Mind Games

Play's refusal to pass judgment during the creative process reflects its deceptively simple approach to creativity: Look at more stuff; think about it harder. Instead of locking themselves in a conference room with the goal of emerging with the perfect idea, teams venture into the world with a voracious appetite for inspiration. Exposure to new ideas is encouraged through "radical sabbaticals" -- opportunities for employees to climb mountains, explore unfamiliar terrain, learn to surf -- any experience that will inspire them creatively. Play believes that the more connections you make between seemingly unrelated concepts and the more perspectives you have on a problem, the more likely you are to hatch a winning creative solution. "That's what playing is all about," Stefanovich says. "It's an attitude and approach that encourages boundless thoughts. It helps you let go of parameters. If you think about it, you were at your most creative as a child, because you had no fear. You took more risks. No one judged your performance and said you were 'bad' at playing. Our process tries to recapture some of that freedom."

The primary creative group at Play is called the wallpaper team, because it "covers" everything. J.B. Hopkins, 39, a member of that group, explains it this way: "I'm at my creative best when I'm in my stream-of-consciousness mode. Often, my concepts are not clearly or precisely thought out. But if I have to stop and edit them, I lose some of that energy. Because I'm allowed to throw out half-formed ideas and then to refine them later, I'm able to work at my creative peak."

Killer Creative Gets Killer Results

On her flight back from a radical sabbatical in Hawaii in August 1998, Courtney Page wrote Stefanovich a thank-you note -- on an airsickness bag. He was so amused by the gesture that he used it in a speech, as an example of risk taking and creativity. "It's a great example of communicating in a clever, unique, interesting, and more relevant fashion," he says. "I'm not a guy who wants to hold a boring piece of paper. I want to hold that barf bag. I want to fold it up and put it in my pocket and take it home and say to my wife, 'Look, I got a barf-bag letter today.' That's cool." A senior vice president from Nationwide Insurance heard that speech and called Stefanovich to ask him to fly out for a meeting. Two days later, he and Lynn Spitzer, 43, Play's equivalent of a COO, were sitting in a conference room at Nationwide's headquarters, in Columbus, Ohio. Senior VP John Cook walked in and tossed a barf bag across the table. It read, "Let's play." Nationwide was in the midst of a major branding effort that included a logo change. The company had used a stellar agency to develop the new symbol, but it wanted a different approach to introducing it to employees. The new logo was an emotional as well as a strategic issue for Nationwide. Market research showed that although the company's slogan ("Nationwide is on your side") had widespread recognition, its logo did not, despite having been around for more than 40 years. But inside the company, feelings about the logo were curiously strong. Some employees got tattoos of the blue eagle and the letter N. One person even had the logo inlaid on the bottom of his swimming pool. "It was a very emotional issue," says Chris Gay, strategic communications officer at Nationwide. "Forty-five years is a long time; the logo was cemented into our culture."

So Play helped Nationwide design an event to introduce the new logo, as well as follow-up training for a crew of "brand builders" who would help employees adjust to the new brand strategy. The highlight of the event, which was beamed by satellite to more than 30,000 people, was the release of a bald eagle, raised by the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, which rehabilitates birds of prey. Nationwide made a donation to the center and launched a program on its intranet that tracks the eagle using a transmitter in a tag that the center had placed on the bird. "We wanted to have some kind of symbolic gesture that respected the 45 years that the logo -- and the people who had been loyal to it -- had served the company," Spitzer says. "The event was intended to acknowledge that contribution while getting across the need for change."

A follow-up event trained 350 employees on how to teach their peers and colleagues about the brand changes. The new logo was a blue frame with an empty, white center -- an interactive logo into which customers and employees could envision the faces of people the company served. Play suggested that the training room re-create the inside of the frame. So those 350 people, dressed in white Tyvek suits, spent four hours creating the brand in a room that had white floors, white walls, and white furniture.

The result? One month after the training session, a survey showed that 86% of Nationwide's employees understood the new brand strategy. And 90% of them believed that they personally could make the new brand happen.