Ben Weinlick

We are looking for new contributors to the Serious Play Pro website. If you want then you can just start or join a discussion easily on our community forum website immediately after registration. 

We would also be happy to publish the materials that our readers would find interesting on the blog front page. For example:

Interesting blog posts about play, playfulness, facilitation,
Case studies – stories, videos or photos of your facilitation events,
Reviews about books on facilitation and playful techniques,
Research review posts – covering interesting new avenues that has been studied recently.

We hope that this could bring some new debates to our growing community and provide visibility to new and active bloggers. Just send a message to Marko.

Serious Play Pro Website Statistics – Number of Annual Visitors July 2013-July 2014Since the introduction of LSP Open Source we are glad to witness that the number of facilitators has grown steadily. The Serious Play Pro community was established just four years ago and today we are a true community which covers all the corners of the globe.

It is fun to observe that the coverage of the visitors (the table below) is really almost global. See the annual statistics table of the different countries and the annual number of unique visits from that country. All the regions are well represented among the people interested in the Lego Serious Play methodology.

In average, 66.1 unique visitors come to our site every day nowadays (up from 44.1 visitors/day in 2013 and 35.4 visitors/day in 2012). Given that 2/3 of those visitors are new visitors, it means that any post published are likely read in a month by 2000 different people.

#
Country
Visitors

1
United States
5,739

2
Spain
2,257

3
Netherlands
2,168

4
United Kingdom
2,035

5
Germany
1,907

6
Mexico
1,843

7
Canada
1,369

8
Estonia
1,326

9
Colombia
1,210

10
France
1,177

11
Denmark
1,161

12
Australia
852

13
Singapore
752

14
Chile
750

15
Italy
648

16
Turkey
572

17
South Korea
569

18
Belgium
563

19
Switzerland
507

20
Brazil
481

21
Japan
462

22
Peru
414

23
Russia
369

24
South Africa
335

25
India
321

26
Argentina
313

27
China
307

28
Malaysia
294

29
Hong Kong
273

30
Sweden
238

31
Ecuador
229

32
Philippines
228

33
Thailand
217

34
Venezuela
207

35
Austria
201

36
Finland
196

37
Portugal
188

38
Poland
183

39
Indonesia
176

40
New Zealand
169

41
Taiwan
168

42
Greece
143

43
Israel
135

44
Ireland
127

45
Norway
124

46
Costa Rica
112

47
United Arab Emirates
106

48
Czech Republic
93

49
Slovenia
92

50
Romania
89

51
Hungary
88

52
Kosovo
88

53
Lithuania
87

54
Saudi Arabia
83

55
Guatemala
80

56
Bolivia
76

57
Egypt
68

58
Panama
65

59
Ukraine
51

60
Slovakia
44

61
Croatia
42

62
Vietnam
42

63
Kazakhstan
40

64
Serbia
34

65
Cyprus
30

66
Iran
28

67
Jordan
28

68
Pakistan
26

69
Puerto Rico
25

70
Luxembourg
21

71
Bulgaria
20

72
Uruguay
20

73
Latvia
19

74
Qatar
19

75
Belarus
15

76
Dominican Republic
15

77
Kenya
15

78
Macedonia (FYROM)
13

79
El Salvador
13

80
Lebanon
12

81
Trinidad and Tobago
12

82
Paraguay
10

83
Bahrain
9

84
Honduras
9

85
Mauritius
9

86
Nigeria
9

87
Tunisia
9

88
Morocco
8

89
Macau
8

90
Albania
7

91
Cote d’Ivoire
7

92
Ghana
7

93
Jamaica
7

94
Malta
7

95
Nicaragua
7

96
Iceland
6

97
Kuwait
6

98
Sri Lanka
5

99
Moldova
5

I have today revised the layout of the community website to make it better readable by mobile devices. Please leave your comments on any issues that you notice on the website functionality.

Laura Seargeant Richardson has published an inspiring video about how the rules of the play can be modified and left to the player’s own devices to achieve more proactive results. Something to also contemplate

Audioboo.FM has published a Radio Interview with Andy Priestner on Lego Serious Play. You may follow him over twitter at @PriestLib
listen to ‘Andy Priestner on LEGO Serious Play (Week 8)’ on Audioboo
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During recent days, a couple of new Slideshares have been created on Lego Serious Play methodology. The first one is created by the Assistant Professor Arindam Basu of University of Canterbury at Christchurch, New Zealand. In his presentation he combines design thinking with Lego Serious Play approach and demonstrates how the combination can be used in order to achieve flow in solution finding process.

Another Slideshare is in French language. Published by a SlideShare user “Chinkie75” – it shows some photos of tower and bridge building exercise and a number of metaphors as well.

The following article was published on the website of Independent Free Press Canada.

Chances are you grew up with LEGO. Perhaps it was your favourite toy, or a building tool that invoked your imagination to

After the post where the Lego Serious Play Starter Kit (art.no. 2000414) was unpacked, recently another video has been uploaded to YouTube where a Dutch facilitator Rick Lindeman demonstrates the contents of the

Dotti Toellner and Cori Moore Video on Lego Serious Play Facilitation workshop at Lift 2014 conference. They wrote about the event the following.

What happened at Lift14: Well, we sure had some serious fun – it’s amazing what you can do with such energetic and inspiring participants! The fully booked session kicked off with some skill building exercises, teaching our lively liftonians how to (literally) build metaphors, express abstract ideas with 3D models and collaborate through storymaking. Then the real work started as we addressed the question: “What does it take to be a change agent”. (We couldn’t believe how committed these guys were – talk about “flow moments”.) Putting their new skills into action, our lifters experienced rapid action prototyping and shared sense making as they probed and encouraged their fellow team members, drawing out meaning with plenty cheers and laughter!

They also reflected upon their experience at their blog and at their company website.

Doerte ‘Dotti’ Toellner is co-founder and managing director of Point-Blank International. In nearly two decades as a qualitative researcher, design thinker and change agent she has founded two companies and travelled the world on the behalf of ‘her’ brands. Catching sparks and crafting new ways of looking, thinking & doing keeps her inspired and passionate – in research, design, innovation & life in general. Make sure you set aside some time to chat with her about her hobby horses, such as 5 senses research, haptic think and the role of magic in the qualitative approach!

Cori Moore is stationed at Point-Blank’s idea workbench and communication hub, better known as Spark & Craft. A multitasking octopus, she devotes her time to running workshops, attending conferences and events, writing blogs & articles, tweeting, occasionally doodling and bringing new sparks of inspiration & people into the company. A cultural sponge, with a passion for trying new things, her bag of tricks incorporates her experience in the diverse fields of research, communication, event management & mixology – she can make a mean cocktail if you ask her nicely.

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

An interesting post from Get West London about the use of Lego Serious Play in therapy

A Harefield woman is among a