My wife, Pamela, works at Sterling Brands, a design firm in New York City. Also on her floor: a fashion merchandiser. One day the fashion firm left some mannequins standing next to the the freight elevator.

It was Christmas come early. Sterling designers scooped up the mannequins. Once lost souls marooned near the elevator, they were now objects of whimsy and drama. The office bloomed.

The mannequins are modular, so people began to switch body parts. The arms of a male mannequin appeared on a female mannequin. Someone wondered gravely whether she should rethink “the whole working out thing.”

One mannequin is now wearing sneakers, as if about to go on a run at lunch. Another wears a skirt fashioned out of recycled clothing. Some body parts disappeared . . . only to reappear in someone’s drawer or in the company fridge. Still others are unaccounted for and no one quite knows where they will turn up.

The president of Sterling, Debbie Millman, dressed her mannequin in a coat and scarf. Under the coat, she placed a badge. The mannequin was secretly Brenda Leigh Johnson, Assistant Deputy Chief of the LAPD (on the show The Closer).

Out by the freight elevators, these mannequins were blank, unhappy, lost. Inside a design firm, they became social, interesting, and fun. Blankness turned to animation. Imagination flourished. Sterling is a pretty animated place &#8212 design firms just are &#8212 but these mannequins made the place come alive.

From an efficiency point of view, the mannequins look like a bad idea. Surely they distract everyone from the task at hand. Surely they encourage an air of frivolity that must be bad for business.

Well, no. I think we can suggest a model that shows how the value created by mannequins ends up on the bottom line. Sure, it will look a bit Rube Goldberg-esque. But let’s try.

The mannequins begin with an act of unlicensed “borrowing.” This gives a tang of illegality (or “liminality“, as it’s called in anthropology) to the proceedings. It’s no longer business as usual.

Posed around the office, the mannequins are anomalous. What are they? Why are they reconfigured, dressed, and or gesturing that way? This provokes questions, conversations, and eventually play.

People begin to find away of making the mannequins mean . . . something, anything. Dress them, decorate them, reassemble them, reassign their identities, give them secret identities, build stories around them, tell jokes at their expense, and otherwise save them from their composure.

Most of what this office does is work performed to client expectation, under pressure, to a deadline. These mannequins don’t come with a deadline. This activity is pure play, creativity for the sake of it, so the mannequins get quite a lot done even when they’re just standing there.

Sterling is of course a creative enterprise, so anything that revivifies and animates the creative process is a good thing. This isn’t distraction and it isn’t tomfoolery. It restocks the good fellowship and creativity on which Sterling depends.

But then the real question is not whether this is good for Sterling but why we don’t have mannequins standing by in every corporate HQ. As we know, the office can be a grim and humorless place. I visited the headquarters of a large computing company not so long ago, and, looking out over a sea of cubicles, I couldn’t see a single image or drawing anywhere. Scary! Every office should welcome strange, playful visitors even if they are made out of fiberglass.

Every company would benefit from a Culturematic that unleashes our intelligence, creativity, and playfulness. Surely, this goes quite directly to the bottom line. We can’t hope to track the value in any very exact way. More’s the pity. We would see that sometimes mannequins and other Culturematics return exemplary work that creates value of the most fundamental kind, winning new business, or securing old clients. The investment is play. The ROI is obvious.