Play as a strategic capability in hospitality and service organisations

Taking its cue from ‘play’, the opening word of our first episode of the Poets of Hospitality podcast, this article argues that hospitality does not suffer from too little seriousness, but from the wrong kind of seriousness.

Drawing on that initial discussion and the authors’ experience in hospitality management research and education, we invite hospitality and service managers, educators, and other professionals to reconsider play not as a distraction from serious work, but as a strategic capability for experimentation, improvisation, and organisational learning. Properly cultivated, play can help organisations become more adaptive while creating engaging and memorable experiences.

Play becomes strategically useful when organisations give employees room to experiment within clear boundaries, permission to improvise, and opportunities to turn what they learn into better service practices (Roos & Victor 1999). Play, in this sense, is not a single activity or temporary mood. It is an organisation’s ability to explore new possibilities without losing sight of its responsibilities to guests, employees, and the business.

Research on strategy-making shows why this matters. Roos and Victor (1999) argue that play can help people imagine different futures through building, storytelling, and working together. Roos, Victor and Statler (2004) further show that so-called serious play can bring hidden assumptions into the open and help people develop a shared view of what the organisation could do differently. For hospitality and service organisations, then, play becomes strategic, as it helps people see, discuss, and rehearse possibilities that established routines keep invisible.

Service organisations have become very good at procedure, and increasingly nervous about imagination. They measure waiting time, standardise greetings, script recovery, audit cleanliness, and turn the guest experience into a sequence of controlled touchpoints (Lemon & Verhoef 2016; Zomerdijk & Voss 2010). This is useful, but it is not enough.

We have previously argued that hospitality is not merely service business but experience business, as its value lies in transactions and time saved, as well as in embodied, memorable experiences and time well spent. Play helps explain how organisations might make that transition. A hotel may execute every standard and still feel dead. A restaurant may deliver every course on time and still leave no trace in the guest’s memory (Kim, Ritchie & McCormick 2012). The trouble is not operational failure, but rather imaginative poverty.

Play as disciplined experimentation

Play is often treated as the opposite of work. That is a grave managerial error as play is not idleness, and nor is it childish ornament. Properly understood, play is the disciplined freedom through which people test possibilities, rehearse alternatives, and make human encounters more alive.

Mainemelis and Ronson (2006) show that play allows people to become absorbed in what they are doing, explore ideas more freely, and temporarily worry less about whether every attempt will succeed. This makes unusual combinations and alternative ways of acting easier to imagine. Play is one of management’s neglected instruments.

Huizinga (1949) argued that play is central to culture. Caillois (2001) showed that play can take different forms, including following rules, pretending or role-playing, taking risks, competing, and improvising. These forms are familiar in business, and integral to how organisations explore possibilities, coordinate action, and stage service encounters. A reception desk, a restaurant floor, a hotel lobby, and a service robot moving through a dining room are all parts of a staged social world (Bitner 1992; Lugosi 2008). Hospitality is delivered, and also performed.

Disciplined experimentation begins with a tension: play needs freedom, and at work it also needs a purpose. Statler, Heracleous and Jacobs (2011) describe the challenge of asking people to explore openly while still working towards an organisational goal. Control the outcome too tightly, and play becomes another procedure in disguise. Leave it completely disconnected from organisational needs, and it may be enjoyable without producing anything useful. The managerial challenge is therefore to provide direction without deciding the answer in advance.

In hospitality, the boundaries are set by service purpose, safety, dignity, and the promises made to guests. Within them, employees can experiment with language, timing, sequence, staging, and service recovery without turning guests into unwilling participants in an experiment.

Experimentation becomes strategically useful when it produces learning that can inform future action. What matters is not simply whether an experiment succeeds, but whether it expands the organisation’s understanding of what might work, for whom, and under what conditions.

Some discoveries may remain situational, while others may deserve further prototyping, testing or eventually become part of a service design intervention. This is what begins to turn individual experimentation into an organisational capability: a repeatable capacity to learn from experience, adapt existing practices, and respond to changing circumstances (Eisenhardt & Martin 2000). Organisations can then remember and reuse what works without turning every good idea into another rigid script (Miner, Bassoff & Moorman 2001; Moorman & Miner 1998).

From experimentation to service improvisation

The important distinction is between entertainment designed primarily for guest enjoyment and organisational play used to explore how service might work differently. The two may overlap, but they are not identical. Play can improve the way service works by changing how employees interpret situations, test responses, and relate to guests. When employees have room to use their judgement, they can vary a greeting, soften a difficult arrival, recover a mistake with grace, or turn a routine exchange into recognition.

Experimentation and improvisation are closely related. Experimentation creates opportunities to try alternatives and learn what might work differently, while improvisation draws on that learning when employees must respond in the moment. In service encounters, there is often little time to test several options before acting. Employees must interpret what is happening, draw on their experience and available routines, and adapt their response as the encounter unfolds. Improvisation therefore combines action and learning rather than separating them in time (Moorman & Miner 1998; Miner, Bassoff & Moorman 2001).

