Safe Danger: Why Play Is Serious Business

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

In the late 1990s, a team of designers at IDEO, the legendary innovation firm, were given a strange assignment. ABC's Nightline had asked them to reinvent something so ordinary, so familiar that it had become invisible. The shopping cart. The brief was simple and frankly, it was kind of impossible. Design the shopping cart of the future, and they had just a few days to do it. On day one, they didn't start sketching. They didn't even open CAD software. They just played.

Todd Henry [00:00:32]:

They raced karts through the parking lot. They deliberately crashed them into walls to see how they would hold up. They interviewed shoppers, cashiers, and even kids. They made ridiculous prototypes out of cardboard, tape, and whatever else they could find. One designer suggested a detachable basket. Another built a kid proof seat that doubled as a mini shelf. It was absolute chaos and it looked nothing like work. But in that chaos was the secret.

Todd Henry [00:01:00]:

It was something we're going to talk about today. Safety within danger. They weren't afraid to fail because failure was part of the process. They trusted one another enough to risk looking foolish to try ideas that might not even work. And within that play, they found their breakthrough. A modular, detachable shopping cart system that would inspire a generation of design thinkers. Play wasn't a distraction from the work. Play was the work.

Todd Henry [00:01:28]:

When I think about that story, I think about the delicate balance every creative person, every leader has to hold. The need for stability and challenge, for clarity and uncertainty, or for safety and danger. It's in that intersection where we feel safe enough to take risks and brave enough to be honest, that real innovation happens. Well, my guests today both live in that space. Ben Swire, former IDEO design lead and author of Safe Danger, helps organizations rediscover trust through creative play and psychological safety. And Cass Holman, designer and author of Playful, believes that adults need to relearn what children instinctively know. That constraint, curiosity, and a little bit of friction are what make life interesting and what makes creativity thrive. Their work reminds us that play isn't childish.

Todd Henry [00:02:19]:

In fact, it's the engine of connection, invention, and growth. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Ben Swire [00:02:38]:

So safe danger is the core principle I use when I design my workshops.

Todd Henry [00:02:43]:

That's Ben Swire, author of Safe Danger.

Ben Swire [00:02:46]:

It's about the sort of emotional space where people feel safe. Safe enough to leave safety behind, but still challenged enough to grow. Most people tend to think of safety and danger as opposites, but I've just found it's more useful to think of them like dance partners. You know, safety gives us solid footing, but danger gives us movement. Safe danger is that emotional sweet spot between the two where people have enough security to show up as their authentic selves instead of the people they think they're expected to be.

Todd Henry [00:03:17]:

I have a similar concept that I've been teaching for a number of years. Stability and challenge as the two primary things that talented people need to thrive. When I read this book, I thought, we have been thinking along parallel tracks because the stability piece really is the safety. You want to have clarity of process, clarity of expectations, clarity of all the things that we need to have firm footing. But then also we want the danger, the risk, the challenge, the playfulness, the unexpected, the uncertainty. Some of that is required to do great work. And I think so many leaders, unfortunately, they want to make everything certain or they chase certainty at the expense of that danger piece that you talk about.

Ben Swire [00:03:53]:

Yeah. That is the drawback with growth, is it? It requires some pain. It requires some stretching and stepping out of your comfort zone. And, you know, safety is really appealing, but it very quickly can descend into stagnation if you're not careful. And I, you know, I do know. I know plenty of companies and organizations that confuse comfort and safety. They'll assume that if people are happy and smiling in meetings and enjoying the perks, the culture is safe. But comfort isn't the same.

Ben Swire [00:04:24]:

Real safety is when people feel safe enough to speak the truth, challenge an idea, and step away from that safety when that isn't present. I think cultures get quiet on the surface, but tense underneath. I worked with a company that had gorgeous offices, free meals, and meditation pods. On the surface, it looked like the perfect place, place to work. But they came to us after a product launch had failed. They learned that several employees had seen the flaws weeks earlier, but stayed silent because, as one person put it, that's not how you get promoted here. The company had built comfort, but their safety had locked them in and frozen them. The cost was innovation that never made it to the daylight.

