Serious Play Forum

[Marko Rillo]

Dear all,

Serious Play Pro community member @Macrina suggested to open a separate group for those who are interested in discussing the connections between Lego Serious Play and Business Model Canvas. Please let me know how many of you would be interested in a dedicated channel. If there is enough interest then I am happy to open a separate dedicated group. If not then lets keep the discussions here in generic LSP facilitation forum for the time being. Please let me know your views.

Macrina’s message below.

Marko

Dear Marko,
i am an anthropologist and designer now inc¡volved in business education…so for me it will be great if the group is open to people that has not been certified as LSP+ Bussiness Model Canvas…many of us have been exploring this path with no need of an extra certification.

But you might know better this LSP community. Probably they will like to make it a close group?People involved in education are sometimes more open to share, but I understand also tha people are doing business with (LSP+Business Model Canvas) and need to have some “safe “space to really share experience, tips, etc.

Business Model canvas can be used in many ways: with young students, with MBA students, with enterpreneurs in the first stage of the ideation, enterpreneurs pitch, companies, for innovation,etc. And so does LSP. So the variations,experiences, applications are so diverse that can create a interesting research. And LSP is not always a good idea with BMC, so there is a lot to learn there.

Whe were 8 people in Amsterdam trained the 12 NOV and more in the 13Th Nov. Some of us had already experienced similar approaches before, and I feel there is a lot more to learn.
So the idea was to create a Group to share experiences doing LSP inspired by the BMC.

In fact, I will be posting very little this year as besides my work with the MBA students in design and Management at the Business School, I have to develop a new master course , ans its going to be super time consuming…

and Marko,hank you for your work at LSP pro, is very inspiring.
Best
MACRINA

[Eli De Friend]

I probably have some thoughts on this, but I am going into a webinar right now.

In the meantime, please change the abbreviation in the subject line from BCM to BMC!

I’ll post my thoughts when I get out of our webinar

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Marko and Macrina,
In the original vision of the community, we imagined that there would be communities within communities and as we have just seen the birth of the Italian-speaking community, this notion is alive and well.

However, when Patrizia suggested creating her Italian-speaking community, my first reaction was negative. While, I would defend the right of Italian speakers to share professional knowledge and ideas in their mother tongue, I was concerned that they might miss the bigger picture.

With BMC, the question is more complex, I feel. The Canvas is one modelling tool, as is LSP. Granted LSP is a little richer than the A0 piece of paper with a few lines on it, but ultimately both are ways for business people to get their ideas out of their heads so that they can share and discuss them with others.

If we started creating micro-groups for every combination of compatibility searching between LSP and another tool, the general forums which are only just beginning to show some richness of content would suddenly be abandoned as people set up their LSP and Christmas card stalls or LSP and Masterchef lessons groups.

While I think that the popularity of the Canvas can only help practitioners of LSP, for the time being I don’t see the need to hide this evidence from the general public by removing the subject from main home page.

Macrina, I’m really glad that you are enthused by both approaches. Don’t be afraid of sounding too academic for the business folk. At the moment, the community is a happy blend of both worlds. Many of us have links into both business and academic worlds and I feel that is a strength.

I’m sure that people will let you know if they feel the general forum is beginning to sound too much like an ivory tower of academic intellectuals.

Maybe we could try to organise an LSP-BMC brainstorm (brickstorm?) with Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur?

FYI: here’s what Yves had to say about his experience with LSP http://www2.hec.unil.ch/wpmu/ypigneur/2012/04/01/lego-serious-play/

In any case, we have agreed to touch base with Alex in the new year about exploring stuff.

All the best,

Eli

[Patrizia Bertini]

Eli,
I agree with your points about both concerns Canvas and language related groups.
I think that for the BMC it could be useful if we’d start using tags appropriately.
If participants would also take the time to use Tags, it would facilitate to keep all different applications and uses in the same main forum, but at the same time, it would make content easily searchable by tags, so that someone interested in a specific topic could easily browse and find the issues that are relevant to them.

