Design Thinking — The LEGO way !!
LEGO has been in existence for over 100 years now and continues to thrive and inspire generations!! Founded in 1932, it became the most valuable Toy Company in the world in 2012 and also got featured in the Forbes Top-100 Brands of 2018. It has been a very long and illustrious journey for a Toy Company that has kept the interest of generations alive, right from kids to teens to parents, and continues to do so even now.
Both of my daughters and I are huge fans of Lego. We have spent countless hours building and playing Lego together, inventing new designs and uses of the “Interlocking Lego Bricks”, building, dismantling, and rebuilding wonderful structures and models that are functional.
Recently when I was talking to my daughter about an essay she was writing on Lego, I realized that the entire philosophy of the Lego design is the ability to integrate any block into any other block and that may very well have been the reason for their longevity and amazing success that has lasted decades.
I am a Digital Enthusiast and Management professional and just could not help but think of how can the LEGO Design be used to build Products and Organizations that are agile and efficient, that last longer, are easy to tweak, that adapt fast and evolve to market demands.
All Organization or Products must answer a few questions these days:
How do u keep your core intact while still be able to morph into any form or function as the market demands?
How do you design to Pivot to leverage your strengths?
How to design for Agility and Morphisim?
How to build an organization on a forever moving and evolving platform?
How do you change most efficiently with time and cost as key metrics?
If we look at Lego, we can find answers to these and many other questions. What Lego can teach us, to build organizations and products that can meet the forever evolving market demands and aggressive competition. Here are 8 ideas that I think we can pick from Lego to design Organizations and Products for the digital economy.
- Define who your customer is?
Who is your customer? It is important to define your customer in terms of who uses it (Product/Services Consumer) and who pays for it (Product/Services Buyer) and what is the gratification that comes with the use(usefulness/fulfillment) of the product?
For Lego, the Product/Services Consumer is the child (age 5–16 years). The Product/Services Buyer is the parent or adult. The usefulness is learning for the child, bond-building between the child and the adult, and gratification is the happiness that comes from building and learning.
2. Define your USP and let your brand resonate that.
The USP for Lego is the “Interlocking Brick” and that is the single most important reason for the success of Lego. The meaning of Lego is to “Play Well” and the brand resonates its meaning through the USP of the product. Lego has fiercely guarded this design through patents and continues to innovate and file patents to ensure its competitive edge.
Organizations need to find their USP and continue to innovate and patent those processes, features, utilities, and designs that can give them a sharp edge over their competitors.
3. Find your Lego Brick
The brick can be defined as the smallest possible component of your business/product that can exist independently and has a unique function or action that it performs. It works at its own individual level and also works in conjunction when integrated with other functions. Just like the Brick in Lego, find the smallest independent unit of your service or product or business.
For Eg in the case of a Software company, each module or micromodule can be called a Brick. For an Automobile company, every single part of the automobile can be a Brick. For a Telecom company, every component of the service delivery platform can be a Brick.
To elaborate a bit using the example of Telecoms — we need to ask how many of the systems, telecom infra, processes, APIs, Modules, Softwares, people, networks, apps, backend systems, etc are actually designed as plug and play modules. Imagine if each of these Services Delivery modules could be converted into Plug and Play Bricks that can fit in anywhere. That will create an extremely nimble, agile, and competitive organization that can be very successful in the digital age.
4. Convert your Brick into an Interlocking Brick
While the Brick has an independent function and an interdependent function when integrated with other Bricks, the most important feature every Brick must have is the capability to interlock. This has to be an inherent feature of the Brick. This is by far the hardest design job that all organizations need to undertake.
To pick an existing product, disintegrate it into the smallest functional block, and then adding a layer of interlock on these blocks is a Design Thinking problem Organisations must solve and is by far the most challenging aspect of building the “Lego Brick” feature into your product.
5. Create 3 layers of interconnection
While designing your interlocks you must take care of building at least three layers of interconnectivity. One layer to receive input, the second layer to handover the output, and the third layer to interconnect to any other layer.
Imagine if you could just pick any part and integrate it with any other part through its connectors, just like you do while playing Lego.
6. Easy to Attach, Detach, Reattach
Once you have such high levels of inter-connectable units, your ability to design, test, deploy, redesign increases manifold. You can attach, detach, and reattach any feature within minutes and create MVPs that can be launched in the market at low costs and with rapid speed.
You are not only able to ‘time the market’ but also able to meet the exact needs of the market. Because of such high interconnectivity, you can incorporate market feedback into your product quickly and deploy in no time.
7. Easy to Produce On-Demand
This model enables On-Demand production. Capacity enhancement is much easier, production capacity can be redeployed to produce different kind of interlocking bricks as the demand for those services increase.
For Eg, if there are 10 Lego models, and you find that 2 of them are doing well, then it is easy to redeploy production capacity to produce those 2 models without an increase in cost, or any delay because in the end what you are producing is the Brick and it is reusable in multiple Lego Models.
If you have to add a new feature to your product or your application, that can be done within no time and launched. Long production times, numerous trials, etc can be a thing of the past.
8. Identify your Leverage point and turn them into Pivots
Now that you have a product/service or an organization that evolves and adapts rapidly, you have an additional advantage. You can Pivot !!
Lego Pivoted into Movies (the Lego Movie was a blockbuster), into Gaming with Minecraft, into Amusement Parks, into Lego Science, etc and that has given them a leading edge in the market even today.
One of the most brilliant examples of Pivoting is from Amazon. They started with books, pivoted that into e-commerce, pivoted books into Kindle, pivoted e-commerce capacity into the cloud, used Prime to create USP, and converted that from free delivery to free delivery + music + movies. The Lego way gives you this ability to Pivot. The question is: Do you want it?
In my opinion, a simple Lego Brick teaches us the very basis of winning in the digital world. There is a lot we can take and deploy from the Lego model and drive business success.
Is the Lego Design the future of all Organizational and Product Designs? May just be !!
Let me know your thoughts.
