254. Unleashing Creativity: Turning Work Into Play with Mick Spiers

What makes a team truly creative? It's not beanbag chairs or forced brainstorming sessions—it's about creating an environment where play becomes the engine of productivity.

Drawing from the wisdom shared by ex-Pixar executives Jamie Woolf and Dr. Chris Bell, this solocast explores how psychological safety, ownership, and freedom transform workplaces from control centers to creativity hubs. The distinction is powerful: work doesn't need to feel like work when people are in flow.

Remember the piano stairs experiment in Stockholm? When regular stairs were transformed into musical piano keys, people abandoned the escalator en masse—not because they suddenly learned stairs were healthier, but because taking them became fun. This same principle applies to our teams. When we create conditions where exploration feels natural and failure feels safe, innovation flourishes without force.

True inclusion means moving beyond token representation to genuine agency—people don't want to merely attend the party; they want to help plan it. Creativity emerges not from chaos but from stillness, those moments when our minds settle and make space for insight. And perhaps most importantly, creativity isn't restricted to your design team—it's the procurement specialist finding a novel cost-saving approach, the team leader redesigning workflows to reduce stress, the frontline worker identifying a customer pain point no one else noticed.

What would your organization look like if every team member felt empowered to play, experiment, and truly belong? The answer might transform not just your culture, but your results. Ready to create those conditions in your team? Listen now and discover how to unlock the creative potential hiding in plain sight.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: Work as Play
• 1:50 When Work Becomes Fun
• 5:44 The Power of Inclusion and Belonging
• 7:14 Creativity Can't Be Forced
• 8:07 A Still Mind is a Creative Mind
• 10:51 Creativity Comes in Many Forms
• 13:03 Empowerment Unlocks Creativity
• 15:09 Episode Closing and Next Preview