Todd Henry [00:05:06]:

I think that, again, that's such a great illustration of the fact that so many leaders want to immediately resolve tension. And so what do they do? They push it beneath the surface.

Ben Swire [00:05:15]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:05:15]:

Because they don't want to deal with it. But to your point, that's not the same thing as safety. Safety is, we know that there's tension. We acknowledge the tension. I once had a leader similarly. Tell me we're about the healthiest team you'll ever meet. We never fight. And I just wanted to say you are the most profoundly unhealthy organization I've ever experienced.

Todd Henry [00:05:32]:

Because you never fight. Because that conflict doesn't just vanish when you don't fight, when you don't argue, when you don't hash it out, it stays beneath service to your point. And so I love the way that you parallel that. You know, sort of the idea of safety is not comfort. I think that's fantastic because I think so many leaders really need to embrace that. One of the things you talk about as it relates to the importance of pushing out of those places of comfort and stasis is the importance of play. And you talk about creative play as deceptively simple but carefully designed creative activities. What is a misconception people have about play and how do you address that in the book?

Ben Swire [00:06:14]:

I think a lot of people think of play as different from work, as an escape from work, sort of opposites. What I have found is that it doesn't have to be that way. If you're determined that work needs to be unpleasant and difficult, there are plenty of opportunities for that. But I've also seen that when you work play into a dynamic when people are enjoying themselves, it opens up all sorts of things that would be missed otherwise. When we do team building activities, we use play as a way to lower the cost of risk. In most places, risk feels heavy, mistakes have consequences and people hold back. But play allows you to change that equation. It creates a space where the stakes are lighter so people can experiment, they can improvise, they can stretch in ways they normally wouldn't.

Ben Swire [00:07:05]:

So far from being frivolous and a waste of time, I think play is one of the best training grounds for the sort of courage, trust and connection it takes to do good work and to build a team that can collaborate powerfully together.

Todd Henry [00:07:20]:

So can we talk about the elephant in the room for a lot of leaders listening to this, which would be, that sounds wonderful, Ben. I'm sure that is a very effective way for my team to step out of their comfort zone and come up with better ideas? We're busy. We have to have this by next Tuesday afternoon or we're all going to get fired. How would you respond to leaders who push back on that and say, that's great in a theoretically wonderful world, but we just don't have the resources to do that?

Ben Swire [00:07:49]:

My approach to that is that I understand that approach. It's driven into us from the time we're in middle school cramming for exams. It's A scarcity mindset. I only have so much time. I have to cram as much in or we're all ruined. Neuroscientists have looked into what makes the brain function work. Experts have looked into what makes people productive and effective. What we've seen again and again is that slowing down and taking the time to do it right speeds things up and makes things much more effective.

Ben Swire [00:08:19]:

There have been study after study after study from Google, mit, University of Warwick, looking into what makes the best teams so successful. These are the teams that are the most productive, that make the fewest mistakes, that have the biggest impact on their organizations and their industry as a whole. What they found was that the thread that ran throughout these teams was not nose to the grindstone mentalities. It was not hard skills, it wasn't about education or experience. It wasn't about ambition or determination. It was psychological safety. These were teams that felt comfortable bringing their full selves to the work, taking time to question things that seemed problematic to offer their full selves. And that's what made all the difference.

Ben Swire [00:09:05]:

And if you look at the stats, the numbers that come out from Gallup year after year, teams that are happier, that are better connected, that feel more comfortable being themselves, do better work, they have better retention and they're more successful on all of the metrics that you're looking for. And those companies, I believe, also as a whole, tend to make more money. So what I found is that mentality of saying, no, we don't have time, we don't have time is obsolete. It's been ingrained in us to such a degree that people no longer question it or questioning it feels dangerous or risky, which it does. But the people that study this stuff are constantly saying it's mentality that doesn't serve you.

