How Strategic Absurdity Sparks Soul-Aligned Ideas
EPISODE 2
Play fuels clarity. It resets your system, stirs creative energy, and opens space for what's ready to come in.
But here's what most people miss. Play isn't a break from strategy. It is the strategy.
In this episode, Kaitlin unpacks why the weird detour, like the stuffie battle, the luxury ice cream cone for a Yeti, the wildly improbable business plan, is often the exact move that breaks the loop. From Nintendo's "lateral thinking with withered technology" to a 56-version podcast cover that finally percolated through deliberate absurdity, this is what it looks like when play becomes a repeatable system for movement.
The breakthrough comes in through the side door.
NERD OUT WITH ME
I’m a nerd. You’re a nerd. We’re all nerds. Ok. Ok. No, we’re not. BUT if you would like to jump in and go deeper into some of what we mentioned in this episode, here you go.:
Nintendo's Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology — How Nintendo's greatest designer used old, cheap technology in unexpected ways and won. Play as creative constraint.
The Games Infants Play: Social Games and Oxytocin — Social play between mothers and infants elevated oxytocin in both, measured in real time.
Oxytocin Response Following Playful Mother–Child Interaction — Playful interaction elevated oxytocin in earthquake survivors. That increase predicted better child behavioral outcomes two years later.
Curiosity about one thing improved memory for completely unrelated material — A curious brain encodes everything nearby, not only what it set out to learn.
Polyvagal Theory — The nervous system has a dedicated circuit for safety and social engagement. Play activates it.
Flow shows up as dopaminergic activity the brain, measurable on a brain scan. People who experience it more often have denser dopamine receptor populations
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to The Alignment Engine, where high performing humans get a glimpse below the hood and explore how soul, systems, and strategy click into place and accelerate the road ahead. Buckle up. Let's roll.
Hey, friends. Welcome back. Today we are talking about play. Most of the time we think about play as something for kids or a break or just for fun. But we're going to talk about play as something that fuels movement, something that disrupts the stuck, stirs up the creative energy and shifts us into a rhythm that actually flows.
And make space for something more deeply soul aligned to show up. I'll share how I've used it in parenting in business and in the middle of a creative loop that was circling forever. Let's see what opens up when we make space for the [00:01:00] unexpected.
As a parent, I've noticed how hard it can be to flip into imagination mode. If you're a parent, my guess is you can probably relate. There's a specific kind of moment of, "oh no," that shows up when my kid says "let's play stuffies vs. sea monster" again, and I know it's gonna require full commitment. Full dialogue. Full on weirdness, which I love.
But also, I'll be honest, sometimes I'm like, "How about a card game? A sword fight? Board game? Nerf gun battle? I'm totally down for some Nerf guns." Sometimes something with just a smidge more structure than full on make believe narrative play is so much easier.
The reality is imagination play [00:02:00] is harder. Those creative neural pathways don't get as much use in adulthood, and they do require more energy to access them now, but when I let myself go there, really drop into it and embrace the imagination, something opens up.
His face lights up differently. I'm a little different too. The dynamic between us smooths out. That kind of connection carries over not just for him, but for me too. And what's wild about it is that it's not just for that moment when we have a good creativity-fueled play session, even just 5 or 10 minutes of full on immersed in imagination zone.
He's more regulated. I'm more present and there's this rhythm that just starts to form that carries us through everything else. Getting dressed, eating, lunch, all the transitions. It's like we've resynced and honestly, that's taught me a lot about how I treat my [00:03:00] own energy because if play helps him shift into calm, into connection, what might it be doing for me too?
It turns out that play is nervous system work are wrapped up in giggles and stuffed animal battles. There's strong research behind why play has such a deep impact on how we move through life.
Studies have shown that imagination based play and enhances neuroplasticity, reduces stress and anxiety, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and boosts emotional resilience and creative cognition.
It turns out that laughter and unstructured play stimulate the vagus nerve and support a shift into a calm, grounded presence. When we're in creative flow, the body responds by regulating stress hormones and releasing dopamine, not from the outcome, [00:04:00] but from the engagement itself. And this is one of my favorite topics. I promise. We'll dive deeper into it at some point.
And in parenting those stuffie battles, those are oxytocin events. Shared imagination literally helps your body sync with your child's.
And when we engage in something new or unexpected, especially in a way that feels playful, the brain starts lighting up different neural pathways. That kind of novelty supports learning, adaptability, and growth.
The nervous system remembers novelty and it responds to unpredictability as an opportunity to learn instead of a threat, as long as we've created a safe enough space to experience it, and that's what play does. It creates these conditions for learning and clarity and deeper connection. It's a system that regulates the entire nervous system, opens the field for creativity, and brings your entire [00:05:00] body into a different rhythm.
One that listens more closely, one that moves with clarity and embraces new things.
