There was a time when Lego was simply considered an effective mental development tool, focused solely on children. With years of research and development, companies are now recognising how Lego or to put it right ‘LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY ®’ can help enhance customer experience and kindle the potential of their employees. In today’s highly competitive business environment, companies are seeking newer ways to harness and explore the talent and expertise of their existing workforce. Enterprises are striving to create a work culture which is more productive and more importantly unobstructed that can serve the end customer better.
Well, surprising as it may seem, playing with Lego bricks can help organisations overcome these business concerns by tapping into their existing resource pool, facilitating open communications, initiating changes, and even introducing radically new propositions.
ACE – Transcending Experience and Empowering Businesses
The Academy of Customer Experience, popularly known as ACE, is an organization that solves problems, transcends experiences and empowers businesses through LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®. With the framework of “Play | Think | Transform®”, ACE has several reputed industry leaders from Financial, Telekome, Insurance, IT/ITES, Retail, Logistics industries to name a few like Reliance Jio, Nokia NSN, L&T Infotech , Robert Bosch, E-Zest etc as its clients. The company is an Asian partner of the BG Group, which has its presence in over 1,00 countries across the globe.
Play is not frivolous. It is not luxury. It is not something to fit in after completing all the important stuff. Play is the important stuff. Play is a drive, a need, a brain-building must-do. – Jeff Johnson & Denita Dinger.
ACE’s flagship product “Playshop®” uses LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® for frameworks (Areas of Customer Experience Management, Design Thinking, Service Design & Innovation) to unleash the power of inspiration, thinking and imagination in corporate setups. It utilises Lego bricks to demonstrate the value of a hands-on, collaborative, iterative problem solving process that involves each and every team member in overcoming unique challenges. By engaging professionals in solving everyday problems, Playshop® provides deep insights into how these individuals would function together as a team in real-time situations.
Participants engage in a world of “play and storytelling” where the common language used is the Lego bricks; this ensures every participant is at the same pedestal and his/her opinions and perspective are heard and allocated equal weightage. The Lego bricks become the only means of communication and help professionals connect and exchange their ideas and thoughts more easily and effectively. This form of communication eliminates the hurdles associated with the traditional means of communication, which may, at times, be very restrictive. Team leads and managers can identify the strengths of individuals within their teams, and even gauge how effective their personal instructions as a leader are.
“In our sessions we have had amazing experiences, colleagues discovered that they knew so less about each other inspite of being together for years, artists and musicians were discovered, managers understood their members and concerns better, and there were also extremes when people broke down in few sessions after understanding how some problems were playing on their unconscious mind which they were ignoring”, recalls Laxman, Founder-Academy of Customer Experience.
Playshop® helps organisations discover new frontiers to improve enterprise-wide communication and open the gates for honest thought exchanges. It fosters three-dimensional thinking by creating and constructing metaphors that represent the real challenges faced in organisations. The Lego bricks engage not just the minds but also the hands, as a result of which, thoughts and ideas from the mind take shape and are expressed in greater details through the Lego bricks. Playshop brings deep, valuable subconscious thoughts to the surface. Though this approach is unconventional, it enables visual interactive thinking, kindles creative pursuit, and offers new dimensions to solving day-to-day business challenges.
ACE’s Playshop® instils leadership development, strategic and creative thinking, ideation, agile mindset development, and collaboration. It also facilitates constructive dialogs and provides individual mentoring and executive development. With the help of a hands-on, minds-on approach, Playshop® has, till date, helped several companies improve their corporate team building strategies, which has not only assisted employees but also organisations in serving their clients better through the power of collaborative thinking. ACE’s objective is to help enterprises activate and unify their human capital to reach a common goal together.
ACE’s new offerings based on the Play |Think |Transform® framework – Flashcards and Design Thinking are the addition to the innovative way ACE helps in transforming the way organizations look at their business problems and goals. While Flashcards enable members to think and visualize/simulate the unforeseen challenges, the Design Thinking play makes them look at a business scenario in a whole new perspective and helps them innovate ideas to delight customers as part of their daily operations.
Read more about ACE’s Playshops that solve business problems, transcend experiences and empower businesses.
This article was originally published here.
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