I recently spent some time laughing hysterically while playing board games with my kids. There’s nothing better than watching a kid unleash an enormous laugh, is there? It got me thinking about the many things we can learn from child’s play that apply directly to our lives today as hard-driving, world-conquering, eat-nails-for-breakfast adults:

1. You Need a Challenge. With nearly every game ending in a tie, the primitive and simple game of tic-tac-toe gets old in about three minutes. That’s because human growth and fulfillment come in the midst of challenge. “A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner”, the English proverb states. We are meant to take on complex challenges, gaining confidence through achievement. If you are feeling stretched, this is a good sign and indicates you are becoming stronger and more powerful. Conversely, if you find yourself punching the clock and mastering your surroundings, it’s time to push yourself to a more challenging game.

2. Listen to Your Instincts. Remember the game “You’re Getting Warmer” where one kid is blindfolded and has to find another. With each step, the other kids chant “you’re getting warmer” or “you’re getting colder.” Try playing this game by yourself. It turns out we have an incredible ability to tap into our own intuition if we simply listen. When you make various choices in life, your instincts tell you if you’re getting warmer or colder. Deep inside, you know if your moves are driving you closer to your life’s vision or if your choices are destructive and luring you away from reaching your potential. Kids listen to their intuition, but we adults often fail to hear.

3. Playing the Game is the Fun Part. Imagine you’re “it” in a game of hide-and-seek, but when you open your eyes everyone is in plain sight. Sure, you “won” the game but it certainly wasn’t enjoyable. As adults, we are often so focused on future outcomes that we fail to savor the moment. In the midst of the game with the rush of uncertainty, we find joy and delight. When the game is over, kids insightfully say, “let’s play again!” It’s time to start enjoying the journey instead of postponing our happiness.

4. It’s Best When It’s Your Turn. Every kid wants to go first because they get to be the active driver of their experience. Knowing this, why do so many of us relinquish our power and allow life to happen “to” us? Studies show that happiness at work is often linked to jobs where individuals have more autonomy. Of course, this same principle goes far beyond our careers. We’re wired to be the architects of our own existence, not the subjects of others. In an era with nearly limitless possibility, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be calling your own shots.

In today’s turbulent times, many of us are in a state of imbalance, stress, or even panic. Yet sometimes the most potent insights are right in front of us. As my 14-year-old son likes to tell me, “get your head in the game, Dad.”

Go ahead. It’s your turn to spin the wheel.

The Power of Lego to Inspire

If you didn’t play with Legos as a child you missed out. The good news is that it’s never too late. Lego – and any tactile construction-type child game like it – can help adults jump-start their creativity no matter how old or uninspired. This short moving will get you thinking about Lego and all the ways it can inspire your creative thinking: http://bit.ly/bVQLgr

The 6 Myths of Creativity

Do you need to inspire creative work in your organization? A recent study shows that the ways people usually think about creativity in organizations are not necessarily born out by the facts. Get the real scope on how to make creativity work for you here: http://bit.ly/d3xJVU

Sometimes It’s Just a Picture that Inspires

One sign of a truly creative mind is to take ordinary household items that don’t usually come under the category of inspirational and use them to create wonderful new ideas and mental landscapes. The artist here clearly thinks out of the box, the egg carton, and the bowl: http://bit.ly/cIEEZt

Helping Left-Brainers Become Creative

It’s not just the accountants and the lawyers – there are a lot of left-brain people in the workplace, and they need help becoming more creative. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to ease left-brainers into a more creative working mode. Find ten suggestions here: http://bit.ly/c0wTKS

We’ve all heard people in the business world proclaim that they are “heads down” on a project. Or that they are unable to explore new opportunities since they are “heads down in execution mode.”

Consider, for a moment, the advantages of being “heads up” instead. Let’s compare the two states of being:

Heads Down
Focused on delivery
Tuning out distractions
Avoiding influence from your surroundings
Execution
Getting things done
Right now
What is
Deadlines

Heads Up
Focused on possibilities
Embracing new things
Welcoming outside influence
Curiosity and awareness
Questioning everything
The future
What could be
Imagination

There is a time and place for both approaches. When you are working to ship a new product out the door, you better hope your team is in full “heads down” mode. The problem is that so much of the business world is in the heads-down state of mind, that it becomes difficult for us to shift to heads-up position. It is even more difficult trying to bounce back and forth between the two.

The urgency of heads-down demands usually trump the longer-term importance of being heads-up, so many people rarely visit this vantage point. As you work to expand your creative capacity, make sure to proactively schedule some heads-up time for your team, and hold each other accountable not only for grammatical errors on a memo but, more importantly, for being heads-up and unleashing your imagination and creativity.

Remember the old TV spots: “You got your peanut butter in my chocolate! No, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter! Delicious!” Two great tastes brought together to create something remarkable, as the slogan goes. Combining two distinct concepts in order to form an entirely new one is the root of The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup technique.

