"The organizations I've seen struggle with adoption have one thing in common: they invested only in the serious use cases. They skipped play entirely and went straight to ROI. In doing so, they missed the fact that play is how you build the population of people capable of delivering the ROI in the first place."

As an instructional designer and former adjunct professor, I know that adults learn new things badly when they are afraid of getting them wrong. Dr. Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has documented across decades of research that play is how the brain safely rehearses unfamiliar behavior; without it, people default to the patterns they already know. Instructional designer Karl Kapp makes a parallel argument for workplace skill-building: people will not practice a new skill at the level required for mastery unless the practice itself feels safe, low-stakes, and a little fun.

AI in associations is exactly the kind of new skill that research is talking about. Staff are quietly anxious about getting it wrong, embarrassed about how little they already know, and uncertain whether experimenting on the clock is even allowed. A structured play pilot resolves all three at once: it gives explicit permission, lowers the stakes, and turns experimentation into the expected behavior instead of the suspicious one.

Play is not the opposite of rigor here. It is the mechanism that makes the rigor possible later.

I think play-informed training makes a great intro to AI after your organization has drafted some basic guardrails and selected (at least temporarily) a preferred LLM (e.g., ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Gemini). If you agree, download my free AI Prompting Practice toolkit for associations and get five step-by-step play activities grounded in adult learning principles. If this feels overwhelming to you on top of all of your other tasks, please don't hesitate to [reach out so we can discuss](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Upskilling with play) either a limited engagement or full-service AI implementation help!

Sources:

1. From The case for letting people mess around with AI, Michael Domanic, Section Transformation Brief newsletter, May 30, 2026.
2. From Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, Stuart Brown, 2009.
3. From The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, Karl Kapp, 2012.