In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Joyce Yoo chats with Cas Holman, designer and founder of independent toy company Heroes Will Rise, about Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity (Avery/Penguin Random House, Fall 2025). Holman challenges conventional views on productivity by inviting adults to rediscover the power of play. She shares how reconnecting with curiosity and exploration can unlock the imagination and foster resilience. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can watch the full video at the end of this page.
What inspired you to write the book?
I’ve been designing for play for over 20 years. In that time, people have constantly asked me, “What about adults?” I’ve heard countless touching stories from people about their relationship to play when they were children. I’ve heard about how much they wanted to reconnect with play as adults, and how lost they felt when they tried to do that or when they thought about doing that.
Initially, I thought that I was unqualified to write the book because I don’t know that adults need a designer. I thought that we just needed a psychologist. Then I realized that, in fact, for the 20-year period that I’d been designing for play, I’d been creating the conditions for play either for children or for my design students as a professor at Rhode Island School of Design.
I began to look for what I was already doing. I was already creating the conditions for play for adults, and also helping others do that for themselves, largely with my students.
As a designer, I like to say that I’m agnostic about form. Sometimes the outcome of my design process is a playground, sometimes it’s a curriculum. Sometimes, in the case of adults, it’s a retreat or a workshop. I said, “What if I were to think this through in book form?” I enlisted a coauthor, which was enormously helpful. Five years ago, we started writing.
How is play separate from what we associate with entertainment or leisure?
Play is different from entertainment or leisure in that play is generative. During play, we bring ourselves. It comes from us, and we make it. Usually, it is emergent: It happens while we’re doing it. I think of entertainment as something that’s much more consumptive. Entertainment tends to happen, and we watch it. I think of leisure as either entertainment or play. It’s restful—we might do something that is regenerative. In that way, either play or entertainment could be considered leisure. Yet, in my experience, play is much more generative. And there’s the assumption that since play is generative, it requires more from us. We tend to engage in leisure and entertainment more because we think, “I’m exhausted,” or “I’m worn out.”
We may say, “I’ve already had such a long day, I need to just sit and watch TV, or I need to consume.” But we gain more when we actually bring ourselves to an activity.
Plays asks us to show up, bring ourselves, and think, “What do I want to do? How will I engage with this activity?” But, in fact, there’s a feedback loop where we then get something back.
If we’re playing with someone else, we connect. We reap all the benefits of that. We could play by entertaining each other.
Play is often associated with childhood. Can play be learned later in life?
Absolutely. By the time we’re adults, we’ve learned not to play. In writing the book, I didn’t set out to teach anyone how to play. I’m trying to help people reconnect with their playful selves. Framed slightly differently, you may play a lot, but maybe you’re playing organized sports or video games.
In that case, I’m trying to help you reconnect with the intuitive nature of free play—a slight variation on playfulness. For the most part, adults have what I call a “play voice” that we have learned to disregard. We have an adult voice as well.
The play voice says, “Hey, look at that grassy patch. Don’t you want to go lie in the grass for a second?” And your adult voice will say, “No, you’ll look silly. You can’t go lie in the grass.”
The play voice says, “Oh, I love this song!” and your play voice might want you to start to move around. Your adult voice might say, “We’re in the grocery store. You can’t dance in the grocery store.”
There’s a feeling that your adult voice is a jerk, but some adult voices are a little kinder and gentler. They try to protect us from what we perceive to be a vulnerability, which is public playing as an adult. In fact, it is OK: We can play in public. We can play on our own.
What are the implications of play in this complicated age of social media, AI, information overload, and instant gratification?
The implications are more important than ever. In playing, and in engaging in free play in particular, we bring our attention to the world around us. It’s a way of being very present where we are, whether in nature or in a city or in our home.
Playing is a way of engaging with whatever is around us, whether it’s people or things. In the book, I outline descriptions of different types of adult play. There’s a known and widely used taxonomy of play types for children. I found that when I tried to relate those to adults, they didn’t quite work the same way. Developmentally, children are very different. And socially, of course, play is really different for a child than what it is for an adult.
One of the play types for adults is “attention play”—things like bird watching or people watching. Even when I’m on the subway, I look around and imagine where somebody is coming from or going to, or what the relationship is between two people. All of that is considered attention play. Twenty years ago, that wasn’t so unusual. Most people probably did some version of that. But now our habit is to compulsively check for something. I don’t know what we’re looking for, but we’re looking for something. We probably will not find it. Now more than ever, it’s important that we own our attention. In play, we can do that. It takes practice, but it’s not that hard to reclaim and relearn those skills.
