At a time when leaders are under unprecedented pressure to optimise performance and consumers are increasingly disengaging from passive brand experiences, this month’s Beyond the Boardroom Breakfast Briefing examined a surprising proposition: that play may be one of the most powerful strategic resources available to modern organisations. Drawing together five converging cultural, commercial and behavioural shifts, the discussion explored how participation, experimentation and human connection are becoming central to innovation itself.
In 2021, a teenager paid nearly US$4,200 for a Gucci handbag on Roblox. It did not physically not exist. You couldn’t hold it, wear it, or resell it at Christie’s, and yet that single transaction told you more about the future of brand loyalty and consumer engagement than most strategy documents produced that year.
Somewhere between kindergarten and the corner office, we decided that play was the thing you surrendered to become credible. Seriousness was currency. The boardroom rewarded gravity. Play was tolerated in a startup that hadn’t yet grown up, or permitted on a Friday afternoon when the real work was done.
That assumption is now costing organisations in ways that are entirely measurable.
At BTB‘s June Breakfast Briefing to unpack the editorial theme of “The Power of Play”, senior brand leaders, consumer executives and journalists convened to sit—and play—with that question properly. What emerged was one of the most candid conversations the series has produced.
The morning opened with a finding that should give every leader in this region pause. A joint study by Calm Collective Asia and Milieu Insight surveying 6,000 employees across Southeast Asia found that Singaporeans feel the least psychologically safe of any workforce in the region—with more than six in 10 saying they are not comfortable sharing challenges with their managers, the highest rate of discomfort recorded across all six countries surveyed. The reasons employees cited were telling: fear of being judged or perceived as weak, concerns over confidentiality, and a broader reluctance to burden others—a set of social calculations that speak less to individual sensitivity than to the cultures organisations have quietly built and tolerated. Across Southeast Asia as a whole, 45% of employees said psychological safety was either poorly implemented or simply did not exist at their workplace. The 2025 DHR Global Workforce Trends Report adds a harder number still: 22% of APAC respondents feel extremely burnt out, nearly double the rate of their European and North American counterparts. The organisations most optimised for output, it turns out, are often the ones least positioned to produce the outcomes that actually move markets.
“What strikes me is how much energy goes into optimising the work and how little goes into optimising the conditions for doing it,” said one chief marketing officer overseeing brand strategy across multiple markets in Asia. “You can hire the best creative talent in the world, but if they don’t feel safe to bring their real thinking to the table, you’re not getting their best work. You’re getting their safest work. And safe is invisible.”
The commercial case is increasingly difficult to ignore. PwC found that 61% of employees believe a lack of trust from leadership affects their ability to perform, while BCG’s research shows psychological safety materially improves retention, particularly among underrepresented groups. Together, the findings suggest that environments where people feel safe to experiment are not simply better places to work, but stronger foundations for innovation itself.
The briefing then did something unusual. Rather than moving to the next slide, the room was asked to participate. Leaders responded to five key strategic questions, not in writing, not in a raised-hand discussion, but by building their answers out of LEGO. Bricks were distributed. The room, initially composed in the way that senior professionals tend to be composed, became something else entirely: absorbed, instinctive, and collaborative. What emerged from the tables was not just a set of constructed responses, but a set of conversations that the formal session had not produced, from cross-table observations, to moments of recognition, and plenty of laughter. The insights that surfaced in those 20 minutes were sharper than those from the preceding hour. It was a small, deliberate proof of concept that play, even in a room full of decision-makers, unlocks a quality of thinking that performance pressure routinely closes off.
“The thing that struck me most was how quickly everyone leaned into it,” reflected one CEO who leads a community of founders and business leaders across the region. “As children, we’re given permission to play. As adults, we seem to spend our lives waiting for someone to give us that permission again. Yet what this exercise reminded me is that nobody is stopping us. We can choose this approach at any time. The energy in the room changed the moment people stopped worrying about the outcome and simply engaged with the process. I’ll definitely be applying this in my work”
The physical environment, the room agreed, either reinforces this or quietly dismantles it. Google, Shopify, TBWA, Cartoon Network—the workplaces of companies that consistently produce culturally resonant work tend to share a design principle that is rarely stated explicitly but is impossible to miss. Permission built into the architecture itself. “The office either gives people permission to think differently or it tells them to sit down and get on with it,” observed one head of creative at a multi-market consumer brand. “Most offices are saying the second thing, even when leadership believes they’re saying the first.”
