveraging gamified and playful training programs to address engagement challenges, foster innovation, and build resilient team dynamics. This approach aligns particularly well with the expectations of employees who have grown up with interactive digital experiences, and as I’ve written prior, the distractions and noise of social media and consumerism.
In today's high-pressure work environments, where burnout rates continue to climb and attention spans are increasingly fragmented, play-based learning offers a compelling counterbalance.
By creating learning experiences that feel refreshing rather than depleting, organizations can overcome resistance to professional development while simultaneously addressing wellness concerns.
The data on employee engagement and innovation through play is compelling. Recent research indicates that 83% of employees report significantly higher motivation when their learning experiences incorporate game-like elements, with organizations implementing comprehensive play-based training systems seeing engagement increases of up to 60%. By creating low-risk environments where experimentation is encouraged, play enables the kind of divergent thinking that drives innovation. Companies like Google that have institutionalized playful exploration have repeatedly demonstrated the business value of this approach. As Sebastian Deterding and colleagues note in their influential paper Gamification: Using Game-Design Elements in Non-Gaming Contexts, "gamification aims to use the motivational power of games to promote specific behaviors" – a powerful tool when those behaviors include creative problem-solving and innovation.
Collaborative play-based learning also addresses another critical organizational challenge: building cohesive teams in increasingly fragmented work environments. As remote and hybrid work become standard, organizations struggle to develop the social bonds that traditionally formed through informal workplace interactions. Structured playful learning experiences can intentionally create these connections, building the trust and communication patterns that enable effective collaboration even across physical distance. [6] That said, today’s mixed views or controversy over return-to-work policies don’t seem to foster the trust that play often exhibits.
Enhancing Employee and Learner Experience Through Play
Play fundamentally transforms how employees experience both their work and their professional development. In practice, this manifests in numerous ways across the organization. Consider a global technology company that replaced its traditional onboarding program with a team-based simulation game where new hires collaboratively solved company-relevant challenges. New employees reported 47% higher satisfaction with the onboarding process and demonstrated significantly faster social integration compared to previous cohorts. [7]
For both new and experienced employees, playful learning experiences create memorable peaks in what might otherwise be routine work experiences. Organizations implementing regular "innovation game days" or reimagining compliance training as "escape room" challenges consistently find that participants rate these experiences as highlights in their work calendar—moments of energizing connection that transform obligations into opportunities. The emotional experience shifts from compliance to engagement. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink states that "the most deeply motivated people—not to mention those who are most productive and satisfied—hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves."
Perhaps most powerfully, play-based learning can create transformative moments for individual employees. Companies incorporating role-playing scenarios into leadership development, where managers experience workplace situations from their direct reports' perspectives, frequently report that participants describe these playful perspective-taking exercises as profound "aha moments" that fundamentally changed their management approach. Jack Mezirow's work on Transformative Learning Theory suggests that such perspective shifts constitute "a deep, structural shift in basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions" that can fundamentally alter how managers approach their roles.
The Strategy of Play for L&D
If the science of play gives us the “why,” then how can we implement a modern and thoughtful approach strategically--especially when our L&D teams are in a world increasingly influenced by AI. So, how would we treat play as strategy?
Here is a model—perhaps not new nor complete—that aligns the science of play AI and modern learning design. This model identifies five Strategic Play Levers for L&D highlighting where play and AI may unlock new potential for learners and organizations alike.
Let’s take a closer look at what these levers really mean in practice:
Cognitive Agilty
Today’s workforce faces rapidly shifting contexts, technologies, and expectations, with increasing requirements to flex, stay fresh and act with agility. Cognitive agility refers to an individual’s ability to rapidly shift thinking, adapt to new information, and integrate knowledge across domains. It underpins problem-solving, pattern recognition, and resilience in the face of complexity. Play naturally fosters mental flexibility through exploration, experimentation, and “what if” scenarios. Playful activities encourage learners to test multiple strategies and adapt in real time—exactly the mental agility modern workers need. Organizations that foster it gain employees who learn faster, adapt quickly, and respond creatively under pressure
Motivation & Flow
This lever focuses on sustaining learner engagement and balancing challenge with play to keep people in a “flow state”—a psychological sweet spot where learning feels natural, immersive, and intrinsically rewarding. Play is intrinsically motivating and helps learners enter flow by reducing pressure, lowering fear of failure, and offering compelling challenges. For example, game dynamics like levels of difficulty, feedback loops, and rewards mirror flow-enhancing structures. Our attention—in work and non-work--is increasingly fragmented and burnout is common. Designing learning for motivation and flow can be a radically new, competitive advantage.
