Ask a room full of professionals what percentage of their working day is improvised. The answer is always the same: 60, 70, 80%. Maybe more. Then ask how many have had professional improv training. The silence is answer enough.
This matters because AI has made work less predictable, not more. Faster decisions, higher stakes, and more ambiguity. The skills this moment demands— thinking on your feet, tolerating uncertainty, responding to the unexpected with something other than panic—are exactly the skills we stripped out of people somewhere between first grade and their first performance review. A thousand tiny corrections taught us that play wasn’t serious work.
Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has spent six decades studying what happens to humans without play. He defines play as “a state of mind that one has when absorbed in an activity that provides enjoyment and a suspension of sense of time.” He explains that the characteristics of play have to do with mental attitude and motivation and not with the behavior itself.
Improvisers enter this play state through letting themselves say yes and seeing what happens.
Hundreds of years of mental and social programming around productivity being like godliness meant improvisation was left for actors, creative artists, and comedians.
We’ve built a culture suspicious of play. And we’re paying for it in ways the productivity data is only just beginning to capture. The most underrated form of play at work isn’t what you think it is. It’s not a slide in the lobby, bean bags, perks, or free snacks. It’s improvisation—being able to adapt in the moment.
Your brain on play
Research on improvisation and play shows that these activities don’t just change how we feel, they change how our brains work. In a pilot study, researchers at One Rule Improv measured brain wave activity in young people before and after a 20‑minute improv session. They found that the brain’s electrical patterns shifted toward greater regulation and integration—improvements in attention and cognition, as well as released muscle tension. More recent fMRI work on adult musicians and jazz improvisers shows that improvisation doesn’t live in one neat “creativity spot.” It actually lights up distributed networks related to attention, memory, emotion, and social processing.
When we play, our brain shifts into a different state. Play‑based activities naturally stimulate the same neurochemicals that reduce stress, deepen connection, and support learning. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins (DOSE) rise, pulling us out of low‑grade threat mode and into a state where curiosity and collaboration can actually happen. A daily DOSE of play can keep burnout away.
Dr. Brown put it plainly: “If there’s prolonged play deprivation, the ability to adapt to a changing, unexpected world is lessened. The ideology you hold on to becomes rigid, fixed, untrue.”
Where the AI investment is going wrong
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement has fallen for the second consecutive year to 20%, the lowest since 2020, costing roughly $10 trillion annually. Meanwhile, the report points out an MIT study found 95% of companies have seen no measurable results from their investment in artificial intelligence. Gallup’s report found only 12% of employees say these tools have meaningfully changed how they work.
Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. Managers are now only as engaged as the people they lead. And Gallup’s own data shows that the single strongest predictor of whether employees adopt AI is whether their direct manager champions it.
We need managers to drive AI adoption, yet they are the most disengaged they’ve been in years. We’re asking depleted people to champion a tool that demands curiosity, flexibility, and willingness to experiment. The current solutions on offer are more training, mandates, and adoption dashboards.
Nobody is asking what got managers to this state or what would actually restore the curiosity, energy, and willingness to experiment that championing anything requires.
The brain problem
The brain problem has two sides and we’re barely treating one. The first is depletion. Ethan Mollick at the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, calls the output of burned-out teams using AI “workslop”—content that looks like progress, reads like progress, and quietly makes everyone a little dumber. It’s also been referred to as “brain rot.” Meetings generate AI summaries that generate follow-up meetings. Each layer adds cognitive load to a brain that is already running tens of thousands of decisions a day. The highest-performing teams we work with have figured this out. They subtract. By cutting meetings without clear decisions, consolidating tools instead of stacking new ones, and protecting focus time as non-negotiable they create far more brain capacity to focus and do good work.
But subtraction only addresses what’s draining the tank. It doesn’t actually refill it.
The second side is deprivation. A frazzled nervous system cannot think creatively, absorb new tools, or adopt new ways of working. And it cannot rest—not really. Rest is a state you have to be regulated enough to reach. We keep prescribing it to people whose nervous systems are stuck in low-grade threat response, then wondering why they come back from holidays still empty. Play is the on switch. Not a ping-pong table in the breakroom or an item on the wellness calendar. Voluntary, low-stakes, genuinely absorbing play is a neurological reset. It’s the way a depleted nervous system gets to come back online.
The more artificial intelligence we implement in the workforce, the more human our people need to be. Not as a provocation but as the actual logic of the technology. AI can generate, process and pattern-match at scale. What it cannot do is think under genuine uncertainty, build trust between humans or make the nuanced judgments that still determine whether organizations survive. Those capabilities live in a brain that is flexible, curious, and regulated. A brain that plays.
The conditions for sustainable high performance
The teams getting traction are doing both: subtracting the noise and restoring the play. They’re creating permission, the signal that it’s safe to be fully human here, not just fully productive. They’re protecting space, actual cognitive room to exist outside performance mode. And they’re introducing a spark, which begins with a belief that play can deliver unique value, an opportunity to be front of mind, and a prompt or call to action that encourages people to step outside their comfort zone.
These three conditions were discovered after interviewing and surveying nearly 1,000 people globally. This is not about a six-figure transformation program. It’s about rituals and repeatable micromoments of human connection, exploration, and creativity that create the conditions for human beings to actually be human.
A ritual doesn’t have to be complicated to carry real weight. One real world example from one of Dara’s clients is “Kudos & Kinks”—each team member gets 30 seconds to share one win and one thing that didn’t go to plan. It runs in every weekly team meeting and then gets a 15-minute slot at the monthly all-hands so it can be shared across teams.
We’ve built schools that reward compliance over curiosity. Workplaces that treat experimentation as risk. We decided, collectively and incrementally, that play was something children did or a reward after the real work was completed. The bill for that decision is arriving, denominated in engagement scores, AI adoption rates, and a $10 trillion hole that no software purchase is going to fill.
The question was never whether play works. It’s whether we’re willing to take it seriously enough to make it part of every AI strategy.
