Fifty People Said Yes
What the hunger for play might be telling us about work
I want to tell you something honest.
I'd been hearing that Dungeons & Dragons was turning up in team building, and not as a novelty — as an actual method. I was curious and skeptical about equal measure. What I wanted to know was whether it would land with my own community, the people who come to these roundtables to think about how generations work together.
So I picked the end of summer to find out. Quiet stretch, low stakes, a good time to test something that might not work.
Almost fifty people said yes. Far more than I expected.
Let me be precise about the number, because the precision is the point. Fifty people accepted. About half came, and we had a full and lively hour. Several who couldn't make it wrote to apologize.
But it's the accepting I keep turning over.
Fifty working professionals read a subject line about a fantasy role-playing game, decided it had something to do with their working life, and said yes. Whatever moved them happened before anyone learned a thing.
That's the part I can't explain away. And it left me with a question: why is everyone so hungry for this?
I'm not writing to tell you to run a campaign at your next offsite. I have no interest in becoming an evangelist for a game I've never played. What interests me is the appetite, not the activity.
So I went looking for what might explain it.
The hunger has a shape
You already know the headline. Gallup has U.S. engagement at 31%, down from a peak of 36% in 2020. Roughly eight million fewer engaged workers in five years.
What matters more is where the decline sits. It isn't spread evenly. Workers under 35 are pulling the average down, with Gen Z falling five points in a single year.
And look at what specifically dropped for them:
Clarity about what's expected
Recognition
Having the materials to do the work well
The chance to do what they do best
Feeling cared about as a person
Opportunity to develop
Read that list again.
Every item on it is something a present, attentive manager provides. Not a policy. A person.
If you run engagement surveys, none of this surprises you. But you've probably also seen the pattern that comes with it - and that pattern is what I want to sit with.
Your younger employees report low belonging. Your most senior employees report that everything is fine.
I don't think the senior people are lying. I think they're describing an organization that has already worked for them.
Ask someone with twenty-two years of tenure whether anyone here cares about their development, and the answer comes easily. They have a network, a reputation, and three people they can call. They're reporting on accumulated positions, not on current conditions.
Meanwhile the machinery that used to induct a newcomer into all of that - proximity, an unhurried manager, informal apprenticeship - has quietly degraded.
If you don't need it anymore, you don't notice it's gone.
But the senior people aren't fine either
Here's the finding that stopped me, and it isn't the one I expected.
In Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, the loneliest people at work are the senior leaders. They score ten points higher on loneliness than individual contributors — plus seven points higher on stress, twelve on anger, eleven on sadness. They're also less likely to say they laughed or smiled during the workday.
So when your survey shows the senior cohort reporting that all is well, hold that loosely. They may be lonelier than anyone in the building. They just don't file it as a workplace problem, because in most organizations a leader who admits to strain is read as a leader who may not be up to the job.
Both ends of the ladder are isolated. Neither end can say so.
And the layer in between, the one we'd count on to bridge them, is in worse shape than either. While engagement among individual contributors has stayed roughly flat for three years, manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. Managers have lost the advantage they used to hold over the people they supervise.
The alarm bell has been disconnected
In my experience, older leaders don't call me until something hurts. Usually it's attrition. People are walking out and nobody knows why.
That signal has stopped working.
The quits rate has been sitting around 2.0%, against a peak near 3% during the Great Resignation. Fewer people are leaving.
But MetLife's 2026 study found that while 77% of employees intend to stay, 56% are staying out of necessity rather than commitment. Only 18% say they stay because they want to.
Retention is no longer evidence of anything except a hard job market.
Three things follow.
Nobody leaves, so nobody advances - so your disengaged young employee is also stuck.
When the market loosens, you won't lose one person. You'll lose a layer, all at once.
And if you're a leader planning your own exit in the next few years, you are looking at excellent retention numbers and a bench of people who are physically present and psychologically gone.
That last one isn't a future problem. It's the current one wearing a disguise.
What people were actually reaching for
Which brings me back to my fifty.
Our guest, Laura Khahil of Once Upon a Roll, said something in passing I haven't stopped thinking about. She's taken the Myers-Briggs many times and always found it frustrating, because it asks how she behaves most of the time - and how she behaves at work, with friends, and with family are three different answers.
She could never tell it the truth.
The archetype approach asks a narrower question. Not who you are, everywhere, permanently. Just: what do you bring to this table?
That's a smaller question, and I think it's the more useful one.
DISC and Myers-Briggs are instruments for understanding yourself, and they're good at that. But they were built by people born in the 1800s - Katharine Briggs in 1875, Isabel Myers in 1897, William Marston in 1893 - and they entered workplace use in the 1950s and 1970s.
We are handing that inheritance to twenty-five-year-olds and then wondering why they can't make it work.
An archetype only means something in a group. A healer is a healer because someone else takes the hits. Nobody asks whether you're a good rogue; they ask whether the party survives without one.
It's a communal frame rather than an individual one. And it arrives exactly when we're seeing the costs of a workplace built almost entirely on individual psychology.
Why pretend works
Here I'm on my own ground.
Before any of this, I spent years in theater, improvisation, and process drama. The first principle of all of it is that role protects.
The character makes the choice, not me. That single move creates a no-penalty zone. The consequences aren't real, so I can risk something.
What I've watched happen, over and over: the quietest person in the room - the one who won't speak up in a meeting, who has learned that visibility is expensive - comes alive behind a role. And then in the debrief, that same person delivers the sharpest observation anyone has made all day.
The game isn't the point. The game is the vehicle. The learning happens in the debrief, when we come back out and ask what just happened between us.
You cannot get to that conversation by scheduling it. People will not say the true thing on demand. They will say it if you give them somewhere to stand.
The baton
One correction to something I said in the roundtable, because I want to get it right.
I said the younger generations invented this. They didn't. Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, who were not kids. They were closer to my age than my son's.
My generation's neighbors built it.
What younger generations did was transform it into something I no longer recognize. Live streams with audiences in the millions. Therapy groups. Law schools use it to train negotiators. A sold-out arena watching people play.
That's a better story than the one I told, because it isn't a handoff to strangers.
It's a handback. Something we made, changed by people we raised, returned to us in a form we'd need help to use.
And that's the opportunity I want to name for those of us in the older seats.
When you invite a younger colleague to bring this in and teach you, you are not conceding anything. You are performing the succession, in miniature, in public.
I don't know this. You do. Show me.
We spend a great deal of energy on succession planning as a documentation exercise. This is the other kind. The kind where authority actually moves.
I don't know yet
Let me be honest about the limits of what I've got. One roundtable and fifty RSVPs do not establish a trend.
What I can say is that something got people's attention. My current best guess is that it's the fatigue of being sorted - of being told what you are by an instrument, when the question you're actually carrying is what does this room need from me, and can it be different next week?
But I'd rather hear from you than keep guessing.
If you're seeing this in your own organization, tell me:
Are your younger employees asking for something your assessment tools don't give them?
Do your engagement numbers show the split I've described?
Has your retention rate gone quiet in a way that worries you more than turnover did?
Just hit reply. I read all of it.
-Mary
Two more roundtables this fall. Dates coming shortly — and the theme of the next one will be shaped by what you send back.