I recently attended the Intersection; a one-day event held at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, California designed to bring together innovative thought leaders from the business world with influential social change agents.  The event is designed to stir imaginations, create visions and incubate action-planning strategies. 

Google’s HQ was the perfect place for such a mash-up and being my first time to this massive part-campus, part-complex, part-alternate planet; I could not help but capture my impressions of the space. 

First, what is physically evident.  Among the numerous, multi-leveled, modern, glass, simply numbered buildings (i.e. building number 40, 41, etc.) are bicycle trails with red, yellow & green painted bicycles laying around for anyone to pick up, use and drop at their destinations.  Signs galore point to hair salons, car oil change stations, a health clinic, fitness center and many places to eat. 

Second, what is emotionally evident.  The architecture of the campus, its amenities and the overall design is…. whimsical.  Settled and dispersed throughout the numerous offices, workstations, cubicles and open meeting spaces is a sense of play.  Google perhaps more than any other company has infused its work environment with a deep ethos of playfulness.  This isn’t to suggest that folks at Google do not work hard.  Quite the contrary.  I arrived on a Friday evening for a 6pm dinner and the parking lots were still quite full and this was the Friday before a long 3-day holiday weekend.  Google believes and embraces the idea that our best insights, innovations and creative breakthroughs come from persistent, concentrated effort that is routinely infused and disrupted even by unplanned, nonsensical, divergent forms of play.  

You leave with an impression that this would be a fun place to do challenging work.  While we all may not be able to encourage our employers to build an ice cream parlor in the midst of our office, injecting playfulness into our daily work routine (albeit at much smaller scales) can help increase our creative thinking.  A playful walk during lunch, an inspiring song on our iPod before launching a new task, engaging in some poetry (reading or writing) – the most divergent or different the activity is from your work routine the more likely a new insight or breakthrough will emerge. 

Frans Johansson, author of “The Click Moment” and Intersection Speaker says that too often we rely on logic, analysis and planning for our breakthroughs.  However, true breakthroughs rarely come from the same logical thinking that is available to everyone else in the industry.  Randomness and serendipity are what make us stand apart and be different.  According to Johansson, we must pay attention to what surprises us, and place numerous, small but purposeful bets whose potential is not based on their potential return on investment (too hard to measure in a world of such massive complexity and uncertainty) but on the affordable loss – the smallest executable step possible. 

What small but purposeful bets can you be making in your work?  Be a venture capitalist with your career – where numerous bets are placed, most of which will fail, but all of which enable deep learning, and through trial and error can lead to a few amazing breakthroughs.