Thanks Marko, appreciate your interest.
The LSP exercise was aimed at finding what really makes the team unique in terms of value proposition (as perceived by themselves; no users/customers of their services were involved in the exercise).
This exercise was informed by a range of outputs from other workshop activities that came before it (which were based on gamestorming techniques, not LSP). For example, we had inventorised the team’s skills, which produced a huge and varied list. Also, the team had a history of providing many different services to customers, which we had grouped into different segments to understand their needs better. And, using things like empathy maps and image-ination exercises, we had produced a list of nearly 100 ideas of what other services the team could provide.
There was a lot of stuff, and doing everything for everyone is obviously not strategy – hence the need to boil it down to the team’s essence and find the unique value proposition.
In addition to more structured ranking and prioritisation, I was keen to ensure that the team would also think about their purpose and uniqueness more instinctively – this is why I thought it would be great to try LSP. And, as I wrote in the article, it worked amazingly well!
So to answer your question, the individual models produced some common themes like being agile, mobile and the strength of our personal relationships with customers; these were complemented by more unique interpretations from individual team members of where they thought the team could make a unique contribution (e.g. they have a lot of geological experience in Africa – if you look carefully at one of the pictures you’ll see a model representing the physical shape of Africa, with its multi-colours representing the diversity of its people, business requirements and geology!).
Creating individual models was fairly straightforward and very intuitive. It was a shame we didn’t have much time to spend on the shared building model, I would have wanted to ask people more questions about some of the connections they made, and whether they could have found more connections between the different elements.
Also, reflecting on it further, it was interesting to see that LSP produced output comparable to the gamestorming methods which were used in parallel by other groups (they created mood boards, drawings and a ‘Make a World’ landscape out of paper). In fact I would rate the LSP output superior in quality because it felt somehow more personal in terms of expression (although don’t ask me why! It’s just a feeling).
In hindsight it would have been great to use LSP for all 25 people (not just the sub-team of 5), and then join it all up into one mega-model to explore ideas more deeply. I guess that’s where the LSP facilitator training may be required… But one step at a time, I first wanted to try it on a smaller scale :-)
Anyway, sorry quite a long answer. Hope this clarifies…! :-)
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