Liquid using Lego to Help Clients find Creative Solutions

The following post on how Lego Serious Play is not just a game was written by the Liquid Agency Chief Creative Officer  Alfredo Muccino

Lego Serious Play is a hands-on, experiential process designed to enhance innovation and business performance. This methodology uses Lego blocks to build business and brand models as a way to encourage creative thinking, collaboration, and communication. At Liquid we believe that creativity and innovation are the result of doing things a little differently. And we’ve found that Lego Serious Play can help teams look at challenges from a new perspective, often yielding fresh solutions.

Doing things differently gets different results.

Lego Serious Play (LSP) is a technique that uses Lego blocks in directed exercises to build structures that metaphorically represent business and brand architecture models. Based on extensive research in organizational development, psychology, and learning techniques—LSP uses the context of “play” to enable executives, managers, and employees to communicate more effectively, to stimulate their imaginations, and to approach their work with increased confidence. We like the LSP methodology because it can yield fresh thinking, deeper communication, and problem solving for companies, teams, and individuals.

Unleash creativity across a wide set of business challenges
Innovative companies worldwide are using LSP across a broad range of purposes, including:

• STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT – Examine and evaluate business and brand strategy implications as they apply to internal audiences as well as external partners and clients.
• ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT – Unleash creative thinking and transform ideas into concrete concepts for innovation and product development.
• CHANGE MANAGEMENT – Facilitate and implement strategic changes or structural changes due to M&A activities.

Foster collaboration and communication.

We believe that collaboration, communication, and cooperation are integral components of today’s sustainable business models. Great organizations encourage their workforces to contribute to the process of building the business and the brand, and nurture the talent and creativity of their teams. LSP is a powerful tool to foster these types of behaviors, because through LSP workshops, participants gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the value of listening to all the voices in the room, and gain insight into organizational leadership and collaborative processes.

At Liquid Agency we strive for innovation—as a result we value finding new ways to stimulate our creativity and the creativity of our clients. This is an important component of our Silicon Valley Thinking philosophy. We are constantly exploring new ways for creative problem solving—and the Lego Serious Play methodology is a perfect example of a stimulating collaborative approach that helps teams solve brand and business challenges from a new perspective.

An example of LSP at work, in Chile.

MagiaLiquid, our office in Santiago, Chile has embraced LSP methodology with gusto. Many of the team members have become certified LSP facilitators, and are using this methodology to solve business challenges with a variety of clients. One of these clients, Cruz Blanca – the most important healthcare provider in the country recently gathered at our Santiago office to participate in a series of LSP exercises in order to better visualize the future of their business. The question that the management team was trying to answers was: “What type of healthcare do we aspire to offer, that would make a difference today and tomorrow”.

Through our LSP Business Model Canvas workshop we explored the concept of a different type of hospital – and a different way to deliver healthcare services – and we explored how to build a sustainable business model to support this idea. The model that was built during the exercise featured the hospital at the same level as the people, connected to them, from the inside of a flexible raft – enabling the team members and hospital departments to row in the same direction and adapt to different situations.

The exercise enabled the Cruz Blanca team to gain fresh insights about their business and engage in meaningful dialogue about the opportunities for the future. Ultimately, the exercise led the client to begin new strategic initiatives designed to transform the way Cruz Blanca delivers healthcare to its clients.