Seen this way, experimentation helps enlarge the repertoire from which employees can improvise, while improvisation generates new experiences that can later be discussed, tested, and incorporated into organisational practice.

That is why play belongs at the centre of hospitality management as well as service management. Genuine hospitableness cannot be reduced to standards alone (Tasci & Semrad 2016; Mody, Suess & Lehto 2019). A skilled receptionist who calms an irritated guest is not simply following a rule. A bartender who senses whether a guest wants conversation or silence is not merely being friendly. These employees are improvising within a structure (Miner, Bassoff & Moorman 2001; Moorman & Miner 1998).

Recent service research similarly shows that frontline employees improvise when unpredictable customer demands, and operational conditions require them to depart intelligently from established procedures (Rayburn et al. 2025). Like jazz musicians, they can depart from the script because they understand the form.

The jazz analogy also points to an important managerial principle: improvisation does not require the absence of structure. It requires enough structure for employees to know what they are departing from and enough discretion to judge when departure is appropriate. In hospitality, service standards, organisational values, safety requirements, and promises to guests provide the form within which variation can occur.

The aim is therefore not to replace procedures with spontaneity, but to avoid treating procedures as complete answers to situations that cannot be fully anticipated. When useful improvisations are noticed, discussed, and shared, they can in turn become material for further experimentation and learning. Play thus connects experimentation and improvisation in a continuing cycle through which service practices can evolve without becoming either rigid or arbitrary.

Creating the conditions for play

Some employees may naturally be more playful than others, but individual playfulness and organisational play are not the same thing. Research suggests that adult playfulness takes different forms. Some people use it to connect with others, while others use it to explore ideas and solve problems (Proyer 2017). However, an organisation cannot build its strategy around being lucky enough to recruit naturally playful people. What matters is the environment around them.

Employees need to know that sensible experimentation is legitimate and trust that responsible departures from routine will be treated as opportunities for learning rather than automatically as failures of compliance. Recent research on play and playfulness at work similarly emphasises that their value depends on organisational context, including leadership, culture, and job characteristics (Proyer & Sendatzki 2026).

This does not mean that managers should tell employees to ‘have fun’. Compulsory fun is usually tyranny with balloons. It is not play, but managerial theatre, particularly when participation is imposed rather than voluntary. Research on workplace play suggests that its effects depend strongly on context and that coercively imposed play can generate cynicism rather than engagement (Firoz, Ghosh & Sharma 2026). This problem is especially relevant in service business, where employees may already be required to manage their emotions and perform prescribed forms of positivity while looking after guests (Fleming & Sturdy 2011; Grandey et al. 2005).

Authentic play cannot be ordered into existence. It must be permitted, protected, and given a purpose. Play also loses much of its creative value when managers decide the outcome beforehand or watch the process too closely. Managers can define the boundaries and pose the question, but they cannot script the answer.

Hjorth (2004) similarly argues that new ideas are more likely to emerge when employees have some freedom from established rules and close supervision. This does not mean abandoning management. It means creating enough latitude for employees to recombine available resources, question established assumptions, and pursue possibilities that existing procedures may not have anticipated. Managers can protect this space for experimentation, but they should not control it so tightly that play becomes just another procedure to follow.

Purposeful play depends on psychological safety, whereby employees need to feel that they can speak up, ask questions, suggest ideas, and try sensible alternatives without being embarrassed or punished for doing so (Edmondson 1999; Frazier et al. 2017). Without that confidence, play is unlikely to flourish.

Many organisations contain ideas that never reach management because employees are unsure whether speaking up or departing from routine is genuinely safe (Detert & Burris 2007). Frontline staff know what guests notice. They know which rituals work, which phrases fail, and which technologies embarrass rather than assist. But they will keep that knowledge to themselves if every deviation looks like disobedience.

In this sense, play can lower the cost of experimentation by creating a protected space in which ideas can be explored before they harden into procedures (Thomke 1998). A playful organisation is not a careless one. It is one that knows the difference between reckless improvisation and intelligent rehearsal.

Putting play into practice

In our experience, putting play into practice does not require elaborate interventions. Organisations can begin with ordinary service moments in which employees have room to test alternatives within clear boundaries, such as greeting a guest, managing a wait, recovering from a mistake, or adapting the sequence of an encounter. Technology provides a particularly useful case because new tools force organisations to make explicit choices about roles, responsibilities, and the boundaries between standardisation and human judgement.

Service robotics makes this principle of disciplined experimentation particularly visible. Introducing a robot is a technical implementation, an also an act of role design. Managers must decide how the robot enters the service scene, what guests are expected to understand, how employees respond when it fails, and which forms of interaction remain human responsibilities.

