Genius Hours Deep Dive Edition #5 — Play: A Strategic Tool for Better Problem Solving | Recap
ADPList Genius Hours: Deep Dive Edition is conversations and insights delving into our most difficult inner workings so that we creative people can heal, grow, and eventually become our best selves.
On the 26th of August, we had a great session with Cami, Ben, and Bronwen on the importance of PLAY in tackling problems at work. Yes, ‘play’!! Benjamin Warsinske, a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Facilitator (a title I’m sure we would all love to have), gave us great insights on how ‘play’ can be implemented in a strategic sense to solve problems collaboratively.
In this article, I’ll be summarizing some of the key points brought up during the session and paraphrasing the questions and answers shared by our speakers.
Introducing our guest speakers:
🌟 Cami Travis-Groves (she/her) is a transformational coach specifically for creatives, an international speaker, and an author based in the Kansas City area. Fun fact! She can touch her tongue with her nose. 👃🏻
🌟 Benjamin Warsinske is a certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Facilitator, working with leaders and their teams to engage, enrich, energize, and empower company culture transformation through play. Fun fact! In Ben’s early career working in Japan and Korea, he got the nickname 2 meters. Being a tall guy, he was often asked how tall he was and would answer 6 ft 7 inches and be met with blank stares, but when he answered 2 meters, he loved seeing people’s faces lit up — opening the door for awesome conversation. 💬
Introducing our ADPList host for the session:
🌟 Bronwen Rees (she/her) is a Senior Product Designer at Xer. Her role as a female design leader is to build up and mentor a generation of great women designers.
What do we mean by ‘play’?
According to Ben, the term ‘play’ refers to facilitated play, which is aimed at solving a problem (a business problem or a communication problem among teams/team members). As a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Facilitator, Ben guides these sessions. However, Cami brought up an interesting point, isn’t the phrase, “LEGO Serious Play” an oxymoron?
Ben: LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a methodology that the LEGO group created out of their research on play in 60 years. I don’t directly work for LEGO but I’m a LEGO fan. I got certified in the methodology when I stumbled across it, and it came full circle from my childhood when I was obsessed with LEGO. Finding this methodology allowed me to bring ‘play’ into the workplace to solve critical business problems.
It might seem strange to think of how ‘play’ can be used to tackle issues at work. After all, it seems contradictory to the idea of a business or workplace. Ben explained that even though it’s unorthodox and unconventional, ‘play’ cuts through the noise of stuffy brainstorming meetings where people struggle to voice their opinions in fear of saying the wrong thing. ‘Play’ creates an environment where there is an even playing field; everyone gets to build and think with their hands, which opens up the discussion and allows ideas to flow.
What does a ‘play’ session look like?
Ben explained that it depends on what the client or team wants. Sessions are customized to fit the objectives. For example, it could be a 90-minute virtual experience where he would send out kits to the team ahead of time.
Cami: What kind of kits? Like LEGO sets?
Ben: Yes, I create customized, curated LEGO kits and send them out as well as other materials. We use that to go through the session.
The importance isn’t on how the models people make turn out, but more on the abstract meaning they represent. By getting the story of why the bricks were assembled a certain way, you start to get insight into other people’s perspectives.
Ben: One of the activities is to build a tower, and no matter how many times I’ve facilitated that activity, everyone’s tower looks different, and everyone interprets building a tower differently. They may focus on aesthetics, or the engineering, or making it as high as possible. It’s interesting to see how people interpret things and that gets to the crux of communication and how important it is to actively listen and see how people interpret the instructions.
Cami brought up an interesting statistic that it takes on average 400 repetitions for your brain to establish a neural pathway, in comparison to 10 or 20 repetitions through ‘play’. It shows that through ‘play’, we can solve problems faster and more effectively. Ben also mentioned that ‘play’ is a great way of reaching people who would be otherwise too shy to contribute to discussions because it guarantees 100% engagement.
Bronwen: I love the thought of 100% engagement, mainly from an inclusive design point of view. Would you say LEGO PLAY or ‘play’ is one of the ways of making your workshops or sessions far more inclusive?
Ben: Yes, I just recently facilitated a session for a video game company with 100 participants around the world. Prior to the session, there were several participants talking to their HR teams saying they were shy and they didn’t know if they were going to turn their camera on or fully participate, and by mid-way through the session, they were so excited to build their models and share their stories that they didn’t wanna stop.
As a shy person myself, I loved the idea that ‘play’ could help people feel empowered to speak up and share, without fearing being right or wrong. Cami asked how many of us present during the live session considered ourselves introverts, and the chat flooded with yesses. So many of us in one space and excited to hear more about how ‘play’ benefits us!
How does ‘play’ work?
So far, we’ve heard a lot about how effective ‘play’ can be in problem-solving, but why is it effective? Ben explained that when you build your model, you’re transferring your ideas from your mind to the model. So rather than simply sharing an idea, you’re sharing the story of your model, and it’s easier to be questioned about what the model represents than about your ideas directly. So your defenses never come up and you can more objectively get to the root cause of the problem is.