Todd Henry [00:09:51]:

I was watching an interview with Steven Pinker, the psychologist. He has a new book out called. I think it's something like when we all know what we all know, which is basically about how we all make assumptions, we don't talk about it, or we all. There's a reality none of us want to acknowledge. And I think that what you're describing is what happens in organizations where we all just assume we're all busy all the time, everybody's busy, we don't have time, we can't do this, and we're never talking about it. Right?

Ben Swire [00:10:17]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:10:17]:

And part of the way that you talk about this in the book is you talk about the importance of connection and creativity becoming the norm, not the exception. And that's really, I think, where most of your work these days is focus is on helping cultures develop into the kind of culture where connection, creativity is the norm. What are some invisible forces or dynamics that can prevent teams or communities from achieving this? And how does your approach counter them?

Ben Swire [00:10:41]:

Yeah, I think the standard mentality is that you drive people either through incentives or fear. You know, it's a stick or a carrot thing. I started much of my career early on in financial marketing at Morgan Stanley. It's a blue chip corporate world. Then I went to this design firm, ideo, that was like going from Kansas into Oz. Emotionally speaking, the place forced this rethinking moment on me. Of all the things that I had been taught, which was sticker carrot, sticker carrot, one of the two started to get overturned. This was a place that ran on trust and connection rather than incentives or fear.

Ben Swire [00:11:17]:

I was embarrassed to say it, but I was stunned that a place could produce world class work like they were doing while putting so much emphasis on the people themselves rather than the work itself. I was used to profit, profit, profit. And this was people, people, people. They came with the firm belief that if you care for your people, success will follow. I've seen it again and again. You want to get the best out of your people, you're paying for them, and yet that mentality of pushing, pushing, pushing, you get less and less out of them. The work that I do is about creating a crack in people's expectations and assumptions so they can see a different way of thinking. Somebody said the hardest thing to learn is the thing you already know.

Ben Swire [00:12:00]:

If people already know that you need to push. People trying to teach something different is you can't just come at them and say you're wrong. The work that I do with Safe Danger and at Make Believe Works is about trying to create a space where people can begin to see an alternative way of doing things. They can begin to see the value of really understanding their colleagues and seeing how much of a difference that can make both for themselves and for the dynamic.

Todd Henry [00:12:25]:

Well, I'd love to talk about the qualities, the seven qualities that you talk about, Joy, vulnerability, which is, we've talked a little bit about that with psychological safety, curiosity, optimism, connection, trust and creativity. How did you come to these particular qualities as being central to transformation?

Ben Swire [00:12:42]:

I came from the movement that I went through. From going from corporate life to ideo gave me a new vantage point to really and to really think, rethink a lot of the assumptions that I was coming with. I started to see that the people at IDO and the teams and the companies they were working with were becoming more productive. They were more resilient, they were more innovative. But it wasn't because they kept teaching them to be more innovative and productive. They were more productive because they were happier. They were more innovative because they took time to ask bad questions and be curious about things. They were more resilient because they did a certain type of optimism that wasn't just naive, oh, it's all going to be better.

Ben Swire [00:13:22]:

It was a learned optimism of, this is rough, but I've been through rough before and so I'm going to come out the other side. The qualities that I picked in the book were the ones that I just saw again and again. Be A, dismissed out of hand is sort of soft and light and fluffy, but B, turn out to be the things that really made the stuff that mattered to people possible. Trust being one of the ones that I keep coming back to again and again. Trust and vulnerability, those two are the linchpins for so much else. The clients that come to us don't know how to build them. They don't know how to encourage them because they're coming from a point of view of it should be bullet points on a page or a presentation. Those are things that need to be experienced, to be learned, to feel safe.

Ben Swire [00:14:09]:

You have to take a small risk and see that you're safe for your brain to adjust and say, oh, it's okay to be brave here. It's okay to take a step. So those sort of skills need to be experienced. And as you said, taking the time to help people experience those often feels like a waste or a distraction from the work that really matters. But I've just seen again and again that it is what makes the work that really matters possible.

