Serious Play Forum

[@SeanBlair]

I’m curious about your experiences with LSP in large groups. I’m facilitating a group of about 320 participants and wondered if any one had experiences to share of workshops of this size?

I imagine a simple ‘thinking-with-your-hands’ intervention of about an hour.

[Marko Rillo]

Sean – sure. Please let us know what kind of exercise you have in mind and what is the type of group that you have in mind.

There are lots of interesting case studies of running LSP sessions in large groups. You have probably already seen this: http://seriousplaypro.com/2014/12/02/lego-serious-play-workshop-for-1000-participants-in-spanish-and-english/

I have also written a short public case study of doing an event with 160 participants here:

Serious Play Case Study – Building Country Vision 2018

In practice there the following issues to consider:
1) The tasks will have to be easy to understand, very short and concise. You do not get the same chance as with a small group to polish your task once the groups have started building;
2) Practicalities. Tables would have to be set up in groups of 8-12 people and you would probably need a set of window exploration bags plus some extra for each table: http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=m2of7VfPwK0&offerid=115554.2000409&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.lego.com%2Fen-US%2FLEGO-SERIOUS-PLAY-Window-Exploration-Bag-2000409
3) You probably need to have several facilitators to run the show who would be able to move around in the room and support the participants who are stuck. Alternatively, you may want to train a representative per table to have some insights into LSP;
4) You would need to think about a solution for managing the created knowledge to make sure that the ideas won’t get lost and it would not be “just another conference fun icebreaker”. For this purpose I usually ask each table to have somebody dedicated to sit with a laptop / tablet, who would summarise the most important points of their table and upload it for everybody. It would be great if you could set aside some time at the end of the session to review the most important points that have emerged.

Hope the others would add also their thoughts …

[@SeanBlair]

Thanks very much Mark. I have seen the 1000 participant post, but not yours. 3 minutes, vision for a country – brilliant!

The conference I’m designing might begin by asking people to identify the challenges their industry faces. Capturing answers on gridcards (my version of post its http://www.meeting-facilitation.co.uk/blog/files/the-mighty-power-of-the-humble-gridcard.html).

Then the participants will get a series of inputs with experts and each group will be facilitated with traditional ideas.

My question is if after a long day (many will have flown in that morning) ‘thinking with hands’ might be more fun and more productive.

I wondered about capturing the output in photos and tweets… or inviting people who are excited at builds to make video vox pops.. (its beer o’clock afterwards).

Thanks for your help Mark. you are a gentleman.

Kindly

Sean

[Marko Rillo]

Sean – love your gridcards concept, thank you for sharing! You might have seen that Tesla Amazing has come up with a novel idea about cards of different sizes that can be written-erased and that stick with static charge to just about any walls: http://teslaamazing.com/

Planning your day looks good. Given that thinking with your hands may be pretty exhausting it is especially good idea to follow it with a beer. ;)

Have you already contemplated what LSP building task(s) would you ask your participants. Presumably they come from single industry, but still with pretty diverse background? Something new and interesting, something to connect them, but not just a repetition of what they did with grid cards? Would be great to think along with you what would work best.

[Wiro Kuipers]

http://www.stattys.com/ do deliver those cards as well, no reason to wait for it being backed first. ;-)

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