Serious Play Pro

Imagine this!

“I’ve decided to apply the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology to journalistic interviews and chose to explore and learn more about OccupyLSX (London Stock Exchange) through the use of LEGO. I have been around St. Paul’s camp looking for someone to involve in my experiment. And that’s when I’ve met Helen. She is 17, she is studying textile, “I still go to the college from here in the morning, which is difficult because it’s freezing and it’s too cold to get up. It’s not nice.” she says with a smile. I ask Helen to build me the first model, to let her familiarize with LEGO”.

This is how Patrizia Bertini – trained LSP facilitator – introduces us to her LEGOviews concept (LW). The LEGOviews idea have been invented and conceptualised by Patrizia and she is now using it in real life situation to investigate complex social realities, like the Occupy movement and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Patrizia: According to Wikipedia, “An interview is a conversation between two people (the interviewer and the interviewee) where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interviewee.”

LEGOviews (LWs) are journalistic interviews based on the LSP method: they do not much differ from traditional interviews in the aim, though they deeply differ in the cognitive mechanisms and in the process. Most of the best interviews we can think of deeply delve topics in an argumentative way and the interview, in most cases; it’s a dialectic and intellectual fight between the two parts. LEGOviews are not fights, they are collaborative dialogues, they are conversations. Read Patrizia’s full article “When LEGO bricks become Socrates’ Midwife”

Crafting Strategy book

by Cambridge University Press

All Lego Serious Play friends should be excited about the new book that professors Loizos Heracleous and Claus Jacobs have just published.

The book “Crafting Strategy: Embodied Metaphors in Practice” focuses on creative approaches of strategy making.

Term “strategy” normally symbolizes future planning as top-down, structured, rational and analytical activity. However, in recent years we have observed that  creative, bottom-up ways of strategy making are frequently much more effective. Frequently Lego Serious Play has proven to be a great tool to support in this. It helps to dismantle inner walls of organizations and release the potential of ground troops. Hence – the authors use numerous examples from Lego Serious Play retreats that the they have observed to provoke thoughts of the managers and suggest alternative ways for more creative strategy making.

The book is full of rich imagery – photos of LSP sessions and resulting discussions have been analyzed in depth. All in all – it gives lots of interesting ideas for anybody who is interested in digging deeper into Serious Play methodology.

The synopsis of the book tells:
“The rationalist approach to strategizing emphasizes analytical and convergent thinking. Without denying the importance of this approach, this book argues that strategists must learn to complement it with a more creative approach to strategizing that emphasizes synthetic and divergent ways of thinking. The theoretical underpinnings of this approach include embodied realism, interpretivism, practice theory, theory of play, design thinking, as well as discursive approaches such as metaphorical analysis, narrative analysis, dialogical analysis and hermeneutics. The book includes in-depth discussions of these theories and shows how they can be put into practice by presenting detailed analyses of embodied metaphors built by groups of agents with step-by-step explanations of how this process can be implemented and facilitated. The link between theory and practice is further supported by the inclusion of several vignettes that describe how this approach has been successfully employed in a number of organizations, including BASF and UNICEF.”

Claus Jacobs

About the authors

Prof. Jacobs was part of the original team at the Swiss-based non-profit think tank Imagination Lab who helped to create the original concept of Lego Serious Play. They worked alongside with Lego Corporation and later with a number of international companies to carry out both theoretical and clinical research projects. Later Prof. Jacobs joined the University of St. Gallen where he has continued with his research activities on the subject.

Loizos Heracleous

Prof. Heracleous is the author of more than 50 articles published in leading journals and his wide range of academic interest spans from innovative strategising processes to culture and learning patterns in organisation change and development.

The book relies on research that the both Loizos Heracleous and Claus Jacobs have done over the years while they have helped people in several organizations to strategize using Lego Serious Play tools.

What do the others say?

“This is truly an amazing book. Combining meticulous scholarship with a plethora of illustrations, it succeeds in articulating an approach to strategy development that relies equally on philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Transiting such broad intellectual landscape is no small feat. These authors accomplish it in a way that will appeal to those who practice strategy as much as those who study it.”
– Steven W. Floyd, Frank S. Kaulback Professor of Commerce, McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia.

