You cannot be serious!

Are you now thinking of a sweaty head-banded John McEnroe, throwing his tennis racket down in disgust at a line call? Or how your colleagues might respond when you say you're taking four days out to become a certified facilitator in LEGO(R) SERIOUS PLAY(R)?

Learning to facilitate the LEGO Serious Play method

For me it was the latter, as I spent four days last week at the Holiday Inn, Bloomsbury learning how to be a facilitator in the LEGO Serious Play method. Now, you might be thinking that serious play is an oxymoron, can there really be anything serious about LEGO? Surely it's the stuff that you remember playing with years ago and that your kids play with now? It's those knobbly bricks you find in all sorts of unusual places in the house, which occasionally you've stepped on in bare feet and wondered if a trip to casualty was in order.

'Team Flourish' behind our landscape.

Myself and twelve eager 'to be' facilitators joined Robert Rasmussen, co-founder of the LEGO Serious Play method, to learn how these small bricks could be used to build teams, innovative new products and services, and model business models and test their behaviour in 'real time'.

Sophistication in simplicity

The sophistication of the method is in its simplicity. There's an underlying four step core process of framing a question, building a model, sharing the story of the model, learning and reflecting. That's it! Those steps are applied to seven 'application techniques' or AT's. Think of the AT's like apps. There's an AT to build shared models. There's one to build a system and another to extract guiding principles.

From individual models to complex systems

Over the four days we went from building a basic tower right through to a shared and surprisingly complex business model surrounded by agents that might influence it, and connections that physically responded to changes in the system.

Everyone is at the same level - no more 'but I can't draw'

The joy of building models with LEGO is that everyone is at the same level. I've run a lot of Design Thinking workshops, and despite encouraging everyone to draw, that nagging self-doubt that your picture won't be as good as someone else's is pervasive. That doodle you thought was clearly one thing was wildly misinterpreted, and it put you off drawing anything else. So you've given up and written things down, which in a hurry (and looking at the photo some time later), has the clarity of a doctor's prescription signature.

It's all about the model

Your hands 'know'

We're hard-wired to work with our hands. There's research around that suggests that 80% of our brain is engaged when we do something with our hands. During the class, many of us found that we'd built things into our models unintentionally. Windows might be open or closed. Eyes might be looking one way or another. Elements might be in particular positions on a model suggesting importance (or lack of). Proximity, direction and distance, all give additional meaning as the models expand in their landscapes.

Leaning in for 100:100 meetings

The biggest take-away for me was that when everyone's building, everyone's 'leaning in'. Instead of an 80:20 workshop when there's only a small amount of time when nearly everyone is engaged, the LEGO Serious Play method aims to work at 100:100. Everyone is involved all of the time. The 'chatty Cathy' who grandstands and takes up all of the time talking about what they always talk about is taken out of the equation. The silent splinter cell, ready to derail the team with a few side comments at the last minute, has to play an open hand from the outset. And rather than everyone agreeing to something, everyone works through the shared model to the point that they can all 'live with it'. And that sense of a fully shared model that the group really is comfortable living with and adopting - is pervasive.

It was certainly a tougher four days than I'd anticipated, but the value was exponentially greater. I'm really excited to start using the method to help teams come together, innovate, build new ways of working - and most of all - to have fun doing it.