Team Enablement through the Spirit of Play Optimizing Adult Learning – UntappedME
Author: Jose Francis Llenado (RPsy, MA.Org Psy, BS Psy)
Peer Reviewed - Carolyn Burr (M.Lead, Grad.Dip.Couns, B.A.)
Untapped Insight Piece
Untapped Team Enablement Training Series
Untapped’s team enablement training series is designed to foster interpersonal connection, group cohesion, and team level “outside the box” thinking” by creating an inclusive and safe space to practice adaptive thinking and innovation through the spirit of (role) play. The Team Enablement Package is delivered across 3 key spots - Trait Detective, Quest Detective and Reflective Detective. This curriculum which has been informed by research and expertise, blends experiential learning, guided reflection, and interactive gameplay by -
Collaborative Problem-Solving - Engagement in scenario-driven challenges that require logical reasoning, strategy, and collective input.
Trait Recognition and Profiling - Understanding different characteristics that support effective teamwork, using card-based scenarios to highlight real-world applications.
Emotional Intelligence Mapping - Practice self-awareness and empathy through targeted activities, peer feedback, and dynamic role-play.
Communication Mastery - Build awareness of verbal and non-verbal cues, active listening and improvisational dialogue.
Creative Ideation and Narrative Building - Use of metaphors, storytelling, and future-focused prompts to generate fresh ideas and group innovation.
Strategic Thinking in Scenario-Based Challenges - Application of deductive reasoning and creative storytelling to solve problems in trait-based and quest-driven activities.
Innovative Idea Generation through Role-Play - Designing imaginative solutions and constructing narratives that reflect divergent thinking and collaborative innovation.
Training Design
This training with the rigours of CPD accreditation, is built on an Inductive andragogical approach in which learning is derived from processing of a lived experience through facilitated group process and discussion after an activity is conducted. The initial experience operates through a card game team enablement setting that introduces play-based learning tools designed to strengthen team dynamics and inclusive collaboration among professionals.
The Power of Play according to the Evidence
Play enables unlocking Team Enablement in Purpose-Driven Organisations. In organisational contexts where performance pressures are high, play is often dismissed as trivial or counterproductive. Research increasingly demonstrates that play can be a strategic enabler of resilience and innovation.
Neuroscience studies show that play activates dopaminergic reward pathways, which enhances motivation and learning retention, making it a powerful tool for adult learning and professional development (Chang & Plucker, 2023). Similarly, organisational psychology highlights that playful environments reduce burnout and foster stronger interpersonal bonds, which are critical in high-stakes, purpose-driven organisations (Mukerjee & Metiu, 2021).
Moreover, meta-analyses of team training underscores that playful, experiential methods significantly improve team outcomes, including cohesion, adaptability, and collective problem-solving (Klein et al., 2009). In caring organisations that prioritize empathy and collaboration, play becomes a regenerative practice that sustains emotional labor and nurtures creativity (Elsawah, 2025). It is emerging as a serious modality for enabling human-centered leadership and organizational flourishing.
Reframing Play from Distraction to Strategic Tool
Play, at its core, is voluntary, imaginative, and emotionally engaging. When embedded into team culture, it fosters psychological safety by creating low-stakes environments where experimentation is encouraged and mistakes are reframed as learning opportunities (Mukerjee & Metiu, 2021). This psychological safety is a cornerstone of adaptive collaboration, allowing teams to navigate ambiguity and complexity with confidence. Developmental psychology also suggests that play is integral to cognitive flexibility and social learning, reinforcing its role as a strategic tool for adult teams (Lillard, n.d.).
Rather than prescribing rigid frameworks, play invites co-creation and shared meaning-making. In organizational design, playful structures mirror the dynamism of real-world challenges, enabling teams to practice adaptive responses in safe, simulated contexts (Elsawah, 2025). This approach democratizes leadership by allowing individuals across hierarchies to step into roles of influence and insight. In this way, play is not a gimmick but a deliberate modality for activating latent leadership potential and fostering distributed agency.
Evidence-Based Impact of Play (in Individuals and Adult Learning)
The evidence base for play spans neuroscience, psychology, and organizational studies. Neuroscientific findings reveal that play activates the brain’s reward systems, enhancing intrinsic motivation and improving retention of new knowledge (Chang & Plucker, 2023). This makes play particularly effective in adult learning contexts, where engagement and memory consolidation are critical. In organizational psychology, playful environments have been linked to higher employee engagement, stronger interpersonal bonds, and reduced stress, all of which contribute to healthier workplace cultures (Fu & Li, 2025).