Let's zoom out into business. When I was designing my podcast cover, I got trapped in what we'll call the refinement loop. Tiny little tweaks, shifts from one font to another color adjustments that were just different enough to call progress. Y'all, I had 56 versions of almost the exact same cover. I wish I was joking. I am not exaggerating. 56 versions. Each with a smidge of evidence of these little changes.
It just, it wasn't quite there. I got to this place where I was like, "This is pretty good. I feel, I feel pretty solid about this. We're 80% of the way there."
And then I said, "Okay, you know what? We're just gonna screw it. [00:06:00] We're gonna take this and throw up the ugliest, weirdest, whatever that I can think of. And I'm gonna put in the worst color combinations. I'm going to come up with the craziest fonts. I'm going to put my least favorite pictures in, and let's just see what happens."
Some were so bad, I laughed out loud. Some got deleted immediately. Just in case anybody ever came across that file, but one or two had a thread, a spark, something in them that totally worked.
And from that mess, the final design opened up. New font came in. Bolder, better choices emerged, and I stepped out of this micro adjustment loop that I was circling and stepped out onto something that actually felt aligned. And then a good friend with an incredible designer. I came in and she helped me bring it across the finish line. She's so, so good at what she does, and I [00:07:00] absolutely love where we landed.
But that shift didn't start with the perfect move. It started with a wildly imperfect one, a playful one, a right turn into absurdity, and that's what it unlocked.
It was about realizing how often I try to solve problems with better focus, when what I really need is a completely different lens. Play gave me that lens. It gave me permission to break the thing that I was trying to perfect, and that made the final result much stronger. I think we forget how much of the good stuff actually lives on the edge of absurdity and inside the unexpected.
Here's something I've noticed over and over. It takes a lot of effort to move from 80% to a [00:08:00] 100%. That final stretch. It's not about surface level changes, it's not about tiny little iterations. It's about a bigger internal alignment, and that's why sometimes the breakthrough shows up through the side door.
Okay, so it wasn't abundantly clear already. Boy, mom here, and I am entering the world of video games as life.
So we'll stay on theme and explore how this has shown up in another business. Nintendo. Nintendo's story offers a powerful example of what happens when a company builds from curiosity and intentional experimentation. I did not know this. They started in 1889 as a handmade playing card company in Kyoto.
For decades. That was their world. They did handmade playing cards, but over time they followed a [00:09:00] trail of exploration. They launched toy inventions, arcade machines, even side ventures that made little sense on paper and almost nothing to do with their core business. Some of them worked, some of them didn't, but they stayed in motion.
They kept creating one of their guiding philosophies was something called "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology." The idea was simple: use well understood tools in entirely new ways. The creative leap was about how they used the tech instead of the tech itself.
That's another thing that we can dive into at some point. Because I love this. Creativity can explode when you have constraints. In fact, it's easier to be creative when you have constraints than when you have a blank canvas and limitless possibilities. It sounds completely counterintuitive, but it is [00:10:00] 100% how it works. But that's a conversation for another day.
Back to Nintendo. What I love about Nintendo is that they don't just rush towards what's obvious. That lateral thinking with withered technology was the mindset that led to some of their most iconic releases. The Game Boy, Donkey Kong, and then the Wii. The Wii turned the idea of the traditional game console on its side.
It was built around movement, helping people play with their whole bodies. Instead of reaching for more processing power or better graphics, they reached for joy, accessibility, and family connection, and y'all, it worked. The Wii went on to sell over 101 million units, becoming one of the best selling consoles of all time.
It outperformed the PlayStation three and Xbox 360 in global lifetime sales, all of which had the most advanced specs. [00:11:00] The Wii excelled because it sparked something different. It brought something entirely new into homes. And it did that by leaning into intuition, joy, and creativity instead of processing power and shiny graphics. Nintendo's team intentionally created experiences that bypassed complexity and dropped players into a more embodied present moment state.
Just like we talked about from a nervous system perspective, that full body movement and cooperative play does so much more than we realize.
Nintendo built consoles and they built experiences that felt like energy shifts, and they did that by staying close to the spirit of play, of possibility, of surprise and real time responsiveness to what sparks delight.
That's the invitation. Strategic play as a design principle, a system. It's one of the [00:12:00] most underutilized, under celebrated systems for progress, and it's part of how great things get built.
It brings the energy back into the fold, and it helps ideas move. When we engage with it with intention, the next step often reveals itself.
Even last week I was in a brainstorming session with my team and we were feeling stuck. Y'all. There are only so many ways to market. We were circling the same three moves that we always use. They're solid, but they're not sparking anything new. And to be perfectly straight up, we're a little tired of always reaching for the same three things we always do.
So I said, "okay, pause, pause, pause. We need a detour." And we did. We followed this little side quest to get weird about it, to break the box we formed around ourselves. And the [00:13:00] idea we came up with was completely out there. Experiential, intense off-brand, and something I can almost guarantee you we will never actually do.
