When was the last time you played, really played?
For Cas Holman, founder and chief designer of Heroes Will Rise and star of Netflix's Abstract: The Art of Design, play isn't childish. It's the foundation of human creativity, resilience, and connection. She worked with LEGO, Disney Imagineering, and the LEGO Foundation and on a mission to help adults rediscover what children know instinctively: that play is how we learn, adapt, and feel alive.
"Play isn't what happens after work," Cas explains. "It's how we manage uncertainty. It's how we cope, experiment, and find our way through the unknown."
In this conversation, Cas reframes play not as a distraction from productivity but as the engine of it. She explains why play is essential for innovation, executive presence, and emotional agility, and how suppressing it has drained creativity from our professional lives.
"Playful thinking lets us reframe success," she says. "It makes us flexible enough to keep moving when things don't go according to plan."
We discuss:
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Why free play (activities that are intrinsically motivated, freely chosen, and personally directed) is the most powerful form of creative renewal.
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How reframing success turns frustration into discovery: "You came to play basketball, the ball's flat, the court's full, so what? Invent a new game."
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Why curiosity and uncertainty are not threats to be managed, but conditions for growth.
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How "breaking" systems or routines can reveal how they actually work.
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And how adults can learn to release judgment, the internal critic that says "I should know the answer" instead of "let's find out."
Cas's insights are strikingly relevant to the age of AI. As technology automates more of what we do, she reminds us that what matters most is how we create, not how efficiently we delegate creation.
"We're outsourcing the wrong things," she says. "Creativity wasn't the problem that needed fixing. It's what makes us feel alive."
Get Cas' book, Playful, here: https://shorturl.at/jxR4O
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