Using Lego Serious Play

Using childhood toys for thinking sessions.

My old blog had content about Lego Serious Play, and a conversation with someone reminded me that it was no longer available. This updated version brings that back for them and others.

A long time ago I heard about Lego Serious Play and how you can use Lego bricks to help teams think through their challenges. It works well for some types of problem solving, scenario planning, and team building. It works well to help people talk, and to explore ideas, as well as the interaction of components. I didn’t know then that this rabbit hole would impact me so much. It taught me to make my teaching experiential; use play, and games to create opportunities for people to explore ideas.

Use Lego Serious Play to explore scenarios

LSP is especially good for strategy scenario planning. A team can use it to model their landscape, in a similar manner that a spreadsheet lets you model data. Then you can use the LSP models to explore different scenarios, and the team’s options for response.

LSP also helps teams learn more about each other while building shared understanding too. It helps get ideas out of people’s heads and onto the table. This lets people talk about their ideas and different perspectives on them come to light. The elephant(s) in the room are now visible.

The beauty of Lego Serious Play is how it helps participants think with their hands. You build a model and tell a story. The facilitator asks another question, you modify your model, or build a new one. You tell the new story. This means everyone is telling a story about their models. Other participants ask questions about the model. People are telling stories about their models, not about themselves. This makes it easier for people to talk, and share their ideas. Misunderstanding and confusion dissipate as people share their stories.

I used Lego Serious Play in my classrooms for some sessions. It was good in helping teams develop their various potential customers. They could create a potential user with a name, likes, etc, and they create models showing the person using their potential service. This helped them find issues with their idea at the time.

I also did some larger intro sessions so people could see how the process might be used to explore larger challenges, such as how to make Aberdeen ‘better’, and similar explorations. This let people see how we could use the process to combine ideas, as well as how it teased out each person’s own ideas too. They also could see where gaps appeared, and therefore needed more thinking too. Maybe a new model was needed to link two ideas together.

Stan Kurkovsky took Lego Serious Play further with teaching software engineering. He created various workshops to cover a variety of topics. He was able to cover the full range of the software development life-cycle in his sessions.

I mainly used Lego bricks alongside other games to teach agile approaches to software development. This is different from Lego Serious Play. This is using the bricks to create artefacts, or as pieces of something else. There might not be story telling. There might only be the model.

Three Days in Hamburg at StrategicPlay

If you want to use LSP more fully, then you need facilitation training. I did mine in 2012. The training guides you in how to use the LSP process to facilitate an experience for participants and guide them in their event.

Prior to that I’d read everything that I could after hearing about it around 2010. In the ‘good old days’ of Twitter I connected with a few people, who used it for work, which led me to Katrin Elster, and her company Strategic Play. She clarified a lot of ideas for me, and I eventually booked my training with her in Hamburg, Germany.

I had some understanding of the process and its benefits. After getting some Starter Kits thanks to a grant, in late January I ran a session with students and their group project clients, which went well and I discovered this really worked well as a group kick off for projects. The team members all had a common understanding of the ideas and goals of the project. Real cool! It also helped bring the teams together.

Come February 2012 I ended up in Hamburg at the StrategicPlay office with my five fellow classmates and wow! We learned a lot in our three days.

I learned that brain work, which is what we’re doing from 9-6 each day with an hour for lunch, is hungry work. This is made easier by the great food of endless coffees, juices, fruit and cakes, provided by the staff and the fabulous lunches in a nearby restaurant. There are also celebratory drinks in the evening when you discuss how the day went and what issues might still need clarifying.

I learned that I could trust the process of using the Lego models built by workshop participants to illustrate metaphors. This is how Katrin teaches the facilitation training: you run through the process three times; once each day. The first and second days you are the participant, while on the third day you and your classmates each take a section of the process and Katrin is a participant too. The workshop sessions are balanced by theory sessions in another room, which on the third day is also where you have the debrief sessions of the workshop stages you ran with your team members.

I learned that what I thought I knew was the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more that I had to learn and that reading and running a few sessions is not the same as the full facilitation training. They are so much different.

I suspect it would’ve taken me years to learn on my own the lessons I gathered during three days in Hamburg. The third day is what makes the difference. After two days you may know all that you need to know to run a session on your own, but the ‘graduation’ session you run with your team members and the accompanying debrief show you what you need to know and put all of pieces together for a real day-long workshop.