‘Play’ also helps you be more confident in your strengths. As you go through different activities and share your stories and models, you learn more about yourself — maybe you discover you’re creative or a good storyteller.
As a huge science nerd, Cami was also curious about the science behind ‘play’. According to Ben, your hands are connected to your brain, so when we’re building with LEGO, we’re subconsciously thinking with our hands. When you’re given a time limit and constraints and you only have a certain number of bricks, initially you may think that you don’t know what to do, but as you start to build and put bricks together, things flow naturally and that’s because our hands are connected to our brains and we’re able to tap into that creativity without being fully aware that we’re doing so.
How can we push for ‘play’ in our workplaces?
Ben’s advice is to just ask. Start by opening up the conversation. If you’re still struggling to think of how to broach the subject, Ben has a checklist of the top 10 reasons why ‘play’ matters in the workplace on his website that you can use to bring up the main points.
The wonderful things about ‘play’
What Ben has found interesting over time is how effective ‘play’ can be even in more serious and corporate environments.
Ben: So to kind of step back, my background is in design and strategic planning. Kind of the opposite of play, if you will. But my childhood experiences were all play and LEGO, so LEGO informed my creative study in school and then in my career. I see things in my mind in LEGO almost and I’m able to translate that into the human experience.
Unlike other creative outlets like drawing or writing that can be met with resistance or hesitation in corporate environments, LEGO Play helps people feel comfortable enough to share. It brings people together and unites them as soon as they open their boxes and start building.
Cami: That sounds like so much fun. If we don’t have LEGO at hand, what would be a good substitute?
Ben: I talk about getting into a ‘state of play’, and the way I would define it is what personally brings you energy when you think of a creative outlet. It could be painting, it could be drawing, it could be writing, it could be music, whatever that is.
Cami: I have a box of 120 different coloured Crayola crayons! This brings me joy.
Ben: Hahaha yeah, colouring. And so it’s whatever brings you joy and energises you. When you get into that ‘state of play’, you’re able to communicate more freely and you speak more from your heart versus from your head. You’re able to collaborate with less friction because you have opened up and so you are willing to listen to other ideas. So you kind of just give in to this world where everything is just flowing. Some people call it a ‘flow state’.
Cami: Yeah, it’s funny. When we’re multitasking or when we’re going 700 miles an hour, our brainwaves are not in sync with each other at all. They’re all over the place. As we slow down and really focus on the one thing, especially when we’re involving tactile experience, we get into an alpha, an alpha is when our brainwaves are more in sync. That’s why after you’ve been in the zone for a while, you’re not aware of time passage. It might have been 6 hours or it might have been 15 minutes, but time passes differently when you’re in that alpha brainwave state. I love being in alpha and being in flow.
Building trust in the process
LEGO Serious Play comes with guidelines for an even playing field. They set the tone for how to work together in a way that builds trust and helps resolve conflicts.
According to Ben, there’s a challenge or a prompt and then there’s a time limit, and everyone gets to build within that time limit to have their story of how they would answer that prompt or what that model would represent to them regarding the challenge. Everyone then gets to share their story and so that makes a really big difference in resolving conflict because it’s not a ‘he said, she said’ type of scenario. It becomes more objective because we can put all the models in the middle of the table and then we can start to dissect and discuss, and bring out those different insights and see what it is that everyone agrees are the points of conflict.
Following that, how can we then build a model that represents a solution to those points of conflict or a specific one? We would go into each problem and find a solution, and the idea would be that by the end of the session we have an agreed-upon outcome that everyone can agree with.
Cami: How do you bring people from different functions to start listening to the problem rather than just their own point of view?
Ben: The act of ‘play’ allows you to hear other perspectives so it doesn't really matter what function you’re from, it’s more of how you contribute to the greater conversation.
Cami: I feel like the best brainstorming sessions I’ve ever taken part in had not just the creative team, but the gal from the mailroom and the guy from the distribution office and the front receptionist, and the accountants. Those are where some of the most novel ideas came from, surprisingly enough.
One of the main reasons why ‘play’ builds trust is that it takes place in a neutral environment. If you’re having a difficult conversation in a boardroom, you’re going to have your defenses up from the get-go. In a ‘play’ environment, whatever the topic of conversation is, you’re simply building a model and sharing its story in a de-stressful and neutral place.
As you listen to other people’s model stories, you start to understand their experiences and feel more empathy. It changes the whole dynamic of having difficult conversations.
‘Play’ in a creative environment
‘Play’ gives people a voice, making them feel that they can share their ideas and be valued and respected. Feeling this way encourages people to want to be more productive. Ben mentioned that companies are often so focused on productivity in a literal sense that they expect their employees to always think creatively at work.
Cami: As creatives, we feel like we’re forced to produce the proof and outcome of our creativity without being given time to go out and be inspired. We’re humans and we create outside of our work environment too, and when we’re creative at work that’s often just the by-product of our creativity.
‘Play’ gives people a way to channel those sources of inspiration even in a work environment. It helps us do our job better.
Interested in learning more about ‘play’? Check out the Q&A segment in the replay! Or connect with them below:
🌟 Book a session with Cami Travis-Groves.
🌟 Connect with Benjamin Warsinske.
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