An engine. A language. A technique without content — Introduction to LEGO Serious Play
Lego — the world’s best toy — has brought joy, playfulness, and imagination into people’s homes since 1949. It’s a system for creative play and its popularity is demonstrated by its wide representation and usage in many forms of cultural works, including books, films, and artwork. It has even been used in the classroom as a teaching tool.
Making things rather than just talking about them
Origins of LEGO Serious Play
Just as the LEGO Group had been telling children to ‘build their dreams’ for decades, so perhaps adults could be asked to build their visions for future strategy. Building upon the inclusive and participatory nature of the LEGO System, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® rejects the idea that external ‘experts’ mu st be brought in to identify problems, and to propose solutions; on the contrary, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® begins with the assumption that the answers are ‘already in the room’, and invites participants to ‘think with their hands’ to build their understandings. Every member of the team participates, and everyone has a voice.
Insight: LEGO Duck: a Serious Play classic where participants are asked to build a duck from all the bricks shown here.
Who made LEGO Serious Play?
Robert Rasmussen, an educator, and business consultant and previous Director of Research and Development for the Educational Products of the LEGO Group is the creator and one of the ‘fathers’ of the LEGO Serious Play process. He developed the original LSP facilitator program during his tenure at LEGO from 2000 to 2004. Since then and until the launch of the Open Source distribution model (2010) he continued as one of the only two master trainers for LEGO and has personally trained over fifty percent of the global community of LEGO Serious Play diploma holders.
Why use LEGO Serious Play
Lego Serious Play, a three-dimensional thinking and communication process, helps teams gel. You take a group of individual ‘people silos’ and weave them into a cohesive team.
The material makes it easy for participants to put together satisfying models which represent something that they wish to communicate. They do not need significant technical skills; the LEGO System is familiar to many, and even if they have not used LEGO bricks before, most people find it quite easy to build meaningful constructions; they can be built into simple or complex forms, as suits the personality of the builder, and research has shown that people from all walks of life feel comfortable attaching diverse metaphorical meanings to LEGO bricks.
Insight: model from my training creating the metaphor of ‘we are all sitting in the same boat’ (left to right): there is someone who holds the flag up steering towards an aim, different disciplines and people with variety of skills (colour bricks for the different disciplines, mini figures for peoples with skills).
Becoming a certified LEGO Serious Play Facilitator
Like probably many of you, I’ve been always a big fan of LEGO. I still have my old bricks (these are not called stones!), now neatly organized in bags. I remember spending hours and hours building, adapting, destroying. Every minute has been worth it. When I did some research last year for training courses I could do, I found (by chance) that there is something called LEGO Serious Play and that one can become a certified facilitator in this method. It struck me: tackling business issues by building models with LEGO bricks! This should be fun and a great challenge to get it into Tesco. So I signed up for this 4-day train-the-trainer course and I enjoyed every minute of it.
As a certified facilitator for the LEGO Serious Play method, I am now able to run workshops of up to 14 people. I am able to guide the group through the exercises so that they create the relevant content. Furthermore, I can combine LEGO Serious Play with other methods, e.g. paper-based, to capture insights or create another take aways/deliverables
Insight: The facilitator ‘code’ forbids to teach others how the method works. If you google Serious Play you will find generic descriptions and some tips and tricks. You’ll be able to buy the specialised Serious Play brick sets, but they will come without any instructions.
Top reasons to use LEGO Serious Play
- 100% participation — The process guarantees that every person in the workshop participates equally.
- Fresh perspective — The number of options and solutions generated and the fact that each model is an original expression (instead of building on an idea that has already been voiced) guarantees that fresh perspective emerge.
- Authentic expression (no lies) — It is difficult to misrepresent or inflate your reality when using LSP to express ideas.
- Creates a common language — Professional training and cultural norms inform each person’s verbal expression so words can mean different things to different people. Some words or phrases are only understood by people with similar professional training. The LSP models each person builds creates a common language that can be seen, questioned and understood without challenging the model builder.
- Clarifies complexity — The process supports creating a landscape which makes connections and relationships among and between components clear, concrete, and easy to understand.
- Group alignment — The highly structured LSP process in combination with skilled facilitation assures that every person’s core ideas, values, and concerns are incorporated in the final solutions.
- Memorable results — It has been said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Three-dimensional LSP models, stored in your memory as pictures of recognizable objects (such as a gear, globe or tiger) trigger access to the workshop’s key insights.
LEGO Serious Play etiquette
The Serious Play etiquette is built from 3 major parts.
- “Beliefs” or underlying values for engaging in a LEGO Serious Play process.
- “Process” or how a facilitator acts or behaves.
- “Group Dynamics” or how the group acts.
Some of the beliefs include that the answer is in the system, that anyone can use the LEGO Serious Play method and that the only requirement is hands (or feet). LSP is not about modeling; it is about constructing new knowledge, not about making a physical representation of what something looks like. It is about surfacing and clarifying insights.
The LSP process is always about using the bricks to construct and share the story, the process always moves from individual to shared. The method requires at least two people.
LEGO Serious Play will create 100% participation. It’ll help to move away from classic 20/80 meetings, where 20% of the people talk 80% of the time. The right participation will come from the right group dynamics: one of the ways to achieve this is that people shouldn’t have a planning meeting with themselves about what to build: when one does not know what to build, start building. Research has shown that using the hands initiates ideas that will not come by thinking alone.
There is also no right way to build: the way you assign meaning to your model is the right one. The bricks don’t have any particular inherent meaning in them — or any pre-decided iconic value. Not even people or barrels or wheels. Whatever the builder says something represents is what it is! The builder is always right!
Serious Play. Serious costs.
Inspired by this unusual approach to tackle business issues with building models, I wanted to get my hands on the specialized sets. The process of understanding where and how we can use LEGO Serious Play in Tesco, fighting for the buy-in and writing up a compelling business case to finally being able to buy some bricks took me 6 months.
When a business wants to invest into this method they have to be aware of the overall costs and have to create an environment where the technique can be offered and repeated many times, to have a return on investment. The first cost will be for one employee to take part in the 4-day training workshop to become a certified facilitator in the LEGO Serious Play method.
If you want to purchase all LEGO Serious Play kits you are looking at roughly £2600. This will include 100 window exploration bags (they are just sold in this quantity), 20 Starter kits, the identity and landscape kit (with base plates, DUPLO and LEGO bricks for up to 14 people) and the connection kit (with all required connections for up to 14 people) plus linen bags, trolley and plastic bags.
This is a major investment for organizations when they can’t see the value and the power of the LEGO Serious Play technique. There are some ways around buying all bricks up front. I could have just bought the windows exploration kits and run, small, high-level sessions. Inspirational and playful, but if the teams want to use the technique for further, more detailed sessions, you would not be able to offer this.
Other facilitators sharing online that as a good start to introduce, facilitate and implement LEGO Serious Play, it’s worth buying starter kits. These boxes contain more bricks and are needed to get people through the skills building exercise (introductory first hours where people build, share and creating metaphors). The starter kit comes in at £23 per person. The identity and landscape kit as well as the connection kit are both available for £800 each and are used to run regular big sessions up to 14 people over a couple of days.
The LEGO Serious Play kits
The #changechronicles, a growing collection of written work from Roman Schoeneboom, covers but is not limited to #projectwork, #storiesofimpact, #sessioninsights, #training-by-doing, #opinionpiece, #teamsupport, and #changemanagement.