Yes, it will still take me a while to sort out the first one I do, but now I know what’s involved and what questions to clarify with a client before I do it in order to make it run to its maximum potential. Sure I’ll be nervous, but I’ll also know that as I did it once with friends, that this time on my own it’ll be ok. I’ve already made the beginner mistakes in a safe environment so I’ll be fine when it counts.

I learned that the StrategicPlay Lego Serious Play process is everything I thought it would be and more. It builds upon the process discussed in the LSP open source document. This document only scratches the surface though.

Lego Serious Play brings play and thinking together

There are a number of books and online resources available explaining the background, and philosophy of Lego Serious Play. These break down into a few categories: the history, the theory and the manuals. I’ve not found any manuals, however, which explain everything. This means that in order to move beyond the basic approaches outlined in the open source guide, it is necessary to be trained in LSP facilitation by one of the master trainers.

The background and science of LSP are available in a few online papers (open source co-authored by David Gauntlett), Rasmussen (from Robert Rasmussen, one of the founders of the LSP method), Hylton and Statler. These all point to sound reasons of why the process works from the psychological perspective and offer some basic case studies about why LSP works the way it does.

More in depth background to the processes and theory behind the approach can be found in these books:

Brown, Stuart. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul J P Tarcher/Penguin Putnam, 2009. Gauntlett, David. Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identity and Audiences Routledge, 2007. Pinault, Lewis. The Play Zone: 6 Principle for Unleashing the Hidden Value of Your Company Haroer Business, 2004. Rock, David. Your Brain at Work Collins Business, 2009. Roos, Johan. Thinking from Within: A Hands-on Strategy Practice Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Kristiansen, Per, Rasmussen, Robert. Building a Better Business Using The Lego Serious Play Method, 2014, covers the process in some detail.

Roos and Rasmussen were some of the original people involved in setting up the LSP process, while Gauntlett helped draft the open source document for LSP. Rasmussen’s piece provides the context of LSP and a brief background to the theory. Pinault’s book discusses Roos and gives different perspectives on an LSP session with a UK retailer throughout the book.

Roos’s book explains the history of how the idea developed and has been tried with various approaches. However, don’t expect photos and discussion of the LSP process. Lego bricks are only mentioned once or twice in passing. Gauntlett’s book provides the theoretical background to the LSP approach. Together both Roos and Gauntlett explain clearly why this all works as nicely as it does. Gauntlett, also discusses how few Lego bricks you need to run an LSP session. He also did a number of other projects with Lego too, outlined on his website.

Rock and Brown both provide useful theory about why play is important and how our brains work. Rock also explains the SCARF model, which is important in the StragegicPlay approach to using LSP. The ‘SCARF’ model addresses: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. The participants should understand their status in the game with the rules providing certainty of outcome. In addition, the players should have autonomy within the game scenario, and there should be relatedness between the players so that they are seen as friendly players, while the rules also provide a fair game to all participants.

Together all of these books provide an understanding of why the LSP process works, and some indication of how you can build a session around a topic. However, there is more to it all, which you need to gain from LSP facilitation training. This means going to one of master trainers approved by the Lego Foundation, which oversees the LSP materials. Maybe you can’t get to Hamburg, but that is my recommendation. 

Katrin Elster has a wealth of experience using these approaches many times a month over many years and will happily share the stories and experience during the training session. Go play, and learn with the best.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can see what others say too:

Pete Roessler did his StrategicPlay training with Katrin too and wrote about how easy it is to use Lego Serious Play for solving complex problems.

Katrin’s key interest is dealing with ambiguity. Lego Serious Play, is one way to work with ambiguity. She also teaches a CoCreAct process too, which covers other aspects of ambiguity challenges. I did this training in 2015, and know that it has developed further since then.

Go share and play to learn with others

I know that training is not what everyone needs. Do read some of the documents linked to above. Get some Lego bricks if you don’t have any. Think of a challenge you have at the moment. Build a model to represent that. Tell yourself, or a friend, (or even your coffee mug) the story about the model. Build a new model that represents a possible solution. Tell your coffee mug this story. Now, take a moment to tell your coffee mug, how you could start to test that solution with one or two small steps.

This is the power of the process with the brick. As with many coaching techniques it helps you slow down, explore the concept, and then see what options you do have available. It helps you find a path forward.

You can also do this with a group of people. You just need enough Lego bricks for each person. Play well and have fun.

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