Treating Meetings Like a Move in a Game: How a Playful Mindset Can Transform the Way Your Team Gathers

Think about the last time you played a game like Charades. Someone is up front, arms flailing, miming something that seems obvious to them and incomprehensible to everyone else. The room is laughing, guessing, and leaning in. Nobody is checking their phone. Everyone is present because the experience has fully captured their attention.

Or how about a pickup basketball game. Five strangers figuring out in real time how to work together. No agenda or slides. Just a shared understanding of the rules and appreciation for their differing play styles.

As someone who studied architecture and social sciences, I view any gathering, playful or not, as a design challenge. I’ve found the best experiences creatively incorporate place and space to inspire participant engagement.

Work meetings are no different. And yet, in a 2017 Harvard Business Review study, 182 senior managers were surveyed: 71% said their meetings were unproductive and inefficient, 65% said meetings prevented them from completing their own work. These were the people organizing the meetings. Almost 10 years later, not much has changed.

Meetings continue to be cited as a top reason people feel exhausted and dissatisfied at work. Organizations big and small acknowledge the impact both financially and culturally. So why haven’t we been able to improve the status quo? Are we doomed to wasting a significant portion of energy each week?

Change management is rarely simple, but I believe play can help. When it comes to exploring what’s possible and shaking things up, play is one of the most underused tools we have at our disposal. I’ve seen it transform how people show up and design something better. Whether it’s a first meeting, a working session, or a recurring check-in, here’s what I’ve learned from being fully immersed in the world of play and games.

1. The Kickoff Meeting

Every game begins before the first move. The board gets set up, the rules established, the players oriented. Skip that phase and you spend the rest of the experience recovering from a shaky start.

The kickoff meeting is that foundation, a moment to align on purpose, clarify roles, and build enough shared understanding that the ensuing work can move with intention. The cost of skipping or undervaluing it shows up weeks later in misalignment, redundant check-ins, and friction that could have been avoided.

A playful kickoff doesn't just make the meeting more engaging. It creates a felt experience of how the team works together. An activity that surfaces communication styles or decision-making instincts gives the team real information about each other.

Imagine this... The group opens up a shared canvas that's been designed to capture interpretations of the project goals, ways others can help them thrive in collaborative environments, indicators of success and pressure points. After intros and agenda setting, they play a few rounds of a game like Visionary, which challenges an individual to explain a picture while everyone tries to recreate the picture with simple whiteboard tools. From that experience, each person then reflects on the canvas questions. People usually feel more connected and understanding of what it will take to work together.

2. The Problem-Solving Meeting

The collaborative work session, where a team is navigating a real challenge without an obvious answer, is where play earns its keep most visibly.

Practitioners across disciplines have developed frameworks and methods for this kind of work. The names and illustrations vary, but the underlying logic is consistent. Create space to fully understand the problem. Invite and celebrate divergent thinking. Analyze and converge insights toward a central theme. Make the next step clear before anyone leaves the room.

Play can amplify each phase, pulling the whole group into the interaction and challenging them in enjoyable scenarios. There’s also an opportunity to play with tools to make it easier for participants to maintain the energy throughout a session.

Imagine this... Introduce absurd conditions or ask people what the worst solution might be. It’s counterintuitive, but this playful approach is one of my favorite ways to relieve performance pressure. A well-designed (even whimsical) constraint gets people out of their own way and catalyzes innovation. A game like Wing It or Dixit offer some great inspiration for content. Optimization simulations or physical construction challenges are a little more time intensive, but can beautifully illustrate the importance of iteration and growth mindset.

3. The Check-In Meeting

What separates a great sports team from a collection of talented individuals isn't skill alone. It's the accumulated knowledge players develop about each other, who energizes the group, how folks operate under pressure, what kind of space helps each person thrive. That knowledge is built through repeated, attentive presence over time.

A playful approach to the check-in isn't about adding an activity for its own sake. It's about genuine curiosity about how someone is working and what motivates them.

Depending on the hierarchy of roles in this meeting (i.e. manager and direct report, leader to team, equal project contributors), it may be easy to fall into a pattern where one person controls the narrative. But when everyone takes a shared responsibility for bringing something playful to the space, something interesting happens. Groups feel a stronger sense of identity and accountability that flows into the work itself.

Imagine this... Establish an order of meeting participants who are given the responsibility to open a future meeting with a creative prompt. Take 10-15 minutes to play, and most importantly, reflect on what you liked and didn’t like. One of my favorites is called 5-Minute Presentation, where one person presents on a topic of choice. Oftentimes, they'll bring a hobby or recent interest or project, and watching someone nerd out on it is a deeply cathartic experience. The activity also surfaces enjoyable conversation threads that go beyond asking about the weather or list of to-dos.

4. The Meeting You Don't Have

Sometimes the most valuable decision a leader can make is to recognize the opportunity cost of a meeting. Games, especially strategic ones, are built around this trade-off concept. Unproductive meetings and moves both waste the time they occupy and prevent people from executing other work.

Before scheduling a meeting, I find it helpful to ask myself the following questions:

• Is there an agenda with a clear purpose and decision to be made?

• Could we just as effectively coordinate through a document, message, etc?

• Are people drowning in work and needing more time to finish?

• Is there relational value in gathering that couldn't happen another way?

If the responses point toward cancelling a meeting, that doesn’t mean stop meeting entirely. It just means not now. And when the group does eventually meet, participants know it’s truly needed. That’s a very different energy than if people met because they placed a recurring meeting on the calendar 15 months ago.

Imagine this... A team enters a busy sales cycle, and, because of an instituted Friday pulse question (with playful emoji responses) in the team Slack channel, scales back a recurring Monday stand-up meeting to biweekly, while also deputizing an individual who is willing and able to craft a next agenda that syncs the team efficiently. This individual could (and should) rotate around to share the responsibility and elevate different planning or facilitation perspectives. It opens a door for leadership development that will likely benefit the team longer term.

Designing for What Teams Actually Need

At Barometer XP, two frameworks guide how I curate play-based learning. The Depths of Play iceberg grounds the appropriate expectation for an experience. There are 3 levels:

• Team Bonding is mostly for entertainment and forming shared memories

• Team Building uses structured reflection to develop self and situational awareness

• Team Development translates insights into lasting change in how a team works.

Most play experiences stop at the surface. The ones that shift organizations go deeper.

The Pressure Matrix is a diagnostic layer that maps point-in-time team strengths and pressure points to game mechanics and dynamics. There is no universal answer to what game is going to work. Instead, choose games that are responsive to specific and timely needs.

Imagine this... A team leader recognizes that their team is burnt out, both by the exorbitant number of meetings and several project coordination lapses. While a meeting or retreat is likely a part of the solution, suggesting it would accentuate the problem. I find many people in this situation will fail to see the polarity and either schedule another meeting reflexively or recoil from them entirely. Both outcomes lead to a downward spiral. Play can both help identify the genuine pain points (i.e. maybe some feel devalued and others feel bogged down by the AI revolution) across the team, and encourage people to lean into an experience that provides a more holistic fix. What’s often needed is an effective meeting that shows you’re listening to concerns.

Better meetings don't happen by accident. They happen when a participant is willing to design the time with the same intention they'd bring to any other significant investment. A playful mindset — applied with care and backed by honest diagnosis — is one of the most effective tools I know for getting there.

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Want to explore what this looks like in practice? I'm co-facilitating a virtual half-day workshop on better meetings on April 16th. This will be a hands-on session for leaders who are ready to do something different: https://www.barometerxp.com/event-details/playful-leader-workshop-better-meetings