Episode 18 - From the Playroom to the Boardroom: What Leaders Can Learn From Children's Play With tonies’ CXO Ginny McCormick

Strategy and Planning (Head)Leading / Engaging With Others (Heart)

May 26

The principles that make great children's products – clarity over complexity, freedom within frameworks, unfiltered feedback, and permission to fail – are the same principles that drive high-performing adult teams. Ginny McCormick, Chief Experience Officer at tonies, argues these aren't separate ideas for separate audiences. They're universal truths that most organizations, unfortunately, quietly abandon somewhere between the playground and the conference room.

What can children's play teach us about leading adults?

Children are, by most measures, the most honest feedback mechanism available to any product team. They don't have a social contract. They don't soften a verdict to protect the feelings of the person who spent six months building the thing. If it doesn't work for them, they put it down and walk away, immediately, without apology, and without looking back.

Ginny McCormick, the Chief Experience Officer at tonies, has spent decades in rooms with children doing exactly that (she has also worked for Disney, Mattel, and Hasbro). What she's learned from watching kids engage and disengage with products has shaped how she thinks about leading adults just as much as it's shaped the products themselves.

“Children do not give feedback. They give truth bombs. They don't need to censor. They don't think about switching costs. If something doesn't work for them, they will let you know immediately.”

– Ginny McCormick, CXO, tonies

Most organizations claim to want that kind of honesty. But very few have built the conditions that make it possible. The gap between saying "we celebrate failure" and actually creating a culture where people feel safe enough to fail out loud is, in most workplaces, enormous. Kids close that gap by default, not because they're brave, but because they haven't yet learned to do otherwise. Somewhere between kindergarten and the quarterly business review, we tend to lose our sense of honesty. Children haven't gotten there yet. Lucky them.

The question for leaders is how to rebuild what most organizations have quietly trained out of their people. The answer starts with how you think about play itself. Not the gamified, badge-earning, leaderboard version that gets rolled out in well-intentioned culture initiatives. Real play produces creativity, resilience, and bold thinking. It is unstructured, voluntary, and free. After all, how many people do you know who have had breakthroughs during a mandatory “fun” event?

“When you see children playing at their best, it is freedom. The more you try to structure play, the more it feels inauthentic.”

– Ginny McCormick

Why does clarity always win over complexity?

After decades of testing ideas with children, Ginny asserts that the pattern is unambiguous: complexity loses, every time. Not because kids aren't sophisticated; children can recognize and ask for specific brands as early as age three, and their feedback consistently pushes products toward more nuance, not less. Complexity loses because it usually signals that the hard work hasn't been done.

“Complexity can masquerade as more sophisticated. It sounds smarter. But when you're really clear and you've narrowed in on what's essential – why you've said no to things – that is always the winning formula with kids. And I would argue, even as adults.”

– Ginny McCormick

The implication for leaders is direct: if you can't explain your product, strategy, or direction simply enough for someone outside your context to understand it, the problem probably isn't the audience. Complexity is often what you're left with when you've tried to say yes to too many things at once. Clarity is what you get when you've done the harder work of making choices.

Ginny's test: can you explain it to your grandmother? Because if grandma's confused, then the market is probably confused, too. The brands that endure for children and adults alike are the ones that have done the discipline of subtraction, not just the work of addition.

What is the "first pancake" approach to celebrating failure, and does it actually work?

Most organizations have some version of “we celebrate failures here.” Few have rituals that make that ethos real.

Ginny's is called “first pancake”. The premise is simple: if you've ever made pancakes, you know the first one is always the worst. It doesn't matter how experienced you are or how carefully you follow the recipe. The first pancake is the sacrifice (let’s pour one out for every first pancake that ever hit the pan with too much batter, not enough heat, and entirely too much confidence). But there is no perfect golden pancake number four without pancake number one.

“We as a team would all share first pancakes – things that didn't execute the way we thought, where we felt there was a kernel of something, but it went wrong in all these different ways. And the focus of the team was: this is amazing. Because as soon as you share one of those ideas in a larger group, everyone can build on it.”

– Ginny McCormick

The ritual does two things simultaneously. It normalizes the experience of being wrong in front of colleagues, which is the prerequisite for psychological safety, not a byproduct of it. And it redirects the team's energy from judgment to iteration, from “this failed” to “yes, and.” The same instinct that makes children relentless experimenters – an absence of ego investment in any single attempt – is what First Pancake tries to reintroduce into adult teams that have learned, through years of performance reviews and organizational politics, to protect their ideas rather than expose them.

Only 20% of employees worldwide reported feeling engaged at work in 2025. Ginny’s argument is that engagement and experimentation are causally linked – and that you can't have one without the other. The organizations that figure out how to make failure not just survivable but genuinely celebrated are the ones that get the creative output everyone else is trying to manufacture through strategy decks.

What to do this week:

Run a First Pancake session with your team. Ask everyone (including yourself) to bring one idea or initiative that had real potential but didn't work the way you hoped. Not a post-mortem. Not a lessons-learned exercise. Just the story, told honestly, with the kernel of what was interesting still visible inside the failure.

Then have the group build on it: what would you do differently, what could it become, where does the good idea actually live? Do this once and see what it unlocks. Do it regularly and watch what it does to the quality of the ideas people are willing to put on the table.

Related Episodes

– Your Best Meeting Ever with Dr. Rebecca Hinds

– Clarity Over Cool with Éva Goicochea

– The High Line and Beyond with Robbie Hammond