Lego Serious Play
What is Lego Serious Play and why should you use it?
The story of Lego Serious Play originated from LEGO, the Danish company. In the late 90s, LEGO was facing challenges finding new ways to spark innovation in the company. That sparked the idea, that LEGO could use their own product – a product that unlocks children’s imagination when playing – to solve their problems.
Lego Serious Play is a researched method to:
- Create leaning in
- Unlock new knowledge
- Breaking habitual thinking
Back in the late 90s, the CEO of LEGO Keld Kirk Kristiansens was frustrated over the low level of creativity in the ‘traditional’ strategy sessions. He started to ask himself, why LEGO could not use their own product to solve their problems.
Together with the professors Bart Victor and Johan Roos from IMD business school in Switzerland, LEGO set off to develop what is today Lego Serious Play.
The basic process when using Lego Serious Play goes through the following four steps:
1. Constructing a model that answers a given question;
2. Giving meaning to the bricks in the model by the use of metaphors;
3. Sharing the story with the group;
4. Reflecting.
As everybody is constructing and sharing their stories, the process creates ‘leaning in’, meaning that in Lego Serious Play sessions, ALL the participants participate and not the traditional 20 per cent of the meeting, who always speak up and somehow dominate the discussions as well as the decisions. When using Lego Serious Play, everybody shares his or her stories while everybody listens. This simple process leads to full commitment and engagement from people involved.
80 per cent of the brain’s activity is used to control our hands. When building answers to questions with both hands, participants activate vast centres of the brain and thus unlock new knowledge. In practice, participants often tell stories they did not know they knew.
Through play and through listening actively to each other, activities that are rare in a stressful context, participants explore scenarios and come up with new insights that break habitual thinking of solutions to real problems.
Exactly what Keld Kirk Kristiansen was looking for when he felt that LEGO was stuck in traditional thinking trying to solve problems.
Why use Lego Serious Play?
1 – When you need a process that engages everybody and creates commitment to the outcome;
2 – When you need to set your imagination free or think out of the box by tapping into everybody’s insights to innovate, come up with new solutions to old problems;
3 – When you need a clear, shared understanding of a complex situation, problem, strategy, challenge, vision, mission, identity etc in a group to serve as a basis for building a strategy for moving forward;
4 – When you need to be aligned internally or with external stakeholders to progress successfully;
5 - When you need a process for attentive and engaging conversations, creating a room for enhancing trustbased collaboratin.