“This is a persuasive manifesto for the role of ‘embodied metaphors’ in strategy work. The book reflects its topic. It is utterly serious in both its theoretical grounding and its practical advice. Rich in vignettes and illustrations, the book is also a pleasure to read.”
– Richard Whittington, Professor of Strategic Management, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

The book is available for pre-order from Amazon.com

Making is Connecting Book

Long time LEGO SERIOUS PLAY friend/fan/facilitator (and friend of LEGO) David Gauntlett has written a new book. Making is Connecting was recently published by Polity (www.politybooks.com). Check the website here

It is available on amazon as well. This short post to attract your attention to the book. I will do a longer post when I have read it.

(Davids previous book “Creative Explorations” was partly based on his work with LEGO SERIOUS PLAY)

Recently finished this book, and even if it strictly speaking is not about LSP, I wanted to briefly mention it to the community. Dave Gray is a big fan of LSP and has co-written a nice book outlining a whole range of games that can be used in ideation and decision-making. In short, they argue that games and playing are more needed than ever (guess it will be hard to find disagreement with that in this group). We are faced with a word which is no longer linear, rather we are moving towards an increasingly uncertain future with fuzzy goals.

Gamestorming Book

The authors develop a definition that makes a game different from play, personally, I like the definition, but am not certain if what it distinguishes between is ”games” and ”play”, or whether what they are looking at is a world defined by finite games vs infinite games on the one side, and frivolous play and serious play on the other side.

They define games as having boundaries, rules for interaction, artefacts and goals. They also describe how a game has five stages: 1) Imagine the world, 2) Create the world; 3) Open the World; 4) Explore the world and 5) Close the world.

Before moving to describing a lot of different short games they also outline essentials and skills for ”gamestorming”, all of them very consistent with the approach in LSP, for example the design of the questions, the use of artefacts and creating a meaningful space.

I liked the book. It is an easy read, it is (mostly) concise, it makes a great argument for games and for playing, and lists a lot of different game activities that one can turn to, should one find him or herself without bricks (obviously, not a nice scenario)

Check out their website: http://www.gogamestorm.com/

A team working on one of the tasks used in the study.

NPR carried a news story on collaboration and collective intelligence. I tracked down the foundational research on the National Science Foundation web site and in a serious academic journal called “Science”.

In a study involving 699 individuals, a general collective intelligence emerged. Interestingly enough, this general collective intelligence, or C-factor, was not linked to average or maximum intelligence of individual members. It was linked to average social sensitivity, equality of distribution in turn-taking and in the percentage or women in the group.

For more information, see National Science Foundation (NSF) News – New Study Validates Factors That Enhance the Intelligence of a Group nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117795

New release includes a great photo of a team working with LEGOs.

The design of the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY process is based on an extensive body of research on how people, especially adults, learn and how they communicate. New and emerging research is documenting the real-time value of LSP in a variety of workplace settings. A three-year study of ways to improve group dynamics in multidisciplinary design teams at the early stages of innovation documents a number of successful applications of LSP within project design teams and between the design team and stakeholders and users. This research was designed and led by Louise Møller Nielsen and the Department of Art and Design at Aalborg University in Denmark.

Louise Moller Nielsen

Almost all teams begin projects in high spirits and with high expectations. At the first deadline or milestone, spirit and enthusiasm dampen or completely disappears when it becomes clear that there is a gap between expectations and accomplishments. Are there innovative processes to reduce this gap at the early stages of innovation? The purpose of Nielson’s research project was to document the ability of artifacts (LSP constructions) to (1) stimulate conversation within the team and between the team and project stakeholders and (2) create shared frames of reference within the team at the early stages of innovation.

This three-year research project documents the ability of LSP workshops to increase conversation and establish a shared language for project teams ranging from the team changed with designing the next generation of guitar to teams responsible for improving ground support set-up for early stage disaster relief. The study group included traditional manufacturing organizations (such as Daimler) and social service agencies (such as the Red Cross). Louise Møller finds that a team meeting is less successful when the participants “leave the concrete matter (the bricks) on the table in favor of a more typical meeting-style discussion. This (conversation based process) induced longer dialogues and arguments, with fewer participants involved in the discussion.”

