Hello how are you?

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My name is Vinicius and I'm a designer and ghostbuster here at Ensaio.

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Calm.  Did you say “ghostbuster” yourself?

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Yes Yes.  You heard right, but don't worry I'll explain  the reason for this  soon.

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I was invited to talk a little about how play and playful thinking can be the key to creativity and here in our case, to productivity as well…

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Assay is an innovation laboratory and, by selling it, we need to research, study, breathe innovation, and even more, we need to innovate at home.

Blacksmith's house, iron skewer, right?

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Of course, as designers, we need to deliver our projects, make our clients achieve their goals, and this obviously takes most of our time. So we have to race against the clock to be able to harness innovation to customers and to our own in-house innovation.

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Soon, we come to  a fundamental pillar that we need to have here at Ensaio: Productivity.

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Like us  can we be as efficient as possible in a healthy way?

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Today I have two answers to that: Through our process, which involves the Scrum framework, our tools and, of course, the people.

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And I say more:  if we want to go deeper, everything, absolutely everything comes down to people.

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Talking about creativity itself, I found a really cool article on the translluddus portal and would like to share an excerpt with you:

"Understanding creativity as the potential to make new possibilities and solutions emerge in challenging situations, Howard Gardner, father of the Multiple Intelligences theory, in his research on creativity found that great creative geniuses of humanity had a playful state, which he called the state of puerile curiosity, of asking apparently strange questions, such as: “What should it be like to travel at the speed of light?”.

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Using imagination. Einstein, for example, called himself the most curious person he knew, certainly as imaginative as a child.

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Nowadays we see many cases of work environments  that not only do not promote but also inhibit the most playful and fun thinking and, unintentionally, end up slashing people's creativity

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I still haven't met anyone who likes to work in a bad environment where there is no respect and trust and I doubt you would either. This is one of the main values I have. if  millions of years ago a species of fish came out of the sea and started the evolution that brought us here, making you and I have to work from Monday to Friday to pay our tickets, so, since we need it, why not do it have you given the best possible environment that gives space, respect and trust for people to produce, create and why not, continue evolving more and more?

While we need this environment to be creative, no team can be productive without trust! If we feel good and happy at work, the tendency is for people to feel more and more secure and confident and to lose the fear of making mistakes. Here in our context, being afraid of making mistakes means paralyzing, not taking risks, not evolving and, as Eric Ries would say in the book “A Lean Startup”, the only competitive advantage a company can have over its competitors is speed. of creating, testing, and gathering feedback, what he calls a feedback loop.
 

Believe:  the idea you had, surely someone in the world has had one like it. So, the difference is who can successfully put it into practice first.

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At this point, we are well supported by agile methodologies and by the scrum that, through all its events, allows us to always evolve in terms of deliveries (both internal and projects) and also evolve our relationship as a team, through retrospectives, by example.

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Break this tie and make the team more and more confident  it means having one less barrier to, for example, sharing an idea, no matter how dumb it may seem, and this results in an idea that is on the table and that the team will co-create on top of it to reach the necessary goal.

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So we use play, the playful environment, as a very important component of our days and this in a very general way, from gamification , where we have colorful dashboards , which demonstrate the progress of our goals for each area and projects in the week (to the intimate ones, the sprints-goals ) to the craziest names that we give to stop everything: our areas, task boards, projects, events, everything, even our selective garbage collection has a name.
 

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Remember the Ghostbusters story?

So, Ghostbusters is the name of the area of productivity, making an analogy to the wonderful 1984 movie (which I am particularly a fan of). The area receives this name because in  our work, as well as theirs, show up ghosts we've never seen and we have to invent many weapons never before imagined to capture them  or, translating it to our context, we are going to face countless situations that we have no idea about and we will have to create metrics, events, tools, processes in order to be able to help the teams to have a healthy and productive work that can generate the expected results.

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You know the content people, who are producing all of this that you read, watch and listen to? Their task board is called Dunder Mifflin and every event and sprint (which is the workweek) has a name totally tied in some way to the show (which I'm also a fan of) The Office.

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Our innovation projects are always born with a goal determined by the client, from which we have meetings just to give names that translate this goal and symbolize all the identity and materials that the project will have.

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We believe that through fun, companies can create a way to align corporate goals while empowering teams.  

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And in your company, is the environment conducive to creativity? Do you work in a more serious or cool environment?

Tell us what you would like and could implement in your daily life to get closer to a more playful environment that allows and facilitates creativity...