Lego Serious Play
Clear Star
We’re on a mission to help Government organisations adopt service thinking at an organisational level
In Clear Star we love to come at things sideways. Anything that’s a bit different or appears to break a norm and we immediately want to know more. Lego Serious Play (LSP) falls squarely in that bracket.
Background
LSP is a facilitation approach that uses the construction of Lego models individually and in groups to ensure that everyone contributes equally to the meeting, to surface hidden insight and knowledge, and to create a sense of flow. It emerged from Lego trying to find a way to solve its own strategic challenges. In the mid-90s, with video games entering the market and with children “growing older, younger”, Lego was increasingly feeling the impact of this changing environment. Their initial attempts to develop a strategy to deal with this were thought to be unimaginative and a bit pedestrian. This was until they hit upon the idea of using their own imaginative and infinitely flexible product in the strategy development.
This post is a?very brief?summary of the method, some of the science behind it, and how it can be applied. A raft of further information is available, which we’ve signposted below in ‘further reading’.
Our thoughts
LSP is a pretty powerful method, but not as widely applicable as one might think. It’s?really?efficient, good for gaining a common understanding and alignment, and most useful for exploring complex problems and collaborating on approaches and strategies. It’s also good for team formation.
The approach is less useful for imparting information, teaching, and forming set plans. Of course you can do all those things with Lego, but a practitioner will tell you that’s not LSP.
Facilitation of LSP is unusual and counter intuitive. It turns a lot of traditional coaching and facilitation on its head. No reflection and mirroring. Use closed rather than open questions. Resist the urge to create stories from others’ models, or ascribe your meaning to them etc etc. It’s?hard.
We’ve been experimenting with LSP in our workshops and with a number of our clients. It is really proving its worth as an approach. If you’re interested in learning more, there are further reading links below. Or?get in touch?and a couple of our LSP Facilitators will be?delighted?to talk to you about it (seriously, we can’t get them to stop).
Why LSP?
Better meetings
LSP describes poor meetings as 80/20 meetings – when 80% of the content is produced by 20% of the people. These being the people who always talk, had decided before the meeting what they would say, introduce this at the start, say what they always say anyway, and then close the meeting with ‘so we are all agreed?’ having not listened to anything. LSP turns these into 100/100 meetings, where 100% of the people are able to contribute to 100% of the content.
Surfacing knowledge
Akin to?Johari’s window?of unknown unknowns, LSP contends that we’re only aware of 5-10% of what we know. Decisions based on ‘gut’ are probably right but difficult to explain why. This is because the knowledge on which they’re based is in the other 90-95% of stuff ‘below the waterline’. Anyone who’s read?Blink by Malcolm Gladwell?will recognise this in, well, in the blink of an eye! The LSP method provides techniques to expose this, and provide explanations and reasoning.
Flow
In LSP, Flow is a way to model how people learn and how they remain at their most productive, creative and efficient.
You’re ‘in flow’ when in the sweet-spot of a challenging activity and have the right skills and experience. You’re ‘out of flow’ when it’s too easy for you (bored, demotivated, dismissive) or too hard (anxious, uncomfortable, uncertain). A skilled LSP facilitator brings people from low left to top right, through constantly adjusting the difficulty and enabling more skills and experience. The ‘a-ha’ moments occur when you move back into flow (‘oh, I get this now’ as you increase skills, or ‘ah, I see how this could be useful now’ as you increase difficulty).
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Hand Knowledge
Our hands are very closely connected with our brains, and are capable of doing incredible things entirely subconsciously. For example, we struggle to do quadratic equations at school, yet can do complex parabolic calculations in milliseconds to enable us to catch a ball. LSP uses the mechanical action of building something physical to tap into the human ability to deal subconsciously with incredible complexity. To imagine something new, and then to describe it in the real world in a way that is impactful and memorable.
The Core Process
LSP is based on a repeatable Core Process (CP) that has been extensively and empirically deduced. This process is then used in a variety of different Application Techniques (AT).
The Core Process is as follows:
Experienced facilitators will notice this process combines many techniques and approaches. Importantly, it gives everyone some thinking time. A typical whiteboard ideation session is so often dominated by the people who come up with the first ideas (which are probably the most obvious, or not even new ideas). In LSP?everyone?gets a chance to think deeply, in a way that suits the way they work, and then share in safety.
The Application Techniques
The Core Process is used as the building block for large complex workshops, solving knotty problems, through a variety of Application Techniques. These include building individual models, bringing these together into shared models, landscaping with these models, building connections, and examining different scenarios. These are intended as ‘Real Time Strategy’ (RTS or emergent strategy) workshops. The output is a set of Simple Guiding Principles (SGP) to assist with decision making, rather than the production of a fixed plan or set of pre-defined actions.
Further Reading
Our original blog: https://clearstargroup.co.uk/blog/lego-serious-play/
The Method:?https://seriousplay.training/lego-serious-play/
Wikipedia:?Lego Serious Play – Wikipedia
Training:?https://seriousplay.training
Acknowledgements to?Robert Rasmussen?who helped us get to grips with all this. Look up his book ‘Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method’