Whether it’s assessing innovations or discussing the new corporate strategy, there comes a time when people want to describe their ideas about the future and convince others of them. Overloaded PowerPoint slides and complex mountains of figures are not a satisfactory solution, as most people probably know from their own experience. Conviction always arises when there is a compelling story that everyone involved can imagine.
Origin of the method
A method called LEGO Serious Play works well here. LEGO Serious Play was developed in 1996 at the suggestion of Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the main owner of LEGO A/S at the time. At the time, Kristiansen needed an effective process for innovative strategy development for his company and was dissatisfied with conventional strategy development methods. Together with the two professors Johan Roos and Bart Victor and Robert Rasmussen, then Head of Product Development for LEGO Education, he gave the go-ahead for a method that has been developed over 20 years into the effective tool it is today.
Implementation and advantages
How does Lego Serious Play (LSP) work? A detailed description of the method can be found in the methods section of our Innovation Wiki here: LEGO® Serious Play. For an initial overview, however, I would also like to briefly discuss the method here. With LSP, entire process sequences are recreated and played through in a playful way. It is often only then that the actual strengths but also the decisive weaknesses of an idea become apparent. The combination of games and storytelling makes it much easier to get people excited about a project idea.
It is exciting to see how the activity of the participants increases as soon as the Lego bricks are on the table. The majority of people associate Lego bricks with childhood memories and immediately go into “building mode”, regardless of hierarchy or origin. I have now conducted workshops with this method in many parts of the world and have had very similar experiences here.
In principle, the process is always the same: The participants build their idea of the process/product/strategy with Lego bricks and then explain the model with a story. The others listen with interest and then present their own version. A joint model is then built and the ideas of the individual participants are integrated.
What sounds like a quick round at first glance can easily take 1-2 days (depending on the complexity of the topic) and involves a lot of fun, but also intensive (and exhausting) phases of work. It is always important to moderate the process correctly so that the focus is on the progress of the project. You can find out more about the Serious Play method on the Lego website: https://www.lego.com/en-us/seriousplay.
How can you use Lego for your team?
