39: Using Play to Learn in an Ambiguous and Complex World (David Maslach)
- Jose Arrieta
- May 13
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Prerecorded session
Live session
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Overview
My session will focus on how play helps scholars and organizations learn when the world is complex, unclear, and hard to understand.
This topic has had a deep impact on me because it shaped how I made sense of complicated data in my own work on rare events and failure. When I first read “Ambiguity and Choice” by March and Olsen, we were struggling to make sense of adverse event data in medical devices. I chose this data because I thought it would be a very clear representation of learning. I had millions of observations across an entire industry that was designed to learn. All of the regression models would take days to run (with the processing power we had at the time). I first started out with traditional performance feedback models. But, that did not make sense. I could not logically conclude that organizations aspired to create deaths and injuries in the future. Then I tried learning curves. I expected to see learning. Yet no matter what we did, we often saw the opposite. The data did not fit the clean models of learning I had been trained to expect. It was defeating.
At about this time, I read about March’s idea of play. It was especially powerful for me: when the world does not fit our models, we may need to relax our models, not force the world into them. My colleagues and I begin to play. Much of organizational learning focuses on improving the reliability of learning, that is, making lessons more standard, stable, efficient, and repeatable. How do you make cheaper pizzas, planes, or ships? Yet many of the most important lessons, especially those tied to failure, require improving the validity of learning. Stopping. Sometimes making mistakes, and whether actors learn the right lesson from unclear experience. You often have to get worst to get better, if at all. This involves dealing with error, doubt, and surprise. But most importantly, it is often emotional and fearful because your mental map no longer is correct.
This is where play matters.
March reminds us that much of what we do in organizations rests on faith, tradition, intuition, impulse, and complicated goals we do not fully understand. Management research often asks how organizations can improve performance. But the harder question is: Improve toward ‘what' goal? What are we ‘really’ doing here? Play allows actors to suspend reality. As he points out (March, 1976: 76), "playfulness that is the deliberate, temporary relaxation of rules in order to explore possibilities of alternative rules. When we are playful, we challenge the necessity of consistency.” It is a way to reason when existing rules, goals, and models are no longer enough.
I will connect these ideas to the R3ciprocity.com platform as an example of how playful systems can help people engage with failure, feedback, and idea development under uncertainty. I have been building R3ciprocity publicly for 10 years. R3ciprocity has a simple goal: how do I create a platform so that anyone at any stage can create a non-rejectable research paper, and have fun too. I will also emphasize that failure and error are hard to learn from because they are embarrassing, painful, stigmatizing, and socially risky to discuss. Building R3ciprocity in public has been all of these things. My wife and I have ‘wasted’ enough resources on this that it would have been financially better for us to buy a Lamborghini. Grants are not available outside of direct research. The only way I have been able to build R3ciprocity, and deal with the academic pressure is by "being playful." Play can help reduce this fear by making exploration safer, lighter, and more human. I would have quit many years ago if I viewed it the way that much of the current literature views choice in entrepreneurship and innovation; so I know that play is important.
I required my current students to use it for the first time since I began building it. What happened stunned me. Undergraduate students built real tools, research ideas, and solutions they care about. What they did not know is that these students collectively read over 30,000 scientific research abstracts! Thousands of new ideas have been created. There are at least 3-4 viable new businesses (eg, FSU’s first subletting marketplace, a working 3D model of the brain). You can’t just do this with ‘AI.’ Here are some of the public projects here: https://forms.gle/ZZcZBKri1vGRkukr7.
This brought me to tears after what felt like a decade of failing. That is why play is important. You would never be able to do such things unless you temporarily relax the rules in organizational life.
Required readings
March, J. G. (1976). “The Technology of Foolishness.” In J. G. March and J. Olsen, eds., Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations. Bergen, Norway: Universitetsforlaget.
Maslach, D., Branzei, O., Rerup, C., & Zbaracki, M. J. (2018). Noise as Signal in Learning from Rare Events. Organization Science, 29(2), 225–246.
Discussion questions
1. How can play improve the validity of learning?
We know a lot about how organizations improve reliable learning through routines, standards, and efficiency. We know less about how playful action helps people notice deeper, weirder, or more uncomfortable lessons that would otherwise be ignored.
2. How can organizations learn from failure without stigmatizing the people connected to it?
Failure is often treated as useful in theory. In practice, it is a risk. A key challenge is to understand how scholars and organizations can design settings where people can examine errors without shame, blame, or social punishment.
3. How can we create playful systems to help people learn from ambiguous feedback? As March (p. 72) says, how "might [we] better adapt the model children to adults?"
In many settings, feedback is noisy, delayed, emotional, or hard to interpret. This raises a methodological challenge: how can we study whether play helps people draw better lessons?
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