The central question about service robots is not whether they will replace people. That is an incomplete question because it begins with the machine rather than with the service situation (van Doorn et al. 2017; Wirtz et al. 2018). The better question is what role can a non-human actor play in a human service drama.

As part of Haaga-Helia’s HosByte: Smart Omnichannel Sales for the Hospitality Sector project, exploratory service-robot pilots examined how to give a robot a role that guests and employees could easily understand. Observations suggested that a recognisable name, a clearly defined task, and understandable ways of signalling what the robot was doing helped people make sense of the technology.

However, only when elements of play – in our case, adding colourful stickers directly on the robot to make it look less intimidating – were added, guests started to more proactively and spontaneously interact with the robot. In essence, adding playful elements to the human-robot interaction invited guests to engage and experiment with the robot more freely, leading to a more positive service experience.

These observations should be treated as practical design insights rather than proof that making robots more playful or human-like will always improve the experience. Research nevertheless suggests that playfulness can matter on both sides of the service encounter. Playful and emotionally engaging interactions can contribute to guest engagement, while employees’ perceptions of playfulness can influence how they respond and adapt to working with robotic colleagues (Fang, Han & Chen 2023; Song et al. 2022).

But playfulness is not appropriate in every situation. Yang et al. (2022), for example, found that humour improved customer evaluations following relatively minor robot failures but became counterproductive when failures were more serious. The lesson is not that service robots should always be playful. It is that their roles, behaviours, and boundaries should be explored before they become fixed features of the service experience.

The task, then, is not to pretend that robots are human, but to give them a clear and understandable role in the service experience. This requires attention not only to how guests respond to robots, but also to how employees understand, accept, and adapt to working alongside them (Xu et al. 2023).

Automation can remove repetitive work, but when designed only for efficiency, it can also make it harder for guests to understand what is happening or how to reach a person when they need help. One important potential of automation lies in reducing routine work while allowing employees to focus on situations that require judgement, reassurance, and service recovery (Huang & Rust 2018).

Play provides a way to explore where that boundary should lie by considering what the robot should do, how it should behave, when employees should intervene, and which parts of hospitality should remain unmistakably human.

Implications for management and education

More broadly, managers should stop asking whether play is professional. The better question is whether an organisation that cannot play can truly serve. A business that cannot play can still function. It can still follow standards, enforce procedures, and operate efficiently. But it will struggle to adapt, surprise, recover, and be remembered.

For managers, the practical implications are modest but consequential.

• Begin with a clearly defined service moment, such as arrival, waiting, recovery, or interaction with a new technology.
• Give employees permission to vary the existing practice within clear safety and service boundaries.
• Observe whether the experiment improves trust, recognition, ease, or memorability.
• Afterwards, discuss the experience with employees and guests.
• Keep what works, discard what feels forced or false, and share what has been learned.

The managerial task is to make this cycle repeatable by creating room to experiment, learning from what happens, sharing what proves useful, and preserving enough discretion for employees to continue adapting rather than simply replacing one rigid procedure with another.

For educators, the lesson is equally clear. Hospitality management as well as service management education requires marketing, operations, finance, leadership, strategy, and technology, but it should also develop improvisation, empathy, storytelling, humour, and aesthetic judgement. These capabilities are unlikely to emerge through lectures alone. Students need role-play, simulations, scenario rehearsals, opportunities to prototype and test service ideas, and structured reflection in which they can try different responses, experience failure safely, and explain the judgement behind their choices.

Whitton (2018) argues that playful learning in higher education can create safe spaces for experimentation, learning from failure, risk-taking, creativity, and innovation. For management education, this means giving students opportunities not simply to learn how service should work, but to experiment with how it could work.

One example of this approach is Haaga-Helia’s Imagineering with LEGO Serious Play Methodology course, where students use serious play to build, share, and question ideas about services and experiences rather than simply discuss them in the abstract. In one recent application, students used LEGO Serious Play to explore acceptable uses of algorithmic management in expert and knowledge work, making otherwise abstract questions about automation, managerial authority, transparency, and human oversight materially discussable.

The future of management will not be won by efficiency alone. Efficiency can be copied. Genuine hospitableness is harder to imitate (Barney 1991; Mody, Suess & Lehto 2019).

Play is not a substitute for operational excellence, but rather a way operational excellence becomes felt. If hospitality is to move beyond service delivery towards experience business (Ascenção & Tuomi 2021), organisations need capabilities that allow employees to do more than execute procedures correctly. Play provides one such capability. It turns service from a transaction into an encounter, from procedure into memory, and from compliance into care.

The serious manager and the serious educator should therefore take play seriously. Its value is not that it pleases people, but that it enlarges what they are capable of creating. It is a means by which organisations recover the imagination without which work becomes mere routine. An organisation that forgets how to play may not immediately fail. It may suffer something worse. It may become perfectly efficient and utterly forgettable.

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