Serious Play Forum

[Arjan Passenier MSc]

Hi, yesterday I finished a two part workshop to find the improvement values in a company. The workshop had to be split in two sessions because the organisation needed to go on and couldn’t afford to shut down one day (health care). So we decided to split the LEGO Serious Play workshop in two sessions. To facilitate everything we did split the group into table of 9 to 12 people. This worked really well.

The first session (+/- 45 people) went superb… a lot of positive feedback, good models and some really good guidelines for the managers to work with. The second workshop (+/- 55 people) went equally good, but there was a big difference in timing per table. In the end four tables finished their shared model and went for a break, came back, started cleaning up etc. This off course was not positive for the last table. I tried to intervene by giving the others a longer break, but in the end the difference in speed resulted in other being impatient, starting talking (loudly).

What could I have done otherwise to compensate for the speed differences?

[Wiro Kuipers]

The smaller the groups, the smaller the time each group needs to share their stories, the smaller the differences…

Or otherwise: show a large timer, appoint a time keeper, or use a 1, 2 or 3 minute hourglass – that runs while someone is explaining his/her model.

[Mark Matlock]

Did you find the quality of the faster tables’ models to be of good quality?

The question is whether one table was slower and everyone was faster … then the time given for the activity was too long.

If one table was faster and others were slower, I usually work with the faster table asking them questions or if there’s enough time … I give them an additional challenge. Sometimes I’ll have a faster table do additional documenting of their model.. it all depends on just how much time is left.

When I have multiple tables I usually see my primary task being pacing in itself, so I try to speed up tables that are lagging and slow tables down that are moving too quickly.

[Author]

Posts