In sharp contrast, when team members grounded their conversations by referring to their LSP models, “there was a more rapid dialogue, which included all the participants at all times. Sometimes, it was even as if the critical decisions were formalized by a consensus assurance in the group, and subsequently the shared model was not altered, until all participants around the table had given their acceptance of the change.”

Download the PhD Dissertation of Louise Moller Nielsen (2009) Personal and Shared Experiential Concepts

Stuart Brown. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul

A few months ago when I was doing my preparations for TEDxTartu talk about play@work I started reviewing popular sources for materials that cover connections between playfulness and work. I found out vast literature. In two extremes mostly – either related to developmental psychology or about (what Plato calls) “frivolous play”: play as a pastime. However, direct of play@work linkages were few.

One of them was written by Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, co-authored with Christopher Vaughan. The book is called “Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul”.

The book starts with background on animals at play. First vivid example describes an incident where an encounter between polar bear and a husky did not end up tragically for the latter. Instead hungry polar bear was happy to be drawn into puppy-like play.

What follows is an interesting thought experiment that spans several pages. Play is considered to be one of the most important means of child and adult learning; one of the most important sources of creativity; playing together as a fundamental basis for bonding and teamwork. Numerous examples presented in the book demonstrate that our species has been produced to play throughout the adulthood.

Why on the earth do we consider that in order to be productive we need to be sombre and serious at work? Apparently this is an outdated view. There are several studies that demonstrate that playfulness at work is in fact increasing our productiveness.

Indeed – even joking sometimes helps in certain conditions as Lancaster professor David L. Collinson has found in his studies[1]. Side remark – this does not obviously mean that we ought to start joking and playing all day. Certain modesty should be exercised – thinking of some light-hearted solitaire addicts.

However, the most important statement of this about play@work comes from medical studies. These have identified that very serious workplaces are not necessarily more productive. But they certainly are much more depressive. So the opposite of play is not work, it’s depression.

Lots of books about play tend to take playfulness out. Brown is not one of them. His book is fun to read. My definite reading recommendation for anybody interested in how to incite some playfulness in your office or factory. If you are interested then I also welcome you to watch his inspiring video at Serious Play TED conference called “Play is more than fun”.

[1] Collinson (2002) Managing Humour. Journal of Management Studies 39:3, pp. 269-288.

The ability to think creatively is now more important than ever, as the world is changing rapidly and we are all asked to do more with less. Many corporations are outsourcing skilled labour such as engineering, accounting, and software writing.  North Americans watch as left brain jobs go to countries asking for lower incomes.  Innovation is a right brain activity, which comes from the ability to use imagination. It could be one of the ways North American businesses gain a greater foothold in the world market during this economic slowdown.  The Economist Magazine calls innovation the next big economy, following the Knowledge Economy. And now Business week is calling it the Creative Economy, http://ow.ly/1BwZM.

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin.

General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and Google all understand the Creative Economy and they are working to capitalize. They all recognize their greatest asset is the potential that lies in their human resources.  They not only create environments that support ideation and collaboration, but they also create time and space.  It is difficult to be creative when your time is taken up on task completion.

Clearly some people are more creative than others.  But we can all become more creative. There is a way to develop that creative muscle.  First we need to recognize the power of creativity and imagination and see this as an available tool that is accessible to all of us and an important ingredient for innovation. Tools and processes like LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY use systematic creativity to take participants through a process that generates better solutions.  Using whole brain thinking, 3D tools tap into the hidden potential that is locked away in the underused right brain.

If you’re interested in reading more about design thinking – check out the book: The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin.

According to Wikipedia …

Johan Roos and Bart Victor created the “serious play” concept and process in the mid-1990s as way to enable managers to describe, create and challenge their views of their business. Dr. Roos is now President of Copenhagen Business School and Dr. Bart Victor is Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership at Vanderbilt University but when they created serious play they were both professors at IMD in Switzerland. The conceptual foundation of serious play combines ideas from constructivism (Piaget 1951), its subsequent version constructionism (Harel and Papert 1991), complex adaptive system theory (Holland 1995) and autopoietic corporate epistemology (von Krogh and Roos 1994; 1995) applied to the context of management and organizations.

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