Where #legoseriousplay and #playmobilpro meet...?

I ran my first playmobil.pro workshop last week. Well actually I used both LEGO? SERIOUS PLAY? ('LSP') and playmobil.pro together. It was a first for me. Playmobil.pro has only just launched and I was looking for opportunities to use the new kit in a workshop.

I didn't necessarily have any preconceived ideas about how playmobil.pro would work, nor how playmobil.pro and LSP would work together.

The focus of the workshop was on business-readiness, and the degree to which each participant felt they were business-ready. The flow of the workshop was as follows:

1. Model yourself (playmobil.pro - 'PP'): Take a playmobil.pro figure and using the props and costumes, model yourself within a business context. Once you've done that, write one word on the playmobil figure that you would use to describe yourself. Put your figure of you to one side, and we'll come back to it later. The words that some of the participants came up with were: Rad, Random, Ambitious, Serious.

2. Skills Build (LSP): i) Pick up any six bricks and build a duck ii) Take your duck apart, remove three bricks, and then pick up any two new bricks and put all five bricks together in any way you wish. Now tell the story of the model as it relates to - your dream holiday, favourite book or movie. I get people to use the same model to tell a different story, so that they realise in a very short space of time that the same model/bricks can have multiple meanings iii) Build a model using any bricks of 'what makes your heart sing, share your story with the others.

3. Question (LSP): Build an individual model that represents what business-readiness means to you. Share the story of your model.

4. Shared model (LSP): Choose the most important part of your model and highlight it with a flag. Now build a shared model of what you mean by business ready. The model must include the flagged items, but you can add additional elements to the model, as long as everyone agrees to it.

This is the finished shared model representing the groups interpretation of 'business readiness'. The final model took a number of iterations to get there, with the blue baseplate a later addition. The four figures on the blue baseplate represent a team, with the mid-section made up of a series of barriers, representing the problems or barriers that need to be overcome. The model ended with the goal being reached, represented by the column in the middle and the yellow trophy on the left.

5. Storytelling: Create a shared story of your business-readiness model.

6. Awareness (LSP): Taking a slightly different tack now, I asked each participant to build an individual model of how they believed other people perceived them within a business context. I then asked them to write a single word that they thought other people might use to describe them.

Once they had done this, I asked them to get the playmobil.pro figure they had modelled earlier and place it facing the model of how they believed other people perceived them. So for example, in the picture below, this participant used the word 'ambitious' to describe themselves, but for the word they thought others might use to describe them, they wrote 'stubborn'.

7. Concerns/anxieties (LSP/PP): I now asked them to think about the gap between how they perceived themselves and how others perceived them, with particular reference to the word pair used to describe them, and how they might go about closing down this gap.

I asked them to write how they might close this gap down. One word per Myndflo static note. In the example above, this individual wrote words such as - Build skills, [Be] helpful, network - as the actions they would undertake to bridge the gap.

As part of this phase of exploration, I then asked each participant to place their playmobil.pro figure in the shared model, where they felt that they had concerns and anxieties in being business-ready.

One had concerns at the outset around gaining alignment within a new team, and whether or not their voice would even be heard, or whether they would be perceived as being 'stubborn' and therefore ignored, others felt they had challenges during the problem solving phases.

It was only later when I reflected on the workshop, that the use of playmobil.pro figures might be quite a powerful tool. The placing of literally 'oneself' within a shared model could be quite insightful, and focused each user on the specific relationship they might have with a shared model. It was interesting in a sense that where the user might typically be intrinsically or implicitly part of a shared model, using a playmobil.pro figure meant that a new relationship was highlighted where the user whilst being in the model, was on another level external to it. There was a tension between the user and the shared model. And this tension allowed each individual to highlight, in this case, their anxieties. At one time, both an integral part of the model, while at the same time separate to it.

If we only used LSP for the shared model, then in a sense the presence of the individual, and indeed the group building the shared model, is implied throughout all the model, whereas with the playmobil.pro figure, the existence of the individual is obvious, but only at specific points (or moments) in the model. With the shared model in LSP the collective is greater than the individual, whilst still recognising the contribution made by each model (without the individual model, a shared model cannot exist). The addition of the playmobil.pro figure, disrupts this. The individual takes precedence over the whole. The individual is highlighted.

I'm still thinking this through and the implications of it! Hence, my thinking is probably still somewhat vague. Thank you to Otto Driessen for provoking this train of thought in me.

8. Next steps: I then asked each participant to look again at the words they had written on their static notes, and from this to choose one that concerned them the most or caused them the greatest anxiety, and one that they were going to work on immediately.

For this person, they were going to work on 'put myself out there'. For another it was being more confident, whilst for another it was about being more vocal. Whilst each shares similarities of intent, how they expressed or articulated it, the specific word or combination of words they each used, was specific to that individual.

9. Definition of being business-ready: As a last step, I then took the one action they were going to work on and used this to define (for them) their group definition of being 'business ready'.

Whilst we may all have a general understanding of what business-ready is, this workshop highlighted to me, that the definition of being 'business-ready' is in reality very broad, and down to the individual themselves. How often, we make assumptions about the meaning of things!

Tags: #playmobilpro #legoseriousplay #seriousplay