We mapped it out, even though we knew it probably wasn't ever going to happen, and then we found that little thread. We pulled one idea out from the absurd version, and that gave us the spark that we needed. It was about waking up the part of our brain that still knows how to play. If we hadn't taken that playful detour, we would've just recycled all the same old things, and instead we touched on something fresh and new and it felt alive.
So let's break this down into something that you can use when you're feeling stale or stalled out in an area of your life. Here is our framework for how to use play to break the loop.
First off, start with your outcome. What are you working [00:14:00] toward? Stay connected to your strategy. Play, doesn't mean aimless.
Number two, cook up the most improbable way to get there. I'm talking thousand dollar ice cream cones sold at the North Pole. I'm talking, selling real estate on Mars. I mean, technically, I guess that's possible, but since we haven't actually been to Mars yet, we'll count it. Launching a spa retreat for dragons. Go big, make it weird. Push it way out past what's practical.
And the next step. Number three, build it like it's real. If this ridiculous plan had to come to life, how would it work? What would you need? What would the result feel like?
And finally, number four. Pause and pull a thread. Zoom out, analyze the idea, pull it apart. Look at the pieces, one detail, one element, one [00:15:00] feeling. That's all you need.
Pull it back into your actual world and let that spark shift something small and see what happens.
Artists do this all the time. It's similar to when we take out our sketchbook and do something absolutely awful that, you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that will be nothing anybody will ever look at. But the process of doing it is everything. Play creates movement. When you're sketching something you know nobody's ever going to see.
With the intent of just for fun, you're opening up a channel that wasn't there before.
So because you're not stuck and you're not waiting for the perfect idea to come you're opening up this pathway for an even better idea to come to you, and because you're having fun while doing it, it creates the space for something more deeply soul aligned to step in.
This process of playing widens the channel and the consistency and the [00:16:00] practice of continuing to go back over and over, even when you don't want to -- that keeps it on.
And here's the thing, absolutely worth underscoring. I am a firm believer that we came to this life to learn, but also to have fun while doing it.
And whatever life throws at us, it's a whole lot more tolerable when we're able to find a way to play through it. To laugh about the absurdity of it, and even in the hardest of times to find a sliver of lightheartedness about it. And trust me, I know that's not always easy, but I promise it will help almost anything.
So here's what I wanna ask you. Where in your life would you benefit from a little bit more play? Where does it feel like you're circling around the same old things that aren't landing or that feel stale?
This could be parenting [00:17:00] money, your schedule, a creative project, relationship dynamics, business planning, even something as mundane as your weekly grocery store run or your workout routine.
Try taking the scenic route. Try inventing a fake business plan. Try building a version of your day that makes zero sense, and then pull one thread that does. Let that detour. Wake something up.
And this is where we take what we talked about last time and build on it. What's something you've been secretly curious about but haven't tried?
Not because it's impractical, not because it doesn't fit, but just because it shakes something up in you.
Maybe it's signing up for a class on something completely unrelated to your work or what you'd consider professional development.
Maybe it's rearranging your entire living room just because.
Maybe [00:18:00] it's going on a drive with no destination, no time limit, and no plan. Just a big open question mark.
For me, it might be rock climbing, a cooking class, and making my way to all of the coffee shops around town.
These are energy sparks, playful resets, adventure and novelty folded in to brighten everything up, and often the breakthrough in your business, your relationships, your next chapter, y'all it. It doesn't come from pushing harder, it comes from expanding wider from being open to more possibilities.
Sure, we just talked about big breakthroughs, but you know, it's not just about that. It's about the way that you move through the world.
What if once a quarter you did something you never thought you'd do, even something you secretly wanna do, but keep brushing off.
[00:19:00] Skydiving may or may not be one of those things for me. (Mom, if you're listening, let's just pretend I didn't say that and that'll be totally fine.)
Travel to a new place. Try a new hobby. Go to a different park with your kids.
Switch up your people, your spaces, your usual rhythm. Just enough to let new connections form. Play invites life in.
This concept – play as a pattern breaker, as a channel, as a way of moving – this is what we call a system. Inside The Alignment Engine, we talk about sou,l systems, and strategy and this? This is one of those systems.
It's repeatable, it creates spaciousness, it generates real momentum, and it makes outcomes possible. This is how we align. By using systems that are alive and play, my friends is very, very alive.
And that is what I've [00:20:00] got for you today.
If this episode stirred something in you, or if you are already dreaming up your version of a thousand dollars ice cream cones for Yetis at the North Pole. Send it to somebody who's ready to shift gears. And if you feel like leaving a review or a rating, I'd be ever so grateful for those too.
If you're wanting to find out more about what we do at The Alignment Engine, head on over to the website and reach out.
Until next time, get playful, get creative, and stay aligned.