Lego Serious Play Exercise with SAP
SAP is one of the world-leading corporations in system integration. But the one distinctive feature makes it a real leader in its field. For more than 30 years they promote and use design thinking as an approach to innovation development. Creative intelligence and design thinking are already parts of SAP innovation culture in many countries where it operates.
For the SAP CEP education initiative for Russia and CIS biggest clients, SAP approached Wonderfull lab to make experimental exercises with Lego Serious Play methodology.
Lego Serious Play Exercise with SAP
Among several sessions with LSP, one exercise was really exiting by its effectiveness and efficiency. So, we decided to share the exercise with our community.
The task was to create a metaphor of successful collaboration between IT-unit and Business unit in a company. For most companies during ERP-integration this collaboration is crucial to the program and business success. The timeframe for the exercise was 10 minutes. Before that we spend about 10 minutes more for explaining the tool and LSP basics.
Lego Serious Play Exercise with SAP
The result was even more surprising for the SAP CEP organisers, as soon as all of them could never have imagine these “serious guys” playing Lego!
The trick was, that we didn’t get the metaphor of ‘successful collaboration’ (as soon as there were no time given for problem focus and idea generation). But we got one very much valuable result, which no one was thinking about to reach – visually clear and reflexion-free Lego models of real-life problems, arising between IT and Business.
They were so simple, precise and obvious, that every presenter was met with great appreciation, understanding, applause and just a laugh with: “Yes, yes, we have the same!” Such a result gave participants an opportunity not only to see the real problems in collaboration, but also to understand common pains, and very fast solutions “at the fingertips”.
After this fastest LSP exercise we have ever done, participants created creative and open-minded prototypes of the processes, which should be implemented to solve wicked problems. I believe, other practitioners in LSP can use this exercise too!
Exercise: “Metaphor of successful collaboration”
Number of participants: 2-4 people on a group.
Introduction: 10 min.
Game: 10 min.
Presentation: 1 min. each.
Result: reflexion-free visually reach “screen-shots” of the problems and rapid decisions, which then could be used for idea generation and problem-solving activities.
