Serious Play Forum

[Priscilla Ramos]

Hello everybody. I would like to have some ideas of how I can help a failing company using LSP. The biggest problem is lack of commodities products. In this year, the harvest had a trouble and they dont got everything they needed to manufacturing their products to sell. They call me to get help with the LSP Methods, because someone had big results with this and they want to try (the last try).

I was planning to start with the ducks to make the skill building, asking people to make happy and sad ducks, to find what make the team happy and what make the team sad. Maybe it could be the quick start to enable people to speak of your afraids. After that, I was guessing to use window bags and ask people to create two scenarios:
(1) We are in 2050 and your company is producing…
(2) We are in 2050 and your company was failed by doing…

What do you think? What more I can do in this case??? Any ideias, tips and good vibes are pleasured!!

Thanks a lot!!!

[Alejandro Cabral]

Hi Priscila! It sounds like a good scenario to work with shared models to me, as they will need to make decisions as a team. Something that sounds appealing to me is working on the skills they will need to actually overcome their crisis first, and then working on what could be their plan for the future. Both plans have in common one question: what do they need to keep and develop (and why), and what do they need to drop (and why).

A good pre-workshop session with their leaders would be a good idea, so you can extract a few desired outcomes from them. From the description you shared, it does look like they are going through a crisis and need to figure out how to overcome it, so I would start with getting a clear direction from them. Do they want to understand why they are failing? do they want to innovate? are they thinking about changing the team culture? is it really about planning, or sales? All those questions usually help!

I like your idea about having them create different scenarios. As a follow-up to that, I’d ask them to build something together with what they identify as the core of each model and see if there’s consensus around a potential “best” scenario in that case.

hope that helped!

[Francine Masson]

Hi Priscilla!
Good ideas also the ones suggested by Alejandro Cabral.
As professional advisor in innovation strategies, and now also certified LSP, I would recommend to focus on the customer’s profile, their needs and wants. From there, start rebuilding a vision to answer those needs that might have changed during the course of the past years and a vision for 2050 and last a vision for 2025 (action plan to get to 2050, by step)
I wish you good success,
Francine from Montréal, Canada

[Priscilla Ramos]

Thanks Alejandro and Francine. It helps me a lot!! Excelent tips and ideas!! ;)

[Thierry Gregorius]

Hi Priscilla, sounds like this company has a supply chain problem. If that is really the case, I doubt the solution to the crisis lies within the walls of the company. Therefore it may be useful to ask your client if one or more of their suppliers should participate in the workshop.

Also, I hope the company doesn’t just want to use the LSP method for its own sake. Unless the problem is clearly defined, no method will help solve it.

Finally, some gamestorming techniques can be adapted to LSP, or provide inspiration in other ways https://gamestorming.com/ I once ran a hybrid workshop with both gamestorming and LSP which worked well. Every method has its pros and cons, so I would resist getting fixated on a particular method before it’s clear WHAT problem they’re trying to solve, and WHY. The HOW should come later…

Good luck!

[Author]

Posts