Design thinking methodologies also rely on playful ideation to unlock convergent and divergent thinking and inclusive problem-solving. By encouraging experimentation and imagination, play enables teams to generate novel solutions and challenge entrenched norms (Resende et al., 2025). In caring organisations, play surfaces untapped leadership potential by creating conditions where individuals feel safe to take risks and share ideas (Chang & Plucker, 2023). Thus, the evidence suggests that play is not only enjoyable but also a multifaceted phenomenon that enhances engagement, innovation, and connection.
Why Care delivery Organisations Need to Play More
Care delivery organisations, such as those in healthcare, education, and social impact. face unique pressures such as resource constraints and mission-driven complexity. Play offers a regenerative counterbalance by creating space for reflection, renewal, and connection. Research shows that play reduces stress and fosters resilience, enabling teams to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive co-creation (Mukerjee & Metiu, 2021). In emotionally demanding contexts, play provides a safe outlet for processing experiences and sustaining well-being.
Play democratises leadership by allowing all team members to contribute insights and innovations, regardless of formal authority. This distributed agency is particularly valuable in caring organisations, where collaborative problem-solving is essential to mission success (Fu & Li, 2025). By embedding play into organizational culture, leaders can cultivate environments that prioritize empathy, equity, and creativity. In doing so, play becomes not just a source of enjoyment but a strategic mechanism for sustaining purpose-driven work.
The Future of Enablement Is Playful
As workplaces evolve in complexity, traditional approaches to team development are proving insufficient. Play offers a future-ready modality that aligns with the needs of organisations navigating uncertainty and change. Evidence from gamification in adult education demonstrates that playful structures enhance learner engagement and adaptability, preparing teams to thrive in dynamic environments (Elsawah, 2025). Similarly, systematic reviews of creativity in organizational contexts highlight play as a catalyst for innovation and inclusive collaboration (Resende et al., 2025).
When teams play with purpose, they cultivate psychological safety, strengthen relational bonds, and unlock collective intelligence. This makes them not only more effective but also more human and connected. In this sense, play is not a luxury. it is a necessity for organisations that aspire to shape the future with care, creativity, and resilience.
The Inductive Process of Adult learning and Andragogical paradigms
Dole N.D; Ortigas, Perez, (2009)l In Hechanova, (2017) suggests that adults learn best when they involve themselves in the experience of learning, rather than become a passive observer. This is the fundamental axiom of adult learning and transformational leadership-from a top-down perspective to a more democratic exchange of ideas. Play optimizes this as it generates a space for genuine meaning making.
Module designs can either be Inductive (experiential learning) or deductive (framework learning). The former operates from a bottom up learner-centered approach, and the latter from a top down framework approach. In both learning scenarios, facilitators must operate from an andragogical facilitation approach in order to deliver the training needed to maximize outcomes. Most andragogical approaches highlight the importance of outcomes based learning in which learners are facilitated to produce a learning outcome rather than taught how to learn.
A key feature of adult learning is metacognitive and generative learning - reflecting experience through a semi-structured process that draws out meaning and identifies its core components. Deep learning would involve a facilitative process of looking back on an experience in a structured way to make sense of it and figure out what really matters. (i.e. what is this experience telling me). An active process of this examination allows for a regular “update” of the model by which the learner views the experience (Ortigas, 1994; Ortigas Perez, 2008; MacKeracher, 2007, Starkey, Tempest, mcKinlay, 2014)). Learner or coaches role is to facilitate through active learning and development.
Figure 1.0 The Adult Learning Cycle – Psychology of Transformation (Ortigas, 1994; Ortigas Perez, 2008)
Role of Leaders ad Facilitators:
Enabling learning requires essential skills from the coach or trainer. Generally known as “Facilitation”, it is essentially a process of Inductive Group Centered Leadership and Facilitation. Facilitation represents a critical pedagogical skill for leaders, functioning as a process of inductive, group-centered leadership designed to enable learning and development. Central to this practice is the facilitator’s capacity to recognize and integrate the learner’s subjective reality with objective instructional goals, thereby aligning pace and level of engagement with individual and collective needs. Effective facilitation is characterized by a non-autocratic orientation, privileging participation, respectful listening, and situational leadership rather than hierarchical control. The facilitator’s role is to cultivate psychologically safe environments that encourage dialogue, mutual respect, and shared responsibility for learning outcomes. Within such contexts, the facilitator’s style is ideally participative and democratic, though directive strategies may be employed selectively to highlight or demonstrate essential concepts. Ultimately, facilitation is not merely the transmission of knowledge but the creation of structures and climates conducive to collaborative inquiry and experiential growth.