Social Learning & Trust
The Social Learning & Trust lever centers on using peer learning (live, remote, in-person, social), shared experiences, and interpersonal trust supporting workforce development, and career growth. It builds psychological safety, encourages collaboration, and especially fosters a sense of community within teams. Play creates safe, low-stakes environments for people to engage authentically, be open to trial-and-error, and bring their “whole self”. It encourages risk-taking, humor, and shared emotional experience—all of which strengthen trust and enhance collaborative learning. By embedding social play into L&D offerings, companies can ideally accelerate onboarding and foster ongoing team cohesion—even again in remote or hybrid contexts.
Creativity & Innovation
Creativity and innovation enables divergent thinking and creative problem-solving across disciplines. It supports ideation, prototyping, and design-based inquiry—critical in any industry that must constantly innovate to stay competitive. Play liberates people from rigid thinking. Play invites experimentation, wild ideas, and unexpected connections. Games and sandbox environments help unlock creative flow by reducing fear of judgment or failure. As AI and its siblings (LLMs, agents, bots…) enhance or take over routine tasks, human creativity becomes a differentiator. L&D folks that cultivate innovation skills empower teammates and partners to imagine and celebrate new possibilities, products and processes, and ultimately profit and productivity.
Performance & Measurement
This fifth lever ensures that playful learning delivers tangible results. It ideally links play-centric learning design to business outcomes like efficiency, performance, and quality. Playful learning naturally includes feedback, progression, and iterative improvement—mirroring how we typically gauge and audit performance development practices. For our enterprises, and just about everywhere these days, we must prove value. Yet, in many ways, new and foreign or conceptual practices like play-based training will come under reasonable scrutiny without the right business-first strategy.
Review: Our attention is increasingly fragmented and burnout is common. That said, play creates safe, low-stakes environments for workers to engage authentically, be open to trial-and-error, and bring their “whole self “. Designing learning for motivation and staying in a state-of-flow can be a radically new, competitive advantage. Yet, in many ways, foreign or conceptual practices like play-based training will come under reasonable scrutiny without the right business-first strategy.
In our next sections, we’ll align these five strategic levers with two tools: the 12 AI-Enhanced Play Elements and the P.L.A.Y. Build Framework (Purpose, Leverage, Activate, Yield). These tools bring our strategy it to life—guiding L&D colleagues with new approaches to build playful, AI-powered learning programs that are not only engaging but business-relevant.
The Science, Strategy, and Tooling alignment:
When we combine the science and strategy of play, we arrive at a powerful opportunity: to reimagine learning not as a “must do”, but as a continuous state of playful performance.
Let’s explore the new State of Play in L&D.
Links to the series: Part 1: The Science and Strategy, Part 2: Modern Applications of AI in Adult Learning: The State of Play in L&D, Part 3: 12 Approaches for Designing Play with AI, and Part 4: P.L.A.Y. Build Framework
Acknowledging leveraging Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude for research, formatting, testing links, challenging assumptions and aiding the creative process.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s employer or any affiliated organizations.
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NOTES
[1] Berk, L. E., & Meyers, A. B. (2013). The role of make-believe play in the development of executive function: Status of research and future directions. American Journal of Play, 6(1), 98-110.
[2] Russ, S. W., & Wallace, C. E. (2013). Pretend play and creative processes. American Journal of Play, 6(1), 136-148.
[3] Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709-734.
[4] Paulus, P. B., & Nijstad, B. A. (2019). The Oxford handbook of group creativity and innovation. Oxford University Press.
[5] Tjosvold, D., Wong, A. S., & Feng Chen, N. Y. (2014). Constructively managing conflicts in organizations. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1(1), 545-568.
[6] Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. John Wiley & Sons.
[7] Bauer, T. N., & Erdogan, B. (2011). Organizational socialization: The effective onboarding of new employees. In S. Zedeck (Ed.), APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology, Vol. 3, 51-64.
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