Team Climate Pulse

What we have seen from our work at The Playfulness Lab and through ongoing research, is that exceptional teams work differently. They stay open, creative, and connected under pressure. They adapt faster. They collaborate better. And they don’t lose their edge when the heat is on.

This short assessment offers a pulse check on your team’s current culture and climate, specifically, how and to what degree playfulness is already showing up in your system.

Not play as distraction, but playfulness as performance:

The science-backed capacity for curiosity, creativity, and connection that enables teams to thrive in uncertainty.

What you’ll get

A fast readout across three core domains of team adaptability
A sense of how psychological safety, energy, and openness are showing up
A language for spotting and shifting what’s missing

About The Team Climate Pulse

The Team Climate Pulse was developed by Chris Marshall, behavioural scientist, applied psychologist, and founder of The Playfulness Lab - a non-profit organisation focused on helping leaders build exceptional teams in high-pressure environments.

Chris’s research explores how humans adapt under sustained pressure - and what enables teams not just to cope, but to thrive. His early work centred on resilience and mental toughness. But over time, one quality kept emerging as the deeper lever for long-term adaptability: playfulness.

Not as a personality trait.
Not as forced fun or downtime.
But as a performance mechanism, rooted in science, and essential for learning, collaboration, and innovation under stress.

This pulse check is built on that foundation. It gives leaders a fast, research-informed read on how playfulness is showing up (or being suppressed) in their team’s culture.

You’ll assess three foundational drivers of adaptive performance:

Curiosity: the ability to question, reflect, and stay open
Creativity: the capacity to experiment, reframe, and explore
Connection: the relational trust and safety that allow teams to stay cohesive under pressure

You’ll get a quick readout across each of these domains - and a starting point for reflection, development, or deeper diagnosis.

How will my data be used?

This assessment is offered by The Playfulness Lab — a non-profit research and learning organisation exploring the role of playfulness in leadership, team performance, and systemic change.

Our mission is to help leaders build exceptional teams in tough times — by making space for the qualities that drive long-term performance: psychological safety, creative thinking, honest relationships, and adaptive learning.

This tool is one of many we're developing to make invisible team dynamics visible — and to offer a more human lens on performance.

Your responses will remain confidential and will never be shared in an identifiable form.

We periodically use anonymised data to contribute to research on workplace culture and team performance — including in trend reports, learning materials, or publications designed to help other leaders grow more adaptive, playful, and high-performing teams.

By completing this assessment, you’ll also receive updates from The Playfulness Lab — including new resources, tools, and invitations to ongoing research. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Playfulness is not the opposite of seriousness — it’s the opposite of rigidity.
And when leaders learn to read their culture clearly, everything changes.