Today, on BusinessInnovation2005, Douglas Rushkoff worte an article entitled “Work as Play” that focused on creating an innovative work environment.

Here’s some of what he said

Establishing a playful career or company isn’t as easy as it looks. It doesn’t require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention of a company’s culture based on some abstract ideal. But it does mean going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and survival—not just in business school, but for the past five centuries! Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures, producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as collaborative mini-societies, whose underlying work ethic will ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at large.”

Piers Young who writes Monkey Magic (thoughts on thinking) posted this on this site today:

“I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internaland double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious, even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike “identity” must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (”gay”, “black”, “Muslim”, whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. Literally vulgar: from vulgus. It’s crowd-thought” - Source: Philip Pullman in the Guardian

Philip Pullman is taking a very eloquent stand against brand culture. It is also the beginnings of a recognition that part of a joyful culture and a playful culture is tolerance of diversity. This especially means tolerance for a diversity of ideas, approaches and even communication styles.

Out of that tolerance, that playful willingness to explore, ideas can take flight and become true innovations.

Can such a gentle, open-minded approach really succeed? Look at the diversity that powers open source software. Across languages, politics, even time zones, Linux and Firefox roar on. Why? Because it’s fun to be part of those teams. People volunteer their time because they enjoy it.

Douglas Rushkoff has touched upon a raw and critical nerve here. Innovation will not happen in an environment that isn’t fun.