Lego Serious Remote
What I learned from using Lego Serious Play during a remote workshop, without using actual Lego bricks.
Context
A few weeks ago I facilitated a remote workshop for the winners of the What Design Can Do Climate Action Challenge. Thirteen teams participated to learn more about effective teamwork. Most of the teams work remotely in different parts of the world, so a remote workshop seemed most fitting. The goal of the workshop was to convey the importance of clear communication and building trust.
I won’t go into depth about how to run a remote workshop in this post though, you can read all about that in this post by the amazing people over at Hanno.
What I do want to focus on is my online adaptation of Lego Serious Play. For those of you who don’t know LSP, here’s a description from Lego itself:
“The LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology is an innovative process designed to enhance innovation and business performance. Based on research which shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities, the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methodology deepens the reflection process and supports an effective dialogue — for everyone in the organization.”
One of the methods used, asks participants to build a tower together. The catch is that each person has a different set of instructions and they are not allowed to communicate. It’s a great tool, but it’s clear that it has a high in-person element, using Lego bricks and all. Still I wanted to use it for this remote workshop, since it so clearly demonstrates the importance of clear communication. I searched the web for online adaptations, but I wasn’t able to find one. The closest I got was a team who sent physical Lego’s to participants and they then had to build the same tower looking closely at what the others did over the webcam. This wouldn’t work for me for two simple reasons:
- I didn’t have the budget to send out Lego bricks to everyone;
- It wouldn’t really be working on the same thing, but rather individual towers that resemble each other.
So I stopped my search and decided to create my own adaptation. Which I’m sharing here for you to steal / use / improve.
What I made
I started with breaking it down to see what I needed. Some elements were an easy copy from the real thing. The one big challenge was to simulate the Lego bricks. My inspiration for this came, funnily enough, while doing my taxes. I use a Google Spreadsheet to keep an eye on my finance and if I come across something I need to figure out later, I colour the cell so it stands out.
This is when it hit me. The cells look like Lego bricks. Just give them a colour. Google Spreadsheets are collaborative by default. It was perfect and easy. All I needed to do now, apart from finishing my taxes, was to make a template that would work as a building ground for the Online Lego Challenge. This is what I came up with.
To do before the workshop
- Prepare blank templates, one for each team to work on. You can find and use my template here.
- Divide all participants over the different teams
- Prepare personal messages in Slack, directing them to the right template and giving them their individual instructions. Ready to send during the workshop.
Results
I introduced the Lego Serious Play method, sent the messages and directed everyone to Google Spreadsheets. And then just let them build.
It went rather well. The first workshop taught me that I should take more time to clearly explain the process. Some participants were a bit overwhelmed and missed their personal instructions. As you can see in the results below, it doesn’t really resemble the intended design. Especially team 1 just kept going without considering the common goal, building a tower. This just shows the importance of clear communication even more, also from my side.
I made sure to introduce the challenge more clearly with workshop two and they came a lot closer. Both teams ended up with a pyramid shape (sort of), and also kept breaking down the parts that weren’t in line with the instructions. Which, of course, resulted in some frustrations back and forth between the builders.
It was difficult to have just one person at a time be able to build. Next time I would skip this rule and let them work simultaneously, which tends to happen anyway.
Team learnings
Showing the towers that the teams built with everyone is always a fun moment. To see how different things can go and where you succeeded or failed usually sparks a nice discussion.
All together, there was enough to reflect on. The frustrations that built up during the exercise were quickly recognized from other work experiences. But more importantly, the solution to this was clear as well: communication. The learnings for this online session were all similar to a regular LSP workshop:
- The importance of clear communication (also from my side!)
- Recognizing each others different roles while working towards the same goal
- Being adaptive & flexible
- Not acting on assumptions
- And ofcourse, having fun.
Personal learning
To me personally, the biggest lesson was to just create something myself, testing it and (this time) seeing it succeed. In the end it wasn’t difficult. I didn’t embark on a mission to create a new tool, it just kind of happened. I only realised I had created something new when I talked about it to the people around me. To me, that shows that the creativity myth (or lone genius myth) indeed is just that, a myth. I built on the work of others before me, gave it my own twist and something new emerged.
Make it your own
I think this tool could be useful for many teams working remotely. It’s easy to set up and free to use for anyone. If you’re using it, I’d love to hear how it went for you. What went well? Do you have any suggestions on improving it? Just reply here or sent me an email with your thoughts. I’ll keep this post updated if any improvements emerge.
Or, do you have other examples from existing tools that you made your own? Share your learnings and help others improve their way of working as well.
Thanks for reading 🙏
Jorik
Interested in creating your own (remote) team culture? Reach out to us, we love to share our ideas and help you focus on the important things in life. You can reach us via email directly.
