Lego Serious Play Introduction

Think with your Hands: – How to get started with

Lego Serious Play

Martin Sandberg2013

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You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation

-Plato

3Mar

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What bricks to use?

• Use the most basic Lego bricks • They enable thinking in metaphors

4Mar

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When to use Lego Serious Play?

• Team building• Unleashing creative thinking for accelerated innovation• Work out a solution to a shared problem• Create a shared mindset about something• Constructive discussions where everybody is heard• Build a shared vision• Leadership development• One-on-one coaching and Team coaching• Use with your children, family, school, ...

5Mar

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Think with your hands

Just start building. Trust your hands. Let them pick the bricks they want.

Fiddle about ...

6Mar

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Lego Serious Play – Steps

1. The Challenge - Question2. Build a model – Metaphor3. Sharing – Give meaning – Tell your story4. Questions and reflections

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Warm Up – Skills Building

1. Normal, non-metaphorical representation2. Metaphorical representation3. Combine models into a shared group model4. Storytelling

8Mar

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Warm Up Excercises

• Build a duck, 5-10 min• Build a tower, 10 min• Build something; assign a description – metaphor, 10 • Build your dream colleague – metaphor, 10 min• My Monday mornings – story line, 10 min

9Mar

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Duck

• Build a duck using 7 bricks• Explain how it is a duck– Are different people’s ducks similar?

• Now remove 3 bricks so that you have 4 left• Explain how it is still a duck

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Highest TowerEither individually or as teams:

• Build the highest tower you can in 3 min– It should be able to stand without any support– You cannot reserve bricks

• Share something about your tower – explain what it means– Point out differences in the towers – no right or wrong

way of building– Explain how you reasoned in the beginning. Who did

what? Did you assign roles? Did you split the work?– Test for stability – show attachment to something we

have built when it breaks or is disassembled

11Mar

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Dream Colleague

1. Build a model that represents your Dream Colleague, 3 min• Share, 1 min per person• The facilitator asks questions to better understand the

meanings of different parts of the models2. Take one aspect from each model and make a shared model with the others in the team and place it on a paper napkin• Everybody should agree on all the parts of the shared

model. • Everybody on the team explains the shared model

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My Monday Mornings

1. Build a story describing your Monday Mornings, 3-4 mins

• Share your metaphor and storyline2. Take one part which you think is most important and put it in the middle and build a model together with everyone else in the group

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Build Something and Re-Interpret It

1. Build whatever you feel like building, 3 min2. The facilitator assigns a meaning to the model3. The participant explains how the model represents X, 1 min. E.g. ”My

dream holiday is to scuba dive. My model describes the boat and ...”Examples of meanings to assign:• Your dream holiday • The ideal home• Your favorite activity • An ingenious invention • Your favorite song• A relaxing day• Your neighbor• The car of the future• Your favourite TV show or movie

14Mar

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Listen with your eyes

Look at the model that is being shared– use your visual sense to grasp and understand even

more of what the other participants are describing

Examples of Challenges

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A) Future Success

1. Build a model which shows the road blocks to your immediate and future success

2. Build a model describing what your future will look like without the barriers

3. Build a model which shows what you need from others and yourself to knock down the barriers to your success

4. Combine your models which will show how you will get support from the team/group

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B) Team Member

1. Build a model showing who you are on the team– What do you bring to the team?– What could you bring to the team?– Build some of the functions that you carry out on the job, also

include some hidden aspects of you2. Build an addition to your model that shows how you

think others in your team perceive you3. Who are you at your best?– Build an addition to your model showing your thoughts

about this – what characterizes you when you are at your best?

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C) Team

1. Build an individual model showing how you perceive your team:– Show what you believe your team is all about– What is the spirit of the team?– The feel of the team?– The values of the team?

2. Build a shared model that shows what your team is all about– What is the team’s shared perception of the team?– What is the spirit and the ‘feel’ of the team?

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D) Team Aspirations

1. Build a individual model showing what you aspire to be like as a team in the future

2. Build a shared model• Each person explains each part of the shared

model

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E) Team Goals

• Build a model describing the goals for the team

• Build a model describing the objectives to meet the goals (first steps to meet the goals)

• Build a model with the objectives in the form of a storyline to show when in time they should be completed

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F) How do you see yourself?

• Build a model describing how you see yourself in your role (team member, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Manager, ... )

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G) Your role

• Build a model describing your role on the team

• What is easy in your role?• What is difficult in your role?

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H) Strengths and Weaknesses

A. Build a model showing the strengths of your Product, Team, Organization, ...

B. Build a model describing how you can utilize the strengths

1. Build a modell showing the weaknesses2. Build a model describing how you can

remove or compensate for the weaknesses

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J) Appreciation

1. Build a model describing what you appreciated in the workshop

2. Build a model describing what you would like to change in a future similar workshop

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K) Retrospectives

1. Build a model describing what went well2. Build a model describing things that we

should start or stop doing

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How does Lego Serious Play work?

• Much of our brain’s activity is dedicated to the manipulation of our hands

• When we model with our hands and tell stories there is more neuronal activity and better suffusion of blood to critical areas of the brain

• 70-80% of our brain’s nerve endings are connected to our hands

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How does Lego Serious Play work?

• Psychological Flow: Individuals gain most from a learning process when they are committed to and enjoy the process

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The Facilitator

• Creates Open-ended building challenges• Gets the group’s dialogue to serve its purpose• Makes the reflections and dialogue process

easier• Helps participants express themselves• Asks clarifying questions

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Participants’ Etiquette

• The Lego model is your answer to the building challenge• There are no wrong answers• There is no ONE right answer – everyone has different

views• What the model looks like is not the most important

thing• The meaning attached to each model is what makes it

valuable • The Lego models are tools and means to an end

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Group Size

• Roughly 4-8 people per group• One workshop group requires one facilitator• It is generally not possible to facilitate two

groups ‘side by side’ because each group would need focused attention from the facilitator, at the same time

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Play !

• Put bowls of Lego bricks in your meeting rooms and see what happens

• Combine Lego Serious Play with other facilitation techniques

• Play around with the Lego bricks and invent new challenges

• Get your workshops to a flying start by starting with Lego Serious Play to get people talking and energized

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References

• seriousplay.com• strategicplayroom.ning.com• seriousplaypro.com

• Open source introduction document: LSP Introduction

• User requirements with Lego: LSP and User Requirements

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Talks you might find interesting

• The future depends on play: The future depends on play_Seriouslythemovie

• Tim Brown: Tales of creativity and play ted.com/talks/lang/en/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play.h

• Ken Robinson says schools kill creativityted.com/talks/lang/en/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

• Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!ted.com/talks/sunni_brown.html

34Mar

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Food for Thought• How come executives love playing with Lego?• Why do we associate work with ’serious’ and play with ’not

serious’ ?• How can you use Lego Serious Play when you have distributed

teams?• Is Lego Serious Play still ’serious’ when it is used in schools?• What is a ’lean in’ vs. a ’lean back’ meeting?• How long can you keep your fingers away from a pile of Lego

bricks (e.g. in a meeting room)?

• You can download this presentation here: slidesha.re/ONgvsj