Todd Henry [00:14:33]:

Ben Swire's new book, Safe Danger, is available now wherever books are sold. And if you'd like to hear our full interview, you can do so for free@dailycreativeplus.com Ben reminded us that true safety isn't about comfort. It's about courage within connection. He calls it safe danger, that sweet spot where trust and risk dance together. And if that sounds like a lot of play, well, that's because it is. Play is where we rehearse bravery. It's where we practice letting go of outcomes, testing ideas and finding joy in the process itself. And that's where our next guest, Cass Holman, is going to take us.

Todd Henry [00:15:11]:

She's made this her mission, to help adults rediscover the lost muscle of curiosity. She believes that when we stop chasing Easy and start embracing challenge. We rediscover what it means, when to create again. We'll be right back with Cass Holman, author of Playful, after this break. Stick around.

Cas Holman [00:15:43]:

I'm Cass Holman. I design for play. I'm a designer of playthings and play spaces and play possibilities. Recently I wrote a book called Playful. So kind of a designer who writes.

Todd Henry [00:15:57]:

I think it gets to the heart of what we're going to talk about today, which is exploration and play and not taking everything so seriously. It's often imposed on us that we have to define ourselves in a certain way and that often puts us within these boundaries that prevent our ability to explore and really identify what we uniquely bring to the table. Folks listening to this are creative professionals, a lot of leaders, people doing creative work every day. They're doing that with a specific objective in mind often. And that can introduce different dynamics, different constraints. First of all, how do you think about the importance of play not just for children, but also for adults? And what are some of the things that can get in the way of our ability to engage in play consistently?

Cas Holman [00:16:39]:

Well, first of all, I completely relate to the designer or the creative person's quandary of we think that it's the goal to do what we love professionally and then when that happens, we find ourselves more attached to outcomes or possibly a different set of goals than we might be able to stumble upon in a more open ended, exploratory, emergent process. I think of myself as outcome agnostic. Sometimes what I design is an object, sometimes a specific interaction. In some cases it's more pedagogical. In my teaching. I was a professor at RISD for over a decade. In all of those ways I come back to like my own design brief. Whether it's literally a design brief or something that I have in my own intention setting for the project, a goal that may not be related to the outcome in terms of the design, like what the design means, but more kind of like what is the project going for? What are our goals here? Which is I think a nice shift and it allows for a more playful process when you are a little bit less attached to the outcome.

Cas Holman [00:17:42]:

I think that yeah, as creatives I don't know that we'll ever be completely resolved in the ability to feel like everything we do is play. But I do think we can have a playful approach that helps balance when it feels like we are able to play in our own process and be creative in a more open ended way that's a bit more emergent and Therefore, playful and still, on occasion, attached to an outcome that may have a client and a deadline.

Todd Henry [00:18:10]:

Yeah. And I think that's the tension, right, is that we do feel that pressure to converge very quickly because we have to get to the result, because we're being timed, we're being paid, all of that. Interestingly, you write in the book about how often it's in the areas where you see rules, where you feel constraints, where you feel those boundaries that you feel most compelled to play. And I'm curious, why? Why is that the case? Why do you. I mean, there's the myth. Okay, So I want to set it up. I think there's a myth about talented, ambitious, creative people that they just want complete freedom. Don't fence me in.

Todd Henry [00:18:41]:

But you're almost articulating the opposite instinct, which is, no, I want the boundaries. Explain that dichotomy to us.

Cas Holman [00:18:47]:

I don't know if you're familiar with Sister Corita Kent. She was an art educator and also an artist herself, and she said about her assignments that she gave to her students, you know, for a creative person, anything is possible. What boundaries or an assignment or a design brief does is it makes it so you don't have to do everything. It gives you some constraints to play within so that it's less overwhelming. The blank page is quite overwhelming whether you're creative or not. Regardless of your brain type, a blank page can be overwhelming. A squiggle on the page or, you know, only use this pen or only use this. Much of the paper, some prompt.

