What MMA fighters can teach us about innovative organizations

Jesse Enkamp, a karate expert and YouTube content creator, recently released some thoughts on why MMA fighters are no longer “heavy sparring” but using other techniques.

He points out that play is the brain’s natural state of learning. Dopamine is high (commonly thought of as the pleasure hormone but is equally associated with learning), and cortisol is low. The stakes are low, but learning is high.

Despite our brains working this way, how many of us set up our teams’ work cultures and practices this way? Why do we value high-stakes, stressful approaches day in and day out? We think we’re pushing our employees as hard as possible to get the most out of them—or, erroneously, hoping that they discover some limits and overcome them.

But this fights evolution and the built-in hardware and software that our brains already have.

In addition to valuing stressful situations, we often devalue playful situations. We think they’re unserious or unprofessional or argue that “work shouldn’t be fun.” Again, this goes against what evolution gave us. When things are fun, we do more of them. More importantly, we learn at a faster rate.

Think of your favorite book, sports team, or celebrity. Could you write me a letter telling me about them? I bet you could gush about the smallest detail and have incredibly nuanced opinions about a particular plot point or how a game went. You know a lot about your favorite things. This performance is despite you never “studying” them. This performance may even be despite putting so much more effort into studying skills that you think will get you ahead. Why does all this trivia come so quickly to you?

Because you learned it while playing. While having fun. While being entertained.

The jury is still out on whether “hardcore” work—replete with stress, yelling, and pressure—gets more out of people in the short term. But we know for a fact that it fails in the long term to get anywhere close to the outcomes you can get from play.

What are you doing to ensure that what generates value for your firm and your customers is fun for the talent doing it? What are you doing to ensure people are playing with the skills they need to take the team to the next level?