A Playground for Ideas

When you're a kid, a playground is where you go to try new things.
You climb something you've never climbed before.
You make up games with rules that don't make any sense.
You run around, fall down, get back up and immediately try something else.

And somewhere along the way, growing up teaches us to take things a little more seriously.

In a sense, Ting still feels a little like a playground. There is room to be curious, to get excited about something random and to follow a thought just because it seems interesting.

A lot of ideas at Ting start with someone saying something they aren't entirely sure about.

You're in a brainstorm, someone throws out a thought that sounds slightly ridiculous, and instead of immediately shutting it down, the conversation moves forward. Someone adds to it, someone takes it in another direction, and eventually the original thought has either become something interesting or helped the room get closer to something that is.

It’s about being able to say, "This might be stupid, but..." and knowing that people will hear you out anyway. You don't have to walk into every conversation with the perfect thought already formed.

The playground isn't only open when we're working.

Someone brings a new snack into the office and suddenly everyone's crowding around to try it. There is a very serious discussion about whether it's actually good, someone goes back for another piece, and within minutes, half the office has an opinion.

The same thing happens with music someone discovers, something funny that happened on the way to work, a new restaurant someone tried over the weekend or a completely random piece of internet culture that has somehow made its way into everyone's conversation.

Those little moments give people space to be people. They create conversations that wouldn't happen in a meeting and make the office feel like somewhere you can actually enjoy being.

A playground lets you try things because there are no stakes attached to every move.

Creative work needs some of that freedom too. But once we find something worth pursuing, the approach changes.

That's when the questions get more specific.

Does this actually say what we want it to say? Is there a sharper way to put it? Will someone who has never seen the brief understand the idea? Does it make sense beyond the room we came up with it in?

The fun is still there, but so is the craft.

An idea can start out completely silly and end up needing a lot of very serious thinking to make it work. That's part of what makes the process interesting. You get to play with possibilities, then put in the work to turn one of them into something real.

I used to think growing up meant becoming more serious.

Now I think it might just mean learning when to be serious.

At Ting, we can spend part of the day debating something completely ridiculous and then spend the next hour making sure one tiny detail of the work is exactly right.

We can get excited about a new snack and get equally excited when a campaign route finally clicks.

We can laugh at an idea, challenge it, change it and still care deeply about where it ends up.

And that's what makes Ting feel like a playground for ideas.