Something shifted in me during the pandemic. Maybe it was the disruption of everything we thought we knew about work, or maybe it was turning 40 in the middle of it. Whatever the reason, I came out of that period realizing that I had been taking myself—and particularly my job—far too seriously.

Some of that probably came from ideas about professionalism that I had absorbed earlier in my career. I once worked for a supervisor who believed that the work we did needed to model a very high standard of service and professionalism. Over time, I think I internalized part of that message in a way that was never necessarily intended: professional work needed to look professional, and “professional” had a fairly narrow definition. It was polished. It was serious. It certainly wasn’t playful.

The pandemic disrupted that mental model for me. Turning 40 probably helped too. I still cared just as much about doing good work, but I began questioning why doing good work had to look so serious while I was doing it.

Looking back, I can see that this was one of my own mental models at work. Mental models are the assumptions, beliefs, and expectations we carry about how something works or how it is supposed to work. They can be particularly difficult to recognize because they don’t usually feel like assumptions. They simply feel like the way things are. I wasn’t consciously deciding that professionalism and play were incompatible. I had absorbed enough messages and experiences over the years that the connection between professionalism and seriousness felt natural.

That shift in my own thinking turned out to be useful when we returned to conducting in-person training after the pandemic and encountered a problem: people weren’t coming.

We could have treated this as an engagement problem and focused on getting people to register. Instead, we tried to understand why attendance had changed. When we looked beneath the surface, one thing became obvious: the professional development environment people returned to was very different from the one they had left.

During the pandemic, online learning had exploded. Staff could attend webinars without leaving work, watch recordings when their schedules allowed, and access presenters and organizations from almost anywhere. Suddenly, our in-person training wasn’t simply competing with other in-person opportunities. It was competing with the convenience of the Internet.

That forced us to ask a much better question: if staff could access training without going anywhere, why would they want to come to us in person?

There were practical barriers. Gas was expensive, for one, and attending training required time for travel. Those were real parts of the system, but they weren’t things we could control. We couldn’t change the price at the pump. What we could change was what people experienced when they arrived.

If we were asking someone to spend the time and money to come to us, we needed to make that experience worth the cost.

And that was when things started getting playful.

What Do You Think Training Is?

Most of us have a mental model of training whether we realize it or not. Mention a staff training and a familiar picture may immediately come to mind: chairs facing a screen, a presenter at the front, slides, handouts, and several hours of listening. There may be a discussion or an activity somewhere in the middle. None of that is necessarily ineffective. Sometimes listening to someone who knows a subject explain it well is exactly what we need. But after the pandemic, there was an obvious problem with relying exclusively on that model. Much of the same experience could be replicated online without asking anyone to travel.

We began thinking instead about what was valuable about being together in a room. What could happen there that couldn’t happen as easily through another webinar? People could move around, build things, create, solve problems together, talk with colleagues, experiment with ideas, and learn from one another. Instead of treating physical presence as simply the price someone had to pay to access the content, we could design the learning so that being together was part of its value.

Play became one of the tools we used to do that.

This is where my changing ideas about professionalism mattered. A few years earlier, I might have hesitated before asking a room full of adults to play a game, build something, or work through an intentionally ridiculous scenario. I might have worried about whether it looked professional enough. Once I stopped using seriousness as a proxy for quality, however, I could ask a much more useful question: Is this helping people learn?

Sometimes the answer was yes. A game could provide practice with communication or critical thinking. Objects could make an abstract idea tangible. A creative activity could prompt reflection. A playful scenario could give people enough distance from a real workplace problem to experiment with different approaches. People could laugh together and still have a thoughtful conversation afterward. In fact, sometimes the play helped make that conversation possible.

This didn’t mean abandoning presentations or turning every training into a game. It meant expanding our mental model of what professional learning could look like. The format became something we could choose based on what we wanted people to experience rather than something predetermined by our assumptions about what training was supposed to be.