Think about some of the items you use every day, and you’ll likely be able to trace them back to their origins – the combination of two or more distinct items or ideas. The SUV you drive is a combination of a car and a truck. R&B music was a fusion of Rhythm & Blues. The ever-popular Sunggie is a combination of a blanket and a sweater. Your La-Z-Boy recliner – a combination of a bed and a chair. American Idol is a mix of talent show, live concert, and reality TV drama (character development, arguing judges, etc).

The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is not only the foundation of thousands of products, concepts, scientific advances, artistic endeavors, and even efficiency gains, but also a powerful brainstorming technique to generate fresh ideas. Creative challenges of all sizes and shapes can use be conquered using this framework.

A good way to put the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup to work for you is to first list as many “ingredients” as possible. If you are working on a better way to deal with customer complaints, list all the current ways you handle the complaints along with all the other examples you can find from your industry and other industries. Maybe an unrelated field such as high-end hospitality does one thing while a fast food burger joint does something very different. Once you have a long list of possible ingredients, try random combinations to see if you can get a better end result by combining two things that were previously unconnected.

To push your thinking even further, include random things or ideas in your list. In the above example, what if you included a touch-screen kiosk? Or a gardening tool? Or a set of paint brushes? Or a Broadway musical? Or Oprah Winfrey? You can go so far as to flip open a dictionary (remember those?) to a random page and grab any word that you stumble upon. It can’t hurt to add them to the list. What you may discover is a completely unorthodox and refreshing approach to your creative challenge, and new ideas that you otherwise never would have imagined.

This week, take this technique out for a spin with your team and let me know what you think. The combination of two distinct ideas into something fresh and original just may turn out….delicious.

Buying a pair of shoes used to involve going to a local store, selecting a pair from about 250 choices, and walking out with a box in hand. That was the model for shoe sales for the last 200 years. The shoe store owner was happy. You were happy. Everyone was happy. Until that model was completely shattered by Zappos.

As you probably know, Zappos is an online shoe store that stocks over 1 million pairs of shoes. They ship for free…both ways. So you can order 10 pairs of shoes, try them all on, and send back the nine you don’t like. They also consistently rank in the top 5% for customer service right along the Ritz Carlton and other luxury brands. Before they reached their 10th birthday, Zappos became the largest shoe store on the planet reaching over $1 billion in retail sales.

So in this new world, you as the customer are happy. Happier, in fact, with a bigger selection, great customer service, and total convenience. Zappos is happy (company was recently sold to Amazon.com for $800 million). But what about the local shoe store? Not so happy. Not so happy at all!

That local shoe store was Zappos’d. The name Zappos is derived from the Spanish word Zapatos (shoes). Based on the impact Zappos made to the shoe industry, I believe a new phrase has been invented: Getting Zappos’d.

Zappos. (ZA-pos) Verb. To crush one’s competitor. To eat another’s lunch. To overwhelm an adversary with so much innovation and creativity that they succumb to your will. To rewrite the rules of the game and render your opponent helpless. To demoralize your enemy via breakthrough innovation.

The thing is… this isn’t just happening in the world of shoes. In fact, nearly every industry is in the midst of massive upheaval. How many people do you know the Real Estate industry that have been Zappos’d? What about retail? Think how the world of consumer electronics is in a constant arms race for competitive advantage. Makes you wonder who’s going to Zappos who.

In this post-recession era where companies are hyper-focused on cost-cutting, efficiency gains, and “sticking to their knitting”, maybe it’s time that you focus on how you are going to Zappos your competitors. You can only cut so far, and at some point you need to innovate and grow to win.

My suggestion for this week… gather your best and brightest, start with a blank sheet of paper, and really brainstorm on what you can do to Zappos your industry. You’ll have fun and probably end up with a long list of possibilities. You can bet your competitors are doing the same thing. And at the end of the day, it is much better to be doing the Zappos’ing than getting totally Zappos’d.

As kids, we go out to “play”. Later in life, we “play” sports, or “play” music. But then, in sharp contrast, we leave our homes each day and go to “work”. The term implies doing uninspired, often boring and generally yucky things. Parallels of going to the dentist, waiting in line at the DMV, or filling out endless forms come to mind.

What if we flipped the terminology, and started calling “work” something else… “play”. Instead of a workforce, our companies could have a playforce. Think about it… “Bye honey, I’m running off to play.” “Oh great dear, have a nice day at the playground.” Have a conflict? Maybe you should “play” it out.

The research consistently shows that elements of play drive the most creativity, which has become the currency of success in the new generation of business. Play stimulates the mind and the soul, and allows us to break out of the drudgery. Work is about completing tasks, maximizing efficiency, and delivering outcomes. Play can do those things too, but we add fun, imagination, movement, and an energizing lightheartedness to the mix.

The average 1st grader laughs over 300 times a day while the average adult laughs only 17. No surprise that kids are more creative than adults.

Even if you can’t force a company-wide change in terminology, go ahead and make the swap in your mind. You’ll notice a new bounce in your step, and a renewed sense of energy and excitement about the day ahead. Forget about “working” through your next tough business challenge… try “playing” through it instead.