In addition to shaping group dynamics, facilitators perform distinctive communicative functions that directly support the learning process. These include active listening, which attends to both the content and emotional dimensions of participant contributions, and reflective paraphrasing, which ensures mutual understanding and validates individual perspectives. Clarification serves to make complex thoughts accessible, while linking integrates disparate ideas into coherent discussion threads. Conveying acceptance of all contributions, regardless of perceived significance, reinforces inclusivity and reduces evaluative judgment, thereby sustaining psychological safety. Finally, the facilitator achieves humanness by affirming the strengths, limitations, and potential of group members, fostering an environment of recognition and growth. Collectively, these communicative practices underscore the facilitator’s dual responsibility: to guide the group toward its learning objectives while simultaneously honoring the relational and emotional dimensions of human interaction.
Flattening Hierarchical Structures through Play
Games provide a natural mechanism for flattening hierarchical structures by shifting focus away from titles and positions toward capabilities and contributions. In productivity-focused
environments, structured play such as role-switching exercises, improvisational games, or collaborative problem-solving challenges allow individuals to showcase skills without the constraints of formal authority. Research in organizational psychology highlights that these playful contexts accelerate trust-building and interpersonal familiarity, enabling teams to “get to know each other quickly” in ways that traditional introductions or meetings cannot (Mukerjee & Metiu, 2021). By removing the weight of hierarchy, games democratize participation, allowing latent talents to surface and fostering a culture where insight and creativity are valued over positional power.
Raising Awareness of Creativity and Innovation in an AI World
Games also serve as experiential “laboratories” for creativity and innovation, skills that are increasingly indispensable in a market shaped by artificial intelligence. Playful ideation activities such as divergent thinking games, design sprints, or storytelling challenges. These help teams practice generating novel solutions and reframing problems. Neuroscience research shows that play activates reward pathways that enhance divergent thinking and problem-finding (Chang & Plucker, 2023).
In an AI-driven economy, where automation handles routine tasks, human creativity becomes the differentiator. Games raise awareness of this shift by immersing participants in imaginative scenarios that highlight the value of curiosity, adaptability, and innovation. They remind teams that creativity is not a luxury but a survival skill in markets where AI accelerates change and disrupts norms. Play facilitates genuine creativity by introducing spontaneity in a safe space.
Team Enablement Training in Rapidly Changing Workplaces
In workplaces characterized by rapid change and disconnection, games offer a unifying modality for team enablement training. Experiential simulations, cooperative challenges, and gamified learning modules provide safe spaces for practicing adaptability, resilience, and collective problem-solving. Meta-analyses of team training confirm that playful, experiential methods significantly improve cohesion and adaptability (Klein et al., 2009). By embedding games into enablement programs, organisations create environments where teams can rehearse responses to uncertainty, strengthen relational bonds, and build performance capacity. In this way, play becomes a strategic rehearsal ground for thriving in volatile, disconnected contexts.
Returning to Old-School Group Learning
Games also reconnect teams with the “old school” tradition of learning in groups, where collective exploration and shared meaning-making drive deeper understanding. Collective meaning is formed from the spontaneous discovery of outcomes through play (Piaget; Peterson, 1994) In a sense, games enable the formation of a “meta-game”; ma map of meaning that enables a way to conduct one’s self in various domains outside the game space. This can be further highlighted in the process of inductive learning, outlined above, where meaning is formed through lived experience.
Group-based play, through cooperative puzzles, role-play scenarios, or storytelling circles, revives the communal aspects of learning that digital and individualized training often overlook. Developmental psychology underscores that play is integral to social learning and cognitive flexibility (Piaget; n.d. Lillard, n.d.), and these benefits extend into adult professional contexts.
By returning to group-based play, organisations tap into the wisdom of collective learning, and subsequently unlock untapped talent through fostering empathy, dialogue, and shared accountability. This approach both strengthens knowledge retention and reinforces the cultural fabric of teams, reminding them that learning is most powerful when it is relational and co-created.
This Article contains cited materials from existing evidence-based sources. All referenced content is cited using APA format. A comprehensive list of references is provided at the base of the article, as well as in text citations is the article sections
The reference listing included in this article were constructed with the assistance of AI, which organized APA formatting based on the meta tagging of the bulleted journal articles and references.
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