Build your way to better business — The first LEGO Serious Play workshop at Tesco PLC
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.
A detailed write-up of the system and its benefits: An engine. A language. A technique without content — Introduction to LEGO Serious Play
PROTOSHOP — a prototyping workshop
I ran a prototyping workshop on service design and methods, fast scribing and LEGO Serious Play for 18 members of the Store Design team on the 9 June 2017.
The 3-hour workshop was deliberately set out as a hands-on session with a healthy balance of learning and doing. The session covered the LEGO Duck exercise as a first warm-up, introduction to some of Digital Customer Experience team’s work, such as the agile framework and the hierarchy of needs, services and journeys. This was followed by an introduction into how design thinking, customer experience, and service design are connected.
Design thinking is the process of empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping, testing and is used as an umbrella term by many companies to describe their way of working. If you think of SAP, IBM, IDEO, etc. these companies all have their very specific process, based on their stakeholders, their systems, their needs as a business to deliver work. In Tesco and the Digital Customer Experience team, we simply call it the agile framework.
Customer experience is the aim of a set process: it’s defined as the customer’s perception of all direct and indirect interactions with the brand over time. Perception summarises the customer’s feeling, their needs, their expectations, how they believe it should be or they would like it to be. Direct interactions can range from using an app or interaction with in-store staff. If someone talks you through his or her recent shopping experience, that’s an indirect interaction. Over time is important: people don’t forget a negative experience. In our post-family research project, the participants shared shopping experiences which happened many years ago (but are still relevant to how they feel about the retailer).
Service design is not just what makes you walk into one coffee shop and not the other — it’s the reason you keep coming back and tell all your friends about it (from ‘A tale of two coffee shops’, FJORD 2017). It’s putting people at the heart of the experience, embracing co-creation and taking a holistic approach: this can range from supporting teams and colleagues with information, ad-hoc support or training, or to act as a facilitator between many different teams. Being t-shaped and working holistically means using design methods and tools, help your colleagues learning, adapting and using them. Common service design tools are the blueprint, journey maps, affinity diagrams, personas, etc.
While there are already detailed descriptions of the other prototyping methods in previous blog posts, I want to focus in this article on sharing insights from the LEGO Serious Play experience.
More imaginative ways of developing the company’s strategic direction and plans
People are the key to an organization’s success — and people can and want to do well. A strategy is something you live, not something stored away in a document. There are three areas where LEGO Serious Play can support strengthening these statements:
- Beyond 20/80 meetings and creating leaning in: this means breaking 20/80 dynamics (20% of participants talk 80% of the time) and creating a meeting where everybody is leaning in and contributing.
- Leading to unlock: once 100/100 participation is acquired the method unlocks people’s knowledge in the room, their understanding of the system and the connection between the individual’s and the organization’s purpose.
- Breaking habitual thinking: helping the team to break their habitual patterns of thinking, this means: suspending going for the first acceptable solution, instead think once more, think differently and seeing new patterns leading to surprising solutions.
Seriously, let’s play
LEGO Serious Play is fascinating to me. A group of adults — with families, houses, mortgages, responsibilities — sitting around a table, each outfitted with a box of fairly unremarkable bricks. No one talks. It’s very calm. Brick-fiddling-noise. Foreheads are wrinkled. Intense staring. Deep frowns. People are focused. Focused building a model. While they build, they are thinking of what the model represents, what the single elements are and what they mean. The stories, the laughter, the incredible richness of thought makes me want to be part of a group and the building, rather than facilitating the exercise. Every time.
Insight: LEGO Serious Play works because it engages participants. Everyone builds, everyone talks — people are eager to make and share stories. The ‘thinking with your hands’ approach inspires creativity and encourages focusing on the most important thoughts and feelings on the topic at hand when building metaphorical representations of complex ideas. It works because the quick pace keeps the conversation moving and forthright — you don’t have time to ‘have a meeting with yourself’ to over-rotate on how to shape and spin your story. The photo shows members of the Store Design team building their nightmare working process.
The power of the method lies within its exercises, principles, and process
LEGO Serious Play works well as facilitation method because everybody is compelled to follow and use the LSP ‘principles’. Below are 3 things we did in the Store Design session.
The tower — working with boundaries (exercise)
One of the standard exercises to get the group starting is the tower exercise. It’s simple: Build a tower. There are all sorts of boundaries you can let the participants build under: time, height, shape, pre-selected set of bricks or function.
Insight: I asked the Store design team to build a tower with pre-selected bricks (just green and brown). The left-hand side of the photo shows the participants sharing their story and why they built the tower in this way. Right side shows the diversity of thought and building, even though each of them had the same amount of bricks to start with, each tower turned out differently, for all sorts of reasons, e,g. I am a straight person, I built a straight tower.
Assigning meaning to bricks (principle)
How one assigns meaning to a brick is totally up to them. There are no limitations. This is one of the ways that LSP instills creativity into the building process. Some of the examples I witnessed during the sessions are as simple as they can be — Bauhaus even — but the power of the metaphor is incredibly strong and very relatable. Occasionally they are eye-watering funny.
Insight: when presenting his model for the nightmare work process, one of the participant came to the conclusion, that even if one would work through all difficulties and issues on a daily basis (not displayed in this frame), there come a moment where you think you reach the top (big translucent and white brick), and then have to eat a shit sandwich anyway (displayed by two beige and one brown brick).
The power of metaphors (process)
The way how participants are using their bricks to create metaphors, assign meaning to single bricks and help others to understand the meaning behind their models is simply breathtaking. I have the feeling that the LEGO bricks help some people to externalise something is already there. The example below from the Store Design session is a such a case and a great example for the power of metaphors and the LEGO Serious Play method. I asked the group to build individually the nightmare work process (with leaving it open to be relevant to their current work or not). One of the participants build and explained the following model:
Left-side of image: The participant used all available bricks from his set and aligned them in a horizontal line. He placed a mini figure at the bottom and a crown at the top of the pile of bricks. He explained the all the bricks represent the current chaos in his work life, that he is somewhat connected to this (mini figure with grey connection piece) and that he has to walk through the chaos to reach the aim/delivering great experience (represented by a crown with grey connection piece). He continued explaining that we as a business spending a lot of money working in this way (money sprinkled along side the pile of bricks.
Centre of image: He grabbed the grey gear wheel and urged us to be careful, when on that journey not to become a wheel in the system. He continued to explain that if we are lucky there are occasionally signal light and sign posts/flags which will guide us on the way.
So many thoughts expressed in a way, that everybody can follow and take something away. This is the power of the metaphor. I am grateful that I was able to be a part of this session and witness how LEGO Serious Play can surface great storytelling.
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.
