The iRise Blog

I sometimes listen to Krista Tippett’s Speaking of Faith on NPR.  This Sunday’s show was an interview with Dr. Stuart Brown, a physician and director of the National Institute for Play.

First of all, I never heard of the National Institute for Play - and didn’t know that people were devoting their life to studying play. I am also wondering, what a cool place to work (or rather “play”) and how do I get a job there.

So, I did some further research on the National Instititue for Play and found that their mission is as follows:

“We are approaching this work as students of the science of play. We are gathering with other play experts and students to develop projects which will expand the clinical, scientific knowledge of Human Play as well as projects which will translate the knowledge of play into practices and training programs to deliver the benefits of play to all segments of society.”

The research from the NIFP has identified 7 patterns of play as identified below:

• Attunement Play
• Body Play and Movement
• Object Play
• Social Play
• Imaginative and Pretend Play
• Storytelling-Narrative Play
• Transformative-Integrative and Creative Play

There are some interesting takeaway’s to bring to the “corporate table” from this research around creativity, innovation and ideation that is so important to adapting to a changing world.  This type of play is best summarized as “Play + Science = Transformation”.

I encourage you to learn how you can apply this research and add more “play’ to your personal and professional life.

The Speaking of Faith podcast can be downloaded here or you can listen to it here.  The SOF website also has an interesting and short 2-minute slideshow on play occurring in nature that can be found at this link.

[this blog entry was originally posted to the Catalyze Current Wisdom Blog on August 27, 2007]

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I ran across an interesting blog post by Robert Hoeckman, Jr. today on “protocasting” and wanted to share it with the Catalyze community.

What is a protocast?  I am a big proponent of prototyping or simulations as words alone just do not do justice when trying to explain a new system or functionality.  However, Robert’s techniques takes prototyping to an entirely new level.  Robert’s definition of a protocast is: a combination of a prototype and a screencast.  Robert creates them by filming and narrating a simple prototype using a tool like Camtasia (for Windows) or Snapz Pro (for Mac).

Why does Robert make protocasts?  “The less time I spend on what should be simple explanations, the more time I can spend doing other important things for my clients.”

Read more about protocasting in Robert’s blog entry.  Protocasting may be something to consider on your next project.

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In case you don’t follow soccer (if you’re in the US) or football (elsewhere in the world), the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer recently lured English soccer phenom David Beckham to the US for a reported $250 million over 5 years.

Until last night, David has been a bit of a bust on the soccer pitch as he hasn’t played much due to some nagging injuries. But Sir Beckham broke out of the doldrums last night when he scored one goal on a free kick and assisted on another goal leading the Galaxy to a 2-0 win over their DC United rival. Our family was at the game and had a great view of Beckham bending in the goal over a wall of DC defenders.

Here is a great YouTube video showing the goal from about a hundred different angles.

So, you’re asking the obvious questions - what does soccer or $250mm have to do with this blog or the Catalyze community? While a goal and an assist from Beckham has barely made a dent in the cost of bringing Beckham to the US, he has already energized ticket sales for games where he wasn’t even playing and has already helped sell 250,000 Beckham jerseys.

It got me thinking that sometimes you do need to spend money to get the best person to energize your company or take it to the next level. (Plus, writing a blog post on David Beckham can only boost the rankings and visibility of my blog — and I will be able to Google my name along with David Beckham and Catalyze and find this blog post.)

You can settle for mediocrity or you can pay to get the job done right. To further illustrate my point, I ran across a blog entry titled “10 Developers for the Price of One” that discusses software developer productivity - and it discussed that the studies in the difference in productivity between the best and worst programmers ranged from 10:1 to 28:1.

It’s not that the best programmers are spitting out more code than the others, it’s a “total cost of ownership” issue. The better programmers:

• take ownership of a project
• write code with less bugs
• write maintainable code
• do more with less code

So, if Beckham worth $50mm per year? Maybe or maybe not. But he has already generated a ton of publicity for Major League Soccer even when he wasn’t playing up to par.

Now you just have to justify to your manager that you deserve a 28x raise! (note to my manager - I would sette for a 10x raise).

[this entry was originally posted in the Catalyze Current Wisdom blog on August 16, 2007]

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