We live in a time where we are expected to fully embrace our authentic selves. Yet ‘adulting’ is also valued and rewarded. Can both coexist?
Adulting can absolutely be playful. There’s nothing about being playful that says that you can’t also pay your bills and feed yourself and your family. Being cognizant of what we associate with adulting and making the assumption that in adulthood we shouldn’t be fun, or we can’t be playful, originated in grade school, where we learned to not play.
Yes, play can be integrated into adulting, not just in the time that we’re not at work, but also in the ways that we work. Whether or not your work specifically includes play as an outcome or as part of its goals, your work process can be playful.
Now more than ever, it’s important that we own our attention. In play, we can do that. It takes practice, but it’s not that hard to reclaim and relearn those skills.
There are opportunities for play everywhere. You can find them in the way you do dishes, in what happens on your ride to and from work, or in dropping your kids off at practice or at school. One of the things that I elaborate on is how to look for opportunities and embrace possibilities for play when they arise.
You write that play is not the opposite of productivity. How can we achieve both?
They can be the same thing. Playing is productive. Of course, it always comes down to semantics: What do you consider productive? One of the challenges is that we often associate productivity with work or with something that generates a monetary outcome.
Play also has benefits—for mental health, physical health, and our social well-being. There’s ample research that shows that. Integrating a playful mindset into almost all forms of work can lead to unexpected outcomes, which is where innovation comes from.
It also helps people who are collaborating, cooperating, or working together in some way understand each other much better. That understanding can lead to new outcomes, as well as simply enjoying work more. I’m wary of saying, “Play is productive,” but I also want to say, “Yes, you can do it.” It is productive.
Play can be integrated into adulting, not just in the time that we’re not at work, but also in the ways that we work.
Can people who thrive on rules and structure also benefit from free play?
Everyone benefits from free play. In free play, we find our own rules and structure, rather than accepting or using those defined by a game or a device. Free play doesn’t necessarily mean the complete absence of constraints.
Free play means that you’re guided by your intrinsic motivation, such as curiosity and the drive to explore and experiment, rather than extrinsic motivators, such as scoring and leveling up. A pile of cardboard doesn’t necessarily have rules. It’s a great material to free play with, but it absolutely has constraints. You can’t see through it. You can bend it. It gets soggy when it’s wet, so you wouldn’t build a boat with it. Or you could build a boat in order to sink it.
When you consider a group of friends deciding what to do with an afternoon, those constraints emerge very quickly, based on who the friends are. There will be constraints that are based on interest and ability, and on the materials on hand.
The materials that I’ve designed for children are used widely with very neurodiverse communities of people of all ages. It’s interesting because none of them come with instructions. But the materials themselves have built-in instructions, such as wood in the shape of planks. Yet how to use it is something you figure out. You can do it based on what’s there. What you do with it originates from the person who’s playing with it. And I have yet to have someone merely say, “I can’t do anything with this.”
As for object play, with any kind of building system—an open-ended one in particular—you play with it in order to figure out how to use it. That might be the case with a pile of sticks or sand.
There’s a sensory element, so it feels good to hold, lift, and connect things. It feels good to have sand run through your fingers. And in the process of just experiencing sand, for example, as a material, you notice it does things. You also notice its built-in constraints. It’ll do this, but not that. Before you know it, you’re making a sandcastle or a drip one. Drip castles are a great example of a type of free play that originated from the constraints of the material.
Many of us suffer from decision fatigue, the idea that something open ended adds pressure. It makes people think, “Ugh, that’s enough. I don’t need more decisions to make. I don’t need more things to think about. Just tell me what to do and let me do it.”
However, free play takes the pressure off the decision, off any decision being the right one. With a playful mindset, you’re able to see the possibilities and embrace what’s in front of you, whatever it is. That mindset is very helpful with decision fatigue because you don’t always have to make the perfect decision.
You know how to make the best out of whatever is around. In that way, I would argue that free play is actually great for many of our lives, where we may feel like we want to go to whatever is easiest.
How can workplaces embrace and implement play?