Cas Holman [00:19:22]:

Right. Something to start with makes it so a creative person doesn't have to do everything. If anything is possible, that can be quite overwhelming. So what constraints do is give you something to play within. I spend a lot of time on the design brief with the client or my collaborators defining our goals. They're not typically attached to what the thing looks like necessarily. They're more kind of, what do we want people to experience? What do we want kids, adults, or people to walk away from? Sometimes when I'm working with early educators, it'll be something like conflict resolution. So I have that as the goal is, some interaction facilitates some kind of interaction that will allow children to experience conflict resolution, which feels hugely open.

Cas Holman [00:20:07]:

And then I'll start to say, based on our budget, let's say we're going to make something out of wood, so we're going to use wood. And I'll start to apply my own seemingly arbitrary constraints in an effort to start to shake out, like, all right, what is this? What might this Be. And then I can shift those one way or another if I need to. You have the freedom to explore and push against something rather than having a completely open ended anything is possible which can be just a little much so with my design students and I think of in writing this book, right? So the book is about adults in play. And I had been designing primarily for children and some intergenerational play, but mostly working with designing for children to play. I realized that I had quite a bit of experience working with adults in play because of my design students. Some were grad students and some were undergrads. I found that the more constraints I gave them, the more they were able to play and the more their design process seemed like play.

Cas Holman [00:21:04]:

And I saw it in them. They responded because it's kind of like I said, more to push against. And you have to be creative when all you have is a black pen and a piece of paper. And I say, now make a game. Invent a game with a paper and pencil, right? So then you really have to be creative because you're not starting with the entire world open to us. So I encourage designers, if there's an. If there's something that feels too open or overwhelming to assign some constraints and go from there, and then you can open it up as needed, but almost like starting from a more narrow set of rules. And that also might make it feel more like a game.

Todd Henry [00:21:39]:

I once heard a quote, Orson Welles said, the absence of limitation is the enemy of art. Which I think is fantastic because it is true that we need to be able to channel our energies. I saw a documentary about the making of an early solo Peter Gabriel album. And he arbitrarily going into the studio said, we're not going to use cymbals on this record. Like, nobody is playing a cymbal on this record. No percussion, no drummer. It ended up that they did use cymbals, but what that did is it forced them to be much more choiceful about how they used cymbals, rather than it being like, oh, we're just going to play anywhere we want. It sort of made that a much more dramatic moment because they were being much more choiceful.

Todd Henry [00:22:15]:

So those boundaries don't have to be airtight, rigid rules, but they can just be something to help channel your energy so that you're more choiceful about your decisions, so that you're more playful in how you make creative decisions.

Cas Holman [00:22:26]:

I think one of the things that's really powerful about play is it makes us more comfortable with uncertainty. The more playful we can be the more comfortable we'll be with unknowns and uncertainty. We're so used to symbols. Or like, this is where the symbols would usually happen. Shifting a habit into something that's unfamiliar or shifts your muscle memory is going to make you try something else. I feel like that's a great example of a playful approach. I do a lot of what if just for the sake of getting unstuck, and I do this in life, too. Part of what I'm doing in the book is trying to, you know, also speak to people who aren't necessarily or don't identify as creative and just saying, like, you know, in your kitchen with your family, if you're feeling a little bit bored or if you just want to be more playful with each other, you know, start with a what if? Like, what if we put beans in this? What if we use this thing that's been in the cabinet for a year and build a meal around that? So it's this kind of like going in with curiosity also inherently makes you reframe success, which is kind of one of the tenets.

Cas Holman [00:23:24]:

Like, success is that you've then used the beans. Right. It's like nobody's setting out to make the most epic meal ever. It's just like, what if we use this? Let's see. So everybody kind of goes in. There's no one that's responsible for it being delicious. Right. It working means that you use the beans and you tried, and then you all get to kind of afterward, assess, like, oh, okay, well, it could have been better if this.

Cas Holman [00:23:47]:

And next time will this. So it kind of brings everybody in, which is also very playful. There's not one person who's responsible for it working.

