With ‘liberating laughter’ we mean the ability to install an atmosphere of play, pun and humor to build social ties, ease seriousness, relax constraints in thinking and encourage original combinations of knowledge.
Tips for good practice
- Encourage bantering, puns, riddles and practical jokes in everyday team work to facilitate team spirit and release from seriousness.
- Bi-sociate: Seek reversal of logic and inversions of concepts and assumptions by identifying and exploring seemingly incompatible models or frames of reference. Play for example with words, explore metaphors, associate, try new and wild combinations of things (Koestler 1967).
- Explore peculiar & strange ideas that break with normality and have no other apparent quality than seeming beautiful and interesting.
- Conduct ritual cleansing of undiscussables and bad habits by exposing them, taking them to the gutter and replenish their meaning anew. Examples include introducing anti-narratives that exaggerates habits of complaint or staging ritual burying of old ideas/methods/habits (Bakthin 1984).
- Create and mark space for play, e.g. by ritualizing creative sessions and using objects as social markers for untamed exploration, e.g. a piece of chocolate for informal sparring or a green flag or hat for free associations.
Disablers: Seriousness without laughter. Laughter without seriousness: the irony trap or believing that laughter without deep knowledge leads to innovation. Laughing of people instead of with them.
Readings for inspiration
Koestler, A. (1967) The Act of Creation. Penguin, part 1.
Schrage, M. (2000) Serious Play. Harvard Business School Press.
Mainemelis, B. and Ronson, S. (2006) “Ideas are born in fields of play: Toward a theory of play and creativity in organizational settings”. Research in Organizational Behavior, 27: 81-131.
Bakhtin. M. (1984) Rabelais and His world. Indiana University Press