Introducing LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY?: Hard fun with a serious purpose.

I was asked recently “Is LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY? the process where one team has to build a model and describe it to another team in a different room, for them to build?”

My 5 second elevator pitch response to this is: "Not at all. It’s a method to get organisations to deeper insights, new thinking, and commitment to do things differently, in solving business challenges".

Whilst it does do all these things, those words don’t really do it justice, or describe it in a way that people will understand what they will be doing when they use LEGO ? SERIOUS PLAY?.

Instead, I prefer to liken it to the same commitment, energy and engagement that children put to their play.

When children play they demonstrate the most wonderful things about their behaviour:

• They laugh and smile a lot, and research shows us that laughter helps create memory. 

• They are creative and innovative with ordinary mundane objects such as toilet rolls, cereal boxes and tissue paper, turning them into rocket ships, submarines and extra terrestrial creatures with just their imaginations.

• They are incredibly attached to their rocket, submarine, or creature and can describe it years after they made it (challenge yourself here and seek out something in your memory made at school that you remember vividly, and see what thoughts and emotions you have about it).

The process of imagining, designing, and creating an object of worth and meaning from nothing, leads children to open up new thinking and create new insights as well as creating commitment and engagement with whatever they’ve built… and it’s the same for LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY?, only it’s focused on solving business challenges (strategic planning, managing change, designing products, setting up projects, team identity and values, to name a few) through ‘hard fun’.

In the same way that children will make things from nothing from bits of everyday waste, adults using LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY? are encouraged to make things that have meaning to them from LEGO bricks, based on specific business focused questions posed to them. They might not know what they want to make when they start putting the bricks together, or what insights they are going to have from their final model. But once it’s complete, there is always a story to be shared.

As each person shares the story of their model with the group, it creates insights and light bulb moments for them and also for the rest of the group. Each person's understanding of what that means is shared and consolidated with the group, creating a great leveller for everyone's input. Giving everyone equal voice, equal time, and equal involvement, and resulting in ‘lean-in’ meetings where 100% of the group are involved 100% of the time.

By creating the model, sharing the story, and reflecting on what this means, each person has connected emotionally and rationally with the insights obtained, and formed a stronger memory of it as a result. The engagement achieved through this is long lasting and impactful, and therefore doesn’t always need to be captured using traditional methods, although a great way to capture these events is using graphic recording (see Inky Thinking for more details).

So next time you’d like your meeting, workshop, or problem solving session, to have a long lasting and impactful influence in your business, giving people greater insights, and creating commitment, give LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY? serious consideration. Hard fun with a serious purpose.

If you are interested to know more, contact me at KMcK Solutions and we can explore together how I can facilitate your next workshop, meeting or team session. I'm available at [email protected]. It would be a pleasure to   have you follow me on Twitter or Facebook.