Changing the Mental Model of Training

As we experimented, I started noticing that there were really two mental models involved. I had been questioning my own assumptions about professionalism and learning, but staff were arriving with their own accumulated experiences of what training meant. Those expectations mattered because they influenced the decision to attend before anyone ever entered the room.

If your mental model of training is that you will sit while someone teaches you something, an online webinar is often the more efficient choice. There is no commute, no gas expense, and much less disruption to the workday. If training becomes something you actively participate in, however, being physically present can offer something different.

The challenge is that you can’t simply tell someone to change a mental model. We could have described our sessions as “interactive,” “engaging,” or “not your typical training,” but those words wouldn’t erase years of previous experiences. People needed to encounter something that didn’t quite fit their existing expectations.

Repeated experiences began doing that work for us. Someone might arrive and discover that they were going to solve a problem with a group, manipulate an object, create something, move around the room, or participate in an activity they hadn’t anticipated. The important part wasn’t that the experience was surprising for the sake of being surprising. The activity still needed to serve the learning. But each experience provided another piece of evidence that training didn’t necessarily have to look the way they expected it to look.

Over time, that can create curiosity. “Do I need this training?” remains a perfectly reasonable question. People’s time is valuable, and not every training is relevant to everyone. But another question can begin appearing alongside it: “I wonder what we’re going to do this time?”

That shift interests me because it illustrates how mental models actually change. We often approach organizational change as though people simply need to be given a better explanation. If we explain the new idea clearly enough, perhaps everyone will adopt it. But mental models have often been built through years of experience. Sometimes the more powerful intervention isn’t explaining that something can be different. It is allowing people to experience something different.

Don’t Replace One “Should” With Another

There is a caution in this story because systems thinking also requires us to question the solutions that appear to be working. If our old mental model was that professional development should be serious, it would be easy to replace it with a new one that says professional development should be fun.

I don’t think that’s particularly helpful either.

Play is a tool, not a requirement. There are subjects that lend themselves beautifully to games, experimentation, and creative activities, and others that call for quiet reflection, demonstration, conversation, practice, or simply listening to someone explain something well. Adding a game simply because “our trainings have games” would mean we had created another unquestioned assumption about what learning is supposed to look like.

The more useful habit is to pay attention whenever we find ourselves saying something should look a certain way. Training should look like this. Professionalism should look like that. The trainer should be doing this. Participants should behave like that. Those statements aren’t automatically wrong, but they are worth examining because there is often a mental model hiding inside them.

That is one of the reasons mental models fascinate me as part of systems thinking. We can spend enormous amounts of time trying to change the visible outcomes of a system without recognizing the assumptions quietly influencing the choices that produce those outcomes.

Our visible problem was attendance. Looking beneath it helped us recognize that the environment surrounding professional development had changed. Staff had more choices, online learning had become easier to access, and attending something in person carried costs that didn’t exist when someone participated from their workplace. We couldn’t control all of those conditions, but we could reconsider what we were asking people to travel for.

At almost the same time, I happened to be reconsidering my own assumptions about what professional work was supposed to look like. Those two things came together in a way I couldn’t have planned. Giving myself permission to be less serious gave me permission to experiment. Experimentation gave us new ways to design learning experiences, and those experiences began challenging other assumptions about what training could be.

The result wasn’t that we discovered everyone loves games or that play is the secret to staff engagement. It was something much more useful: we stopped treating our existing model of training as inevitable.

Sometimes the thing standing in the way of changing a system isn’t a policy, a process, a budget, or even a person. Sometimes it is an assumption that has been around for so long that no one remembers it is an assumption.

Those are often the most interesting things to change.

Want to dig deeper into mental models and the other ways systems thinking can help us understand what is really happening beneath the problems we see? My book, Systems Thinking in Libraries, comes out in February and explores practical ways to use systems thinking to look beyond the obvious, question our assumptions, and better understand the interconnected systems in which libraries operate.