About the Italian forum – as I know that some Italians tend to be lazy with English sometimes, so I have thought that creating a space where they still connect with community at large and are exposed to the international and global discussions, but where they can find themselves comfortable in writing in their own language, would be an important factor for the community.
Otherwise the risk is to have local communities we don’t know about and that totally miss the big picture as they would not bother to engage with the international community and would rely solely on their micro-local-community.

This way I will do my best to share the shared values and work of the seriouspro.com community and make sure Italians feel part of a wider unity made of this international and inspiring community.

[Eli De Friend]

Good point Patrizia.
Maybe every special community that is set up should have a mediator / spokesperson / ambassador in the general community, like the role you are suggesting you would play for the Italians.

[Patrizia Bertini]

Eli,
I really thought that the role of the moderator was exactly to link local communities to the international one, share the community collective knowledge, and act as a bridge and connector between local and international experiences… What’s the point of the moderator otherwise?…

[Eli De Friend]

To my knowledge, the role of moderator has never been discussed in the seriousplaypro community. I must admit I don’t necessarily read every post, though I try to. The concept of communities within communities was discussed, but not how they would function. In fact, until you mentioned it, I was unaware of a French or Spanish speaking community. For me, it gets complicated if I have to start subscribing to every individual language feed, just to know what is going on.

[Patrizia Bertini]

Local communities seem less active than the big forum.
but I think the role of the moderator is to bring any relevant issue or interesting question that emerges into the local communities to the attention of the community at large. (so that non speakers of the other languages don’t have to get a crush course in French/Spanish/Italian and we are still working and acting as a whole community).
Otherwise I don’t see the point of having a moderator :)

[Marko Rillo]

Patrizia and Eli – thanks for your points. It is a healthy debate to see how much should we keep the discussions in the centre and how much should be localised. A couple of additional points.

First of all. Provided that there is so far no topic interest for dedicated Lego Serious Play and Business Model Canvas forum, let us concentrate those discussions in the main forum indeed.

However, when it comes to regions then I would agree with Patrizia. I have noticed that there are lots of Spanish or French speaking Lego Serious Play activists who are very actively posting on related matters on their Twitter feeds, on Facebook and via LinkedIn. However, they are almost invisible on English speaking community pages.

This may partially be a language issue. But probably more importantly it is a market issue. Those facilitators who have a large enough domestic market do not obviously see the need to market their services towards English-speaking international markets and therefore they are also less visible in English-speaking communities. We should probably be more active to invite all those faciliators whose profile tells us Spanish or French to participate in those dedicated forums, which are presently empty, but which could also serve as a potential marketing tool for their competences and experience:
http://seriousplaypro.com/groups/lego%C2%A9-serious-play%E2%84%A2-en-espanol/forum/
http://seriousplaypro.com/groups/lego-serious-play-en-francais/forum/

Furthermore – I also have a hunch that another reason for sub-grouping is that some sub-practices are also specific to local culture. For instance I have experience that some practices of the “standard” LSP methodology do not work exactly the same way in different countries and therefore they need to be adapted. This is something of a richness that we are yet to explore.

Hence – I would argue for inclusive approach to widen the group of people who could take up moderation for those existing groups. Or why not create some new – (Arabic, Korean, Russian, Portugese, Turkish?) and would certainly welcome even more of them.

In a young community a lot is determined by a 1-2 dedicated persons who would be able to set aside some time to generate new discussions and keep the existing debates going. What do you think? :)

[Patrizia Bertini]

I agree with you Marko!

I think that more than marketing and taking care for their business, the community is a learning opportunity – there are more applications, case studies, experiences involving LSP and those who miss the updates, also miss the opportunity to keep up to date with the trends and can miss opportunities.

If language is a barrier, than we can help overcoming this.

Moreover, it’s important to give to national community a solid reference and guidance and avoid that national communities get lost or elect their own national guru who gives directions on the use of the method based on his interpretation rather than on what the community & LEGO say.

I think we should focus on the main languages that have a number of trained facilitators – otherwise we may end up with empty 20 national communities…! ;)

I am trying to promote the italian forum, but still seems dormant and most seem to prefer other platforms.

But knowing how many italians facilitators are around, I hope to be able to gather all of them here (and train them not to comment but to post using the forum tab!!!) LoL

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