The same dynamic is playing out on the consumer side, where the brands pulling furthest ahead have understood something the digital maximalists missed, attention is moving away from screens and back towards the physical. Coach’s CEO has described the brand’s cafés as profitable businesses in their own right rather than marketing exercises. Prada’s Caffè has travelled from London to Singapore and beyond. Chanel, Dior and Armani have all invested in print publications designed to be collected rather than consumed.
Hermès transformed scarf care into a participatory experience through its travelling Hermèsmatic concept. In each case, the objective is not simply visibility but immersion: creating reasons to linger, touch, customise and belong. The brands pulling ahead are no longer building campaigns. They are building worlds.
“One of the biggest creative shifts we’re seeing is in how brands are treating participation as a strategic asset rather than a marketing tactic,” said the client head of a global advertising agency. “Consumers increasingly want to interact, shape and experience a brand, not simply consume its messaging. That’s why this idea of “play” is becoming such a powerful resource. It creates curiosity, lowers barriers to engagement and gives people a role within the brand world itself.”
Which brings us back to Roblox. Nike’s NIKELAND generated over 26 million visits. Gucci’s Virtual Garden drew 20 million. Louis Vuitton, Burberry and Balenciaga have followed. Asia-Pacific is now the world’s largest gaming market, valued at USD $166 billion in 2025 and accounting for 46% of global gaming revenue. The consumer who first encounters a luxury brand inside a game doesn’t experience it as aspirational and remote—they experience it as familiar, participatory, theirs. That shift in the quality of first contact has profound implications for loyalty, and for who owns the relationship with the next generation of high-value consumers.
“The brands that are understanding play as a concept best are ultimately the brands that understand time,” reflected one veteran journalist in attendance. “They’re not simply competing for attention. They’re thinking about how people choose to spend their lives. Look at Apple. Its greatest achievement wasn’t building a device, but creating an ecosystem where work, creativity, learning and entertainment coexist. That’s why innovation and play are so closely linked. Both depend on curiosity, experimentation and the freedom to explore. The future belongs to brands that help people spend their time better, not simply more efficiently.”
One of the morning’s most compelling conclusions was that power and play are not opposing forces but mutually reinforcing ones. The strongest leaders are often forged through environments that reward experimentation, resilience and continuous learning, qualities sport has long cultivated. An EY and espnW study found that 94% of women in C-suite roles played sport, with more than half competing at university level. The finding points to a broader truth: sport develops many of the capabilities modern leadership requires, from resilience and adaptability to decision-making under pressure and the ability to recover from failure. In other words, it functions as a form of structured, high-stakes play. As organisations place increasing value on human performance, wellbeing and personal development, the growth of the global wellness economy, forecast by the Global Wellness Institute to approach US$9 trillion by 2028, reflects a wider recognition that competitive advantage is increasingly built through people, not just processes.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met a genuinely high-performing leader who didn’t have some form of serious play in their life,” said one luxury executive who has led multi-market teams across Asia. “The ones who don’t burn out faster, think more narrowly, and struggle to inspire the people around them. It’s not a correlation. At this point, I think it’s a mechanism.”
By the end of the discussion, the distinction between power and play felt increasingly artificial. Play is not the opposite of performance, but rather one of the conditions that makes performance possible. Whether developing leaders, unlocking creativity, building loyalty or creating space for innovation, the organisations pulling ahead are those treating play not as a reward for success, but as a prerequisite for it. The question is no longer whether play belongs in the boardroom, it’s whether organisations can afford to operate without it.
Five takeaways from the morning:
- Psychological safety is not a culture initiative, it’s your organisation’s most underleveraged competitive advantage and the data suggests most businesses in Asia are leaving it entirely on the table.
- The most high-performing people in the world do not succeed despite the time they invest in play. They succeed because of it. That is not a lifestyle observation, it’s a competitive one.
- Creativity is not something you hire for, it’s something you either protect or quietly erode. The conditions you build determine which one you are doing.
- The consumer is not escaping digital, they’re escaping brands that have nothing to offer them beyond it. Physical, tactile, participatory experiences are not a nostalgia play, they’re where loyalty is now being won.
- The brands winning the next generation of customers are not the ones with the best product. They’re the ones that have made coming back feel like a reward, and they are meeting those customers where they already are, which is increasingly inside a game.
The BTB Breakfast Briefing is a six-weekly gathering of senior business and brand leaders convened by Beyond the Boardroom. Please contact BTB Events here for an invitation to our next session.