Play states: creating the conditions and capabilities for strategic renewal
15 May 2026
12:00 -13:30
Times are shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W4.05 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Dr Ryan Raffaelli, Harvard Business School
About the seminar topic
Organisations need to continuously renew themselves to keep pace with their competitive environment. Nonetheless, research has repeatedly shown that strategic renewal efforts often fall prey to the demands of day-to-day execution. Drawing from qualitative data of 5 top management teams collected over a 7-year period, our findings reveal a novel capability – play – that helps senior leaders to untether from near-term tasks and manage the ambiguity of the future. We introduce the concept of a ‘play state’, which we define as when organisations feel free to imagine possible futures without the pressures of certainty, commitment or constraint. Together, by highlighting the generative properties play, we identify new ways in which organisations can be structured to leverage, rather than lessen, ambiguity in pursuit of strategic renewal.
Speaker bio
Ryan Raffaelli is the Marvin Bower Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He created and teaches the MBA course Leadership: Execution and Action Planning (LEAP), and serves on the faculty of several executive education programs, including Leading and Building a Culture of Innovation, and Leading Change and Organizational Renewal.
Professor Raffaelli’s research focuses on reinvention and leading change. His work introduces the concept of technology reemergence, a process whereby organisations and industries faced with technological change reinvent themselves. He also studies how leaders infuse values and meaning into institutions during periods of instability. Professor Raffaelli’s research has been published in journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, the Strategic Management Journal, the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Annals, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, as well as in a number of edited handbooks on innovation and management. He serves on the editorial board of Administrative Science Quarterly, the MIT Sloan Management Review advisory board, and is a faculty associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His work has been covered by such media as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, NPR, Fortune, CNBC, Fast Company, and Rolling Stone.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.