Workplaces can embrace and implement more play in a number of ways. It depends on what they are hoping for. I’ve worked with organizations where teams did not align. I worked to facilitate play among their teams.
Through play, the teams got to know each other differently and could understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses beyond what was in a job description. Free play is often nonhierarchical.
When people are working in a somewhat hierarchical dynamic, as happens in most workplaces, it’s often very hard to play. So when I work in these environments, I set up very deliberate, careful, nonhierarchical ways that teams can really get into playing and facilitate understanding. They can collaborate with a new dynamic, which is really powerful in bringing teams together.
One way involves playing so that participants can understand and communicate better. Another method involves having a playing mindset. This has to come from the top. There can be room for bad ideas. A bad idea could mean many things.
Usually a bad idea just refers to one that seems unrelated to the question or the problem at hand. But in those ideas, sometimes if you can hang out with them or explore them, there’s often something that can be useful.
If your team is afraid of having bad ideas, they will not be as open or as generous in the brainstorming or ideation phase. You’re less likely to know whether or not an idea is bad if people are afraid to propose it.
There are brainstorming or meeting skills that I like to use that are very generative. They’re “what if” questions, or “why don’t we?” questions. Everyone is engaged in exploring an idea, rather than it being one person’s idea that everyone has to support or shut down.
There are playful ways that we can hold meetings, as well as small steps, such as shifting habits. Maybe you go outside, or maybe you sit in a different room. Maybe you play musical chairs every five minutes; something changes. Maybe there are many different exercises to help change habits. Those are a few ways that you can implement play in your workplace.
I find that remote work is not very playful. It really does not lend itself to a playful dynamic. Of course, there are exceptions. There are ways that we have worked around that, and we’re figuring it out. But with remote work, we’ve lost the very type of casual interaction that helps us understand each other.
We get to know each other’s playfulness when there’s a little bit of “dillydally time.” That’s the old-school concept of the watercooler. It reflects a time when you weren’t necessarily moving from or to something. You could be around one another without the pressure of productivity. With remote work, calls tend to end the minute that a situation is resolved. That’s very outcome oriented, whereas play benefits from being open to unexpected outcomes. That isn’t as likely to happen when you’re just trying to get off the call. As a result, remote work has not proven to be the most playful experience for most people.
If your team is afraid of having bad ideas, they will not be as open or as generous in the brainstorming or ideation phase.
How has your own relationship with play changed over the course of writing this book and after its completion?
My relationship to play didn’t necessarily change in the bigger picture. While I was writing the book, I was a lot more aware of giving language to the things that I was doing—in a way that was sometimes annoying.
I thought, “Why am I explaining this to myself as I’m doing it?” There was a weird meta-cognitive moment of play that was not play. It was slightly disruptive to the flow of play. Yet it changed my relationship to writing because, in order to spend so much time writing, I had to make writing playful. That helped a lot when I brought on my coauthor, Lydia Denworth, who’s a science writer.
Our conversations had to be playful. I needed to take a lot of the content and cut it up, make diagrams, and see it in certain ways that she said she’d never done before. I thought, “How could you ever do this without cutting up the entire book and putting it on the floor? We need color and diagrams, and also drawings.”
There were certain chapters where I wanted to draw a picture instead of writing text. Perhaps my play changed in that writing is part of my play now. But for the most part, it made me really understand adults more.
My relationship to play at large changed in talking to adults about their play, in hearing beautiful stories, and in having adults be vulnerable with me when they talked about what play meant to them as children and how much they wanted it in their lives again.
Was there anything that surprised you while writing this book?
I was surprised by how little research exists about adults and play specifically. We found a lot. And of course, there were people—researchers and thinkers—who have been tremendously influential to my work and my understanding of play, such as Stuart Brown [founder of the National Institute for Play], whose research is pretty broad.
Play is specific to children, and we apply play research most often to children. That was surprising, and I thought we would find more. Also, I was surprised by how much play resonates with people. As I mentioned, people constantly ask me, “What about adults?” They also ask, “When are you going to design something for adults?” And I’ve said, “I don’t think design is what we need.” I could design a beautiful adult playground, yet I still don’t know that we would let ourselves play there. We could still have our adult voice tell us we shouldn’t play, because it’s not productive, because we’ll look silly, or because we won’t be taken seriously. That felt interesting and surprisingly true.
Watch the full interview