Todd Henry [00:23:55]:

Yeah, you just hit on something that you write about in playful, which is that you think easy is boring, which I. And we think about most of the really valuable experiences we have and most of the most immersive experiences we have. They're not easy. They can be really challenging and really difficult, but they're also very enjoyable and immersive. And yet we have this inherent human aversion to doing difficult things. We prefer comfortable things, which is why we sit in our chair and watch Netflix. Instead of doing something that's going to grow us and challenge us. What have you discovered about overcoming that instinct toward comfort and pushing ourselves into a place of play? How can adults think about that more proactively?

Cas Holman [00:24:34]:

I think part of our aversion to challenge is that as adults in particular, we're pretty uncomfortable with things that we're not good at as we grow up. If you loved soccer and weren't great at it, you may have stopped playing by age 10 or 12. I was talking to someone yesterday whose child loves soccer, is great at it, so has been advancing, but it's gotten so competitive and kind of like intense that she's like, I don't want to play this anymore. It's almost the opposite. She's so good that now it doesn't feel like play perform things become kind of performative and there's a pressure. So we take what would be playful. And because there's this desire or need to be good and to like succeed, it becomes very unplayful and often not very fun. So I think part of why as adults we avoid challenge or choose something that's easy or known rather than doing something new is because of that we've been taught to not do the things right.

Cas Holman [00:25:30]:

We get channeled into what we are good at rather than getting to linger in what we think is enjoyable whether or not we excel. Releasing judgment is 1 tenon of adults in play. Don't judge yourself for whether or not you make a goal every time. If you love running around and joking with strangers at the park, jump into the soccer match. It's hard to do that initially our instinct is like, but it's embarrassing. Or what if I look silly? But in fact that very likely won't happen and the benefits far outweigh the people who might say, oh, you seem a little clumsy for this, but you can be like, yes I am and here we go and it's great and now we're gonna play together and you will reap the benefits of my joy. I think that comes from me also working with children in the challenge. What people often and designers think of as friction, we talk about frictionless.

Cas Holman [00:26:22]:

We want everything to be frictionless. But in learning, friction is the good stuff. The friction is where we learn, right. And I think the same applies to adults. When we're pushed out of our comfort zone, that's where we grow and learn and realize that we're capable or say, oh, actually I did like doing that new thing that I never considered because I didn't think I was sporty or creative. So yeah, I think avoiding challenge is natural based on what our very assessment based educations look like. But in fact I think we can like reintegrate and re acclimate to like the challenges of is fun. And it's where we grow and learn ourselves.

Todd Henry [00:27:00]:

Cass Holman's new book, Playful is available now wherever books are sold and Again, if you'd like to hear our full interview, it's available for free@dailycreativeplus.com when I think back to that IDEO team racing shopping carts through a parking lot, I realized that what looked like play was actually practice. Practice for courage, practice for curiosity, and practice for trust. The conditions that make great work possible are the same ones that make great humans possible. Play, at its core, is a form of trust. It's saying, I don't know how this will turn out, but I believe it's worth finding out. It's choosing curiosity over control. It's remembering that uncertainty isn't a threat. It's an invitation.

Todd Henry [00:27:44]:

The tragedy is that most of us, somewhere between childhood and our careers, traded in our sense of conflict play for the need for productivity. We learned to fear the unknown. But as both Ben and Cass remind us, the real magic happens when we reclaim that instinct, when we bring a spirit of play back to our teams, to our families, and even to our own creative process. So maybe the question isn't how do we make work feel less like play? Maybe the question is, how do we make play feel more like work? So this week, whatever you're building, whatever you're leading or imagining, find a small moment to explore, experiment, to ask what if? To tip the cart over on purpose and see what rolls out. Because that's where the future starts in the serious work of play. Hey, thanks so much for listening again. If you'd like all of our full interviews, you can find them@dailycreativeplus.com My name is Todd Henry. You can find my books, my speaking, and all of my work@todhenry.com until next time.

Todd Henry [00:28:46]:

May you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see you then.