Hi Monica,
Could I suggest a different approach to your question. In my experience, 4 hours is the absolute minimum required to achieve any semblance of shared understanding/agreement on a given subject. Most companies require multiple workshops of variable duration of 1 or 2 days in order to achieve a sustainable impact.
So, if you just want to offer a fun innovative way to have people discussing a particular topic, without any specific ultimate goal, the cost of the facilitation should reflect the competence of the facilitator at animating discussion within a group of people.
But that is only skimming the surface of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. My answer to all clients who ask for a 3-4 hour session is that for the same money, they can more than double the impact, by just allowing more time for the LSP process.
If the facilitator needs to travel to a client workshop location and travel back, the chances are that the full working day has been consumed. Asking the facilitator to deliver an 8 hour workshop will only lengthen the facilitator’s working day from perhaps 7 hours (2 hours travel time + 1 hour preparation time + 4 hours participation) to 13 hours (2 hours travel time + 1 hour preparation + 8 hours facilitation). For the facilitator, it is just a short working day compared with a long working day. And this is without counting the design time, which tends to be on a ratio of more or less 4 hours of design to 1 hour of delivery. For the client the equation is very different.
One way or another, the client will have to compensate the facilitator for at least some of the design of the workshop, the travel to and from the workshop venue, the preparation and clearing up time, as well as the workshop facilitation itself. The travel, preparation and clearing up time are fixed duration, irrespective of the duration of the workshop. It would be in the client’s interest to get a maximum ratio of actual workshop time vs overheads.
Now in order for LSP to work, the first part of a workshop requires a series of activities aimed at familiarising participants with the LSP methodology or approach. Officially this process should take a minimum of 2 hours. This means that the participants are having fun, learning some skills, but not actually addressing any hot topics.
In some contexts, I have managed to whittle that familiarisation (or skills building) time to 30 minutes, but usually those participants have PhDs and are very open to innovation.
After 3 hours of workshop, some shared understanding and mutual appreciation of one or two aspects of a subject will have been achieved. But understanding and mutual appreciation of difference is not the objective of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. The purpose of LSP is to develop sustainable commitment by all participants to a shared idea or vision.
To achieve this sort of objective, from my experience, you need at least a full day, and preferably more. If you don’t do this, you can’t really say that you have used LSP in the workshop and you have spent a lot of people’s time on just having a good time and getting to know each other, rather than creating a clear pathway forward to achieving specific goals to which participants would commit and serve as advocates beyond the scope of the workshop.
Coming back to your actual question about how much to pay a facilitator, I can’t tell you what the going rates are in the US, but there isn’t any reason to think that the US is much cheaper than the rest of the world.
Ask yourself how much a client would pay a McKinsey consultant and consider that the client could get better value for money from a competent and experienced certified LSP facilitator.
If you ask less than McKinsey, and you are a good facilitator, your client is on to a good thing.
Hope this perspective helps.
Eli
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