Deconstructing the underpinning principles of LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY? to make remote meetings awesome

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This article led to the development of the Playful Principles for Productive Meetings training workshop. After several in-house sessions for clients, the training is now available as an open sign-up. Next dates are in March 2021. Details and registration here.

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There’s not a lot of demand at the moment (in the UK at least) for clustering around a table sharing bits of plastic no matter how powerful a facilitation tool.

As a facilitator who uses the LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY? method as a regular part of my work, that is somewhat inconvenient.

However, it is also a fantastic opportunity in several ways:

One reason I use the LSP method is that the philosophy that underpins it (and the many clever techniques it encompasses as a result) are a very strong fit with how I’ve always liked to do things – and it has influenced how I design and run meetings when no LEGO is involved. So this has prompted me to explicitly think about what are the underlying principles and how can I further develop how I use them.

Second, it has never been more important than it is now that teams are able not only to build real alignment around what they are trying to do, but also to build trust and psychological safety into their thinking and doing. Meetings need to be viewed not as the opposite of work, but as where the magic happens, where the team becomes more than the sum of its parts. And yet, just as many organisations are starting to understand the importance of these factors, the context has never made it more difficult to put into practice. 

What are the elements of an LSP experience that are bundled together in a physical meeting that we could unbundle and consciously re-mix for remote working? 

Finally, it seems pretty safe to assume that, when we start meeting in person again, those face-to-face meetings will take on a greater importance and need to achieve greater depth and greater speed with longer lasting impact. And there is no better method than LSP for achieving that.

Deconstructing the model

So, while naturally exploring what bits of LSP might work in a remote setting (and the pros and cons, advantages and limitations of remote LSP are the topic of a different article), I prefer to think about what is it about LSP that drives psychological safety, that encourages breakthrough strategic thinking, that helps teams to really mesh, that brings out the potential and contribution of everyone in the room and how to make the most of that in our “new normal”.

What are the elements of an LSP experience that are bundled together in a physical meeting that we could unbundle and consciously re-mix for remote working with or without LEGO? 

The list below is my first go. I think these are the elements that make for a really productive, inventive (and playful) meeting and as such is a valuable checklist for thinking about how to structure and run your meetings whether remote or in the same location and whether or not there is any LEGO involved.

Here it is something of a list of principles. In subsequent articles, I’ll describe them in more detail with ideas of how they might be surfaced in remote meetings with some examples that I’ve used or seen in the more engaging remote workshops I’ve been part of.

There are more being developed all the time by a thriving community of committed, innovative facilitators looking to really understand the relatively newly mainstream medium and the wider context; not starting from the viewpoint of how to adapt LSP for online, but how to address clients’ needs using its underlying principles. There’s a shared understanding that we are at the start of figuring out what the ‘new normal’ looks like – and much of it is still to be invented.

As an overarching summary, they all build towards a positive, exploratory and playful mindset enabling productive and inventive activity, managing the engagement and energy of the group in and out of flow and building strong relationships beyond the narrow purpose of the meeting.

1. 100/100 involvement: everyone involved all the time. This is baked into the LSP process; it is even more important in a remote context - where participants face all kinds of distractions that the organiser cannot control - if you are to make the most of everyone in the meeting
2. Thinking with your hands: or more broadly using your body to create new neural pathways and quieten the parts of your brain that inhibit breakthrough insights. You won't get the best from people sitting, staring at a screen trying to come up with deep thoughts, so you need to find ways to get people active
3. Listening with your eyes: engaging more than one sense to listen actively so that you can respond deeply
4. Roughly equal airtime – opportunity and expectation: a key indicator of psychologically safe teams is that members speak in roughly equal amounts. In remote meetings this is even more important and less likely to happen without consciously designing for it as those who find it hard to speak up in face-to-face meetings tend to find it even harder in remote ones. 
5. Time to think: the quid pro quo to the expectation to contribute is to give people time to think before they are required to speak; everybody thinks and prepares their contribution before anyone speaks.
6. Psychological safety knitted into the structure: it’s much harder to “read the room” online, so meetings need to be designed to build and maintain psychological safety. How you do that depends on the team context; so it’s vital to understand that
7. Dialogue about ideas, not the people who bring them: when an idea comes from a disembodied head on a screen, it is easy to attach the idea, problem, challenge to the person who brings it. LEGO models allow for a de-personalised conversation; so you need to find ways to get those ideas to the remote table without personal attachment
8. Strong ideas, lightly held: one of the most beautiful aspects of the LSP process is the way it encourages collaboration and commitment to outcomes while removing or at least reducing participants’ feeling of having ‘compromised’ on their ideas. Using exercises from improv are a great way to exercise the same muscle.
9. “Sufficiently unclear” - freedom within structure: my favourite phrase from Robert Rasmussen who has spent more than 20 years developing the LSP method is when he asks “Is that sufficiently unclear” – meaning have I given you enough structure to know what you’re doing and enough freedom/lack of clarity to allow your brain to wander fruitfully to find stuff that you didn’t know you knew. It's a difficult balance when you're not in the room, able to pick up on subtle cues
10. Being present: well designed LSP meetings are carefully structured to move people in and out of their comfort zone around the corridor of flow, so they stay fully present, fully engaged.
11. Storytelling and emotional connection: There is lots of research to show that storytelling is a powerful way to create emotional connection, increasingly memory retention, commitment and empathy within a team and meeting. It’s at the heart of the LSP method. It’s tempting in an remote meeting to become more transactional; but, while it’s important to keep meetings brief, it’s worth thinking about how to create that connection 
12. Systemic thinking and working with emergence: LSP helps people to see strategy, projects, teams and many other issues and challenges from a systemic point of view; playing with the system to see what happens in potential future scenarios (as we do in the full LSP method as taught by the Association of master Trainers) trains teams to be able to be aligned directional in their decision making in response to future events.
13. Commitment to outcomes: the fact of building something together in a positive, exploratory way creates much greater than usual commitment to outcomes from a meeting
14. More than just the meeting topic: in most LSP workshops that I run, the specific purpose of the meeting is only one aspect of what participants get out of it. Typically, they learn new things about themselves and their teams; and they experience good modern leadership behaviours in a memorable way.

I haven’t directly mentioned playfulness in the 14 principles above as I think that it’s not an input. I think playfulness – which is essentially the application of a positive, exploratory mindset within a safe environment – is an outcome of using the principles to design and run meetings – whether remote or not. 

I’ve probably missed some important principles. Please let me know if you think I have.

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If you found this article useful, you might like to know that I've created a workshop to help you bring the Playful Principles to life in all your meetings. Find out more and register here here.

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