I just realized that it’s been ten years since I first took LEGO® Serious Play® training with Robert Rasmussen. I have this listed on my business cards and it’s amazing how many great conversations this starts. LEGO seems so out of place in a business context, that people immediately want to know more.
If you haven’t heard of it before, LEGO Serious Play is a business facilitation technique that uses LEGO bricks to work through complex problems, requiring creative solutions.
I was first introduced to Serious Play by Ellen Grove, and watching her facilitate deep meaningful conversations with just a bit of LEGO was astounding. I could see people opening up and sharing things that they might otherwise not have been willing to discuss. I’ve also seen creativity burst forth with new and novel solutions to hard problems.
When I first took the training, I didn’t understand why it worked. I only knew that if I followed this structure, I’d get some amazing results. It’s only later, as I started to study neuroscience and psychology that I began to understand how it was working, and why I was getting the results I was seeing.
Not everything that I do with LEGO is Serious Play btw. I do a number of other exercises with different kits, but that’s not today’s point.
In one case, I had a team that just wouldn’t speak up in a retrospective. I’d watched them for multiple retrospectives over many weeks and it was like pulling teeth to get anyone to say anything. So one week I pulled out the LEGO Serious Play and we filled two full walls of ideas. Things that they’d wanted to say all along, but hadn’t felt comfortable enough to bring up. That’s a typical reaction.
If this sounds interesting and you’d like me to facilitate some Serious Play for your teams, or you just want more information on what I’m doing with it then let’s talk.
Some things I’ve written about this…
- How to run a retrospective with Serious Play.
- How to build team working agreements with Serious Play.
- Some of the science, specifically around learning