Serious Play Forum

[Barbara]

I need to facilitate a corporate team building event for 300 pax and the theme is “Building Tomorrow, Today’, the key messages being ‘building our future together’.

They want the staff to construct a LEGO structure and the final structure will be displayed in their premises that can symbolise the process of building the organisation together with shared values and vision.

Wondering if someone in the community has any suggestion/idea to share.

thank you.

Barbara

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Barbara,

I hope you will get some response from some facilitators near you. Three hundred people is a lot to handle. The theme is perfectly in line with what LSP is good for. However, if your client wants to display the structure in their premises, they may need the help of a LEGO Master Builder to recreate what the staff produce.

The way I would see this working is to have the 300 people sitting in tables of 4-6. Arithmetically, you would need about 20 LSP co-facilitators to run this session professionally; you might get away with 10. Each table would build their own model of their organisation and each table would present key elements of their model to the rest of the participants. You might want a video camera and large screen to capture and display this.
Until now what you have done is pure LSP on a large scale.
From here, you would want to have an interactive discussion to establish what are the core features of the organisation and what are those shared values, where is the full agreement on the vision?
From here you would probably ask for a spokesperson from each table (If you have 6 people per table, you would have 50 spokespeople) to participate in a separate session to build the prototype model of the organisation, shared values and vision.
To this separate session, which you could probably run with just one experienced LSP facilitator, although I would still recommend two or three, you could invite the LEGO Master Builder. LEGO Master Builders are accustomed to building large scale representations of tangible things (animals, vehicles, buildings); they are not necessarily accustomed to building complex models depicting metaphors and relationships.
Somehow you might want to get about three teams of 15 building 3 different versions of the organisation and then have a negotiation on what elements of which models capture the sense most effectively.
With the help of the Master Builder, you should then be able to construct one single representation that most eloquently reflects the ideas of 300 people.
I would suggest, capturing all of the separate phases on video, so that those involved, as well as visitors to the building can see how the structure was indeed genuinely the fruit of so many hands and minds.

I hope this gives you one perspective and that others will pick up and offer some diverse approaches to the challenge.

If you need to find some facilitators to help you with this process (if you are going to use LSP, you should really get some professional help), why don’t you submit a post on the “Find a Facilitator” page on this site.

Find a Facilitator

Kind regards,

Eli

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Barbara,

I hope you will get some response from some facilitators near you. Three hundred people is a lot to handle. The theme is perfectly in line with what LSP is good for. However, if your client wants to display the structure in their premises, they may need the help of a LEGO Master Builder to recreate what the staff produce.

The way I would see this working is to have the 300 people sitting in tables of 4-6. Arithmetically, you would need about 20 LSP co-facilitators to run this session professionally; you might get away with 10. Each table would build their own model of their organisation and each table would present key elements of their model to the rest of the participants. You might want a video camera and large screen to capture and display this.
Until now what you have done is pure LSP on a large scale.
From here, you would want to have an interactive discussion to establish what are the core features of the organisation and what are those shared values, where is the full agreement on the vision?
From here you would probably ask for a spokesperson from each table (If you have 6 people per table, you would have 50 spokespeople) to participate in a separate session to build the prototype model of the organisation, shared values and vision.
To this separate session, which you could probably run with just one experienced LSP facilitator, although I would still recommend two or three, you could invite the LEGO Master Builder. LEGO Master Builders are accustomed to building large scale representations of tangible things (animals, vehicles, buildings); they are not necessarily accustomed to building complex models depicting metaphors and relationships.
Somehow you might want to get about three teams of 15 building 3 different versions of the organisation and then have a negotiation on what elements of which models capture the sense most effectively.
With the help of the Master Builder, you should then be able to construct one single representation that most eloquently reflects the ideas of 300 people.
I would suggest, capturing all of the separate phases on video, so that those involved, as well as visitors to the building can see how the structure was indeed genuinely the fruit of so many hands and minds.

I hope this gives you one perspective and that others will pick up and offer some diverse approaches to the challenge.

If you need to find some facilitators to help you with this process (if you are going to use LSP, you should really get some professional help), why don’t you submit a post on the “Find a Facilitator” page on this site.

Find a Facilitator

Kind regards,

Eli

[Dieter Reuther]

Where are you located Barbara?

@KarenLynch and I have lead workshops for 200+ people, but in groups of 70.

[Stephen Dann]

An option, if they’re asking for a short exercise with a common outcome.

Depending on what the scope of the exercise (and the venue), you could pull together a Lego exercise using the Duck Kit (6 bricks x 300 people).

You’ll be best friends with the Lego Pick a Brick feature, and I’d suggest that what you want to do is select a wide range of colours for the “Ducks”, focusing around colours that you could mark with a Sharpie or similar permanent marker. Buy a heap of sharpies, and get one of the base plates (grey – https://shop.lego.com/en-CA/Gray-Baseplate-10701, or sand – https://shop.lego.com/en-CA/Sand-Baseplate-10699). Charge all of this back to the company alongside any other fees.

Get the ducks, kit them up (or have them on a table where there are instructions for people to select the required bricks). Get people to work through the Duck exercise (Build a duck; remove pieces and explain why still a duck; build a variant on a duck, explain the duck; explain a thing that is not a duck, explain; build Duck 2.0). Then ask people take their duck apart, and keep a brick that they would be willing to sign/initial, and add to a centerpiece model. Invite them to take their partial duck with them back to the office to reassemble back at their workplace as a reminder that they are part of a big picture (the piece that is shared), and still themselves and important (their own duck sculpture), and they bring something special to their team by being them.

Symbolism, team work, Lego experience, and a load of free range lego ducks. It’ll work.

Invite the highest ranked and most important people to place their bricks first, in the centre of the base plate, and then ask audience participants to file past at some stage and place their own bricks. Highlight that the management will be in the heart of the model, unseen by the time the build is over, but central to the core structure. Ask people to think about how and where they want to fit their brick to the future view of the model. What should emerge is an abstract model that has the signatures and handwriting of the participants, built collectively, and something that could sit as a centerpiece in a case somewhere to remind everyone that they’re in this together.

[Author]

Posts