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

What if the reason your team isn't more creative isn't because they lack ideas, but because they lack oxygen. What would happen if work felt less like a grind and more like flow, fun and freedom? And what if inclusion isn't about being invited to the table, but being trusted to move the chairs in today's solo cast. I want to build on the incredible conversation we just had with Jamie Woolf and Dr. Chris Bell from creativity partners, because something said really stuck with me. Play is not optional. If you want to get work done, that line hit hard, and that's what we're going to explore today. Welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm your host. Mick Spiers, today is going to be a solo cast where I unpack my key takeaways from the conversation with Jamie Woolf and Dr. Chris bell of creativity partners, two ex Pixar executives who taught us about what it means to create a culture of creativity. So I'm going to unpack my key takeaways from that conversation and add a few of my own experiences in here. So I'm going to give you six practical takeaways here about how you can create creativity in your team. Key Concept number one is when work is fun, it doesn't feel like work. Think about a time you were completely in flow. Maybe you were solving a problem, brainstorming a wild idea, building something from scratch, and you looked up and realized hours had passed. That is when work becomes play. It's not about ping pong tables or bean bags. It's not about pretending to have fun. It's not something that can be forced. And we've seen lots of organizations doing things like that, thinking that you're putting ping pong tables or bean bags or whatever it is, and that's what's going to create creativity It's not something that can be forced. It's about psychological safety, ownership and the freedom to explore without fear of being wrong. The reality is, most workplaces are wired for control, not for creativity. And when we remove fun, spontaneity and playfulness, we don't just make work boring. We make it unproductive. Fun isn't the opposite of work. Fun is the fuel of work when it gets done, right? Have a think about this when you know, for anyone out there that does a bit of sport, running on a treadmill, for most people, is dead boring. In fact, it's quite often called a dreadmill. But if you find the sport that you love, time seems to fly by. For me, it's tennis. I'll play two hours of tennis without any hesitation, and I won't even notice the time going by. I'll be so immersed in what I'm doing that time seems to fly past without noticing it. For you, it might be dancing, whatever it is, whatever that fun activity is, where you just lose yourself in the moment, and nothing feels like hard work anymore. It's just amazing. And you get the work done, you get creative, you start trying different things. There was a great experiment some psychologists did in Stockholm in Sweden called the piano stairs. And what they did in a metro station with a lot of foot traffic, where everyone was taking the escalator, they experimented by converting the stairs next to the escalator into some musical stairs. Every foot that you took, or every step that you took up these stairs was a different note of a piano and a piano would play, and they used time lapse videography to be able to show that before they put the musical stairs in, nearly everyone was taking the escalator. And when they put the stairs in, everyone started to gravitate towards the stairs. In fact, in some cases, people wouldn't be just taking the stairs, but they'd be literally playing their way up the stairs. They'd be going like taking steps up, taking taking steps down, and because it was fun, people did the work and they took the stairs. And we know that taking the stairs is better for our health. We know that. So it's not a lack of information that led to people taking the escalator, but once it was more fun to take the stairs, there was a huge shift in how people behaved. So think about that in your workplace, whether it's my tennis or dancing example, or whether it's these. Yano stares, what can you do to make work fun again and without forcing it, just making it so people have got the ability to be themselves and lose themselves in the moment and get themselves into a state of flow. Okay, Idea number two, the power of inclusion, ownership and belonging. One of the most powerful ideas Chris shared with us was this, we're not in the business of making people feel included. We're in the business of making people be included. There's a difference. Being included means having agency, having voice, having ownership. When people are part of shaping the workplace, not just participating in they show up differently. They take pride, they take responsibility, they take initiative. Belonging isn't a warm and fuzzy extra, it's the foundation of performance. People don't give their best when they feel like guests. They give their best when they feel like owners. The metaphor that Chris used was really powerful, the one around a party. You can have a party and invite people to be part of the party, and they'll feel included. They'll turn up, they'll listen to your music, eat your food that you've picked out. They'll have drinks, whatever the case may be. But to be included, they would have taken a role in selecting the music, in selecting the food, in selecting what was going to be done. So to be included means that you're part of it. You're part of the solution, and you take ownership. Idea three fun can't be forced, and neither can creativity. Here's the trap a lot of well meaning leaders fall into. They try to manufacture fun or demand creativity. We're going to do a trust fall. Let's brainstorm right now. Be more innovative. All of that doesn't work, and it backfires, because creativity doesn't live in pressure. It lives in permission and fun doesn't happen on command. It happens when people feel safe, feel seen and feel trusted. As Jamie said, there's a difference between strategic play and gratuitous games. Play should be intentional. It should be connected to purpose. It should meet people where they are. It's not about putting on a show. It's about creating space. Idea for a still mind is a creative mind. Here's something I've been reflecting on. Personally, we think we need to push harder to be creative, but often the opposite is true. When our minds are racing, filled with pressure, expectations and noise, there's no room for new ideas to land. Creativity doesn't arrive in the chaos. It arrives in the stillness it could be in the shower on a walk after a breath. When we give our minds a moment to settle, we create space for insights as leaders, part of our job is not to fill every silence but to protect space for thinking, imagining and wondering. This applies to ourselves, our own thinking process. We can't be Go, go, go. 24/7, we need to give ourselves time, time to think and time to clear the mind, to still the mind, so creativity can come and the same applies to our teams. We need to build space and time for them to do their very best thinking where they're not worried about the next milestone, the next deliverable, the next meeting, they need time to still their mind so they can think clearly. Have a think about this yourself. Think about when your best ideas have ever come to you in your life, and I can pretty much guarantee you it's not going to be in the middle of something where your mind is racing at a million miles an hour. It's going to be at some time where you were at peace, where you weren't thinking about 27 other things. It came at a time where your mind was still there's been a lot of scientific research about this, where they've used functional MRIs to measure brain activity and watching what different parts of the brain fire at different times and when you're thinking about 100 different things, that is not when creative thought lives. It's when you're able to get your mind into a still state where you're not worried about things like. Eye of all, you're not worried about what to cook for dinner tonight. It's these moments where your best ideas come. So what can you do in your schedule, in your diary, to build some rituals where you can have a still mind, and what can you do to create the same for your teams. Idea number five, creativity comes in many forms. One of the biggest myths we need to bust is the idea that creativity only belongs to artists and designers or the marketing team. Everyone is creative, and everyone can be creative, the procurement person who finds a new way to save cost, the team leader who redesigns a workflow to reduce stress, the parent who figures out how to get the kids to school and make it to work on time. That's all forms of creativity, not about the medium. It's about the mindset, and when we expand the definition of creativity. We expand who gets to contribute, and that's when the real magic happens. So have a look in your workplace. How do you reward creativity? Innovation Awards always going to the engineers, or are you looking across the business and realizing that innovation and creativity can come from all walks of life, I also challenge you that you need that diversity of thought in your creativity and in your innovation. So you might have some people in the room when you're looking to problem solve that are not directly connected to the task, someone that can have an another perspective, an outsider's perspective that no one in the room has thought of before. I remember a clear moment in my career when we're trying to solve a problem around passageways for parents that are trying to go through a subway system with children in strollers. And the people that had the best ideas in the room weren't engineers at all, but I tell you what they were. They were parents, and they were parents from the HR department, from the finance department, but by tapping into these people's diverse perspectives, we were able to find solutions that we would never have found by just a pure engineering process. Idea six, empowerment unlocks creativity. Ultimately, creativity is a leadership issue, because it thrives in environments of empowerment, when people are trusted, when they're given room to move, when they're treated like adults who are capable, resourceful and full of potential, they rise. People don't need constant direction. They need conditions to thrive as a leader. Ask yourself, Am I creating those conditions? Am I empowering people to bring their full selves? Am I giving people space to play, to think, to fail and to try again? If the answer is yes, creativity will flow. Remember you do not have to have all the answers. In fact, if you have all the answers, that's a real problem, because you're not creating space for others to bring up ideas and new thoughts. So this is once again, about diversity of thought, but now it's the empowerment, empowering people so that they feel trusted, so that they feel capable and resourceful, and they will come up with ideas, and they will blow your mind with the innovative and creative ideas that they'll come up with. So here's the invitation for you today. What would it take to make work feel like play again. What would it look like to build a culture where creativity isn't forced, it's freed, and what would happen if every person on your team truly felt like they belong? That's the world Jamie and Chris are helping leaders create as the kind of leadership we need now more than ever. So what action will you take today to make that happen, to find that play, to find that freedom, and to ensure that everyone in your team and in your organization is included and feels that they belong. Okay, that's it for today. In the next episode, I'll be joined by the amazing Kyle McDowell. Now you've heard of Simon Sinek and the concept of start with why? Well, Kyle is going to introduce you to the concept called begin. With we and it's a really powerful way of re imagining leadership in a modern world. You don't want to miss this. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo and my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week. And you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.