Why Transformation Can Feel Lighter – and What That Has to Do with «Playful Business»

I'm often asked whether change processes can be approached with a smile – withoutlosing seriousness in the process. My answer: not only can they. They should.

A few months ago, I was listed on LinkedIn as one of the top 20 consultants in the DACH region for «Playful Business». Honestly, it surprised me – not because the term is wrong, but because I rarely talk about what I'm actually doing there. Time to change that.

What transformation often does to us

When I ask leaders at the start of a transformation process how they feel, I hear thesame words with remarkable frequency: heavy. Slow. Draining.

That's not surprising. Transformation means uncertainty. It disrupts habits, questions the obvious and asks people to change – which, neurologically speaking, is simply uncomfortable.

But is that inevitable?

I think: not entirely. And the difference often lies not in the weight of the topics themselves, but in how we work with them.

• Change that only feels heavy creates resistance.

• Change that also releases energy creates movement.

What «Playful Business» is not

A brief clarification, because misunderstandings are predictable:

Playful Business does not mean trivialising serious topics. It doesn't mean dressing up strategy workshops with team-building games. And it certainly doesn't mean using warm-up exercises to avoid difficult conversations.

Playful Business is about switching the working mode without losing sight of the goal.

What happens in my workshops

In my work with leadership teams and transformation groups, I've been using formats for years that go beyond the classic cycle of presenting and discussing. Some examples:

• Ball-Point Game: A simple simulation that shows in 20 minutes what teams often can't learn in months: how self-organised work actually functions – and where hidden optimisation reflexes slow the system down.

• Race to the Moon: A playful vision methodology for the participatory involvement of large groups in vision work. Teams that were previously uninvolved come up with astonishing images of the future and visionary approaches – and thus open up the discussion about what a “desirable and connectable image of the future” means in uncertain, ambiguous situations.

• Pair Run and Spiderweb: Physical formats that make systemic dynamics tangible without a single concept slide. What the Spiderweb reveals about dependencies in an organisation stays with people longer than any stakeholder map.

• Planning Poker and Participative Budgeting: Familiar formats from the agile world –but deployed in unexpected contexts, they trigger conversations that would never happen in classical decision-making rounds.

What these formats share: they create experience rather than explanation. And experience runs deeper.

What's really happening

When a management team loses the Ball Point Game together—and then wins—it has a different quality than a lecture on self-organization. The emotion and the shared experience are real. The insight is gained through genuine experience and even anchored physically. It goes without saying that laughter is allowed, and the question “How do we do this in our everyday lives?” no longer needs to be asked.

That's exactly what I mean by «lighter»: not superficial. But accessible. The path to insight sometimes runs through curiosity and energy – not always through exhaustion and resistance.

• Playful formats are not the opposite of seriousness.

• They are sometimes the fastest way to get there.

What this might mean for your organisation

I regularly see groups that are skeptical at first (“We don't have time for games, we should be working on the task at hand”) talking about their own collaboration differently after an hour than they would after days of conceptual work, because the playful approach creates spaces where their own truths can emerge. This is not a trick. It is a method—systemically grounded, experience-based, and impact-oriented.

If you're curious about how this might look in your context, I'd be happy to tell you more. Not with a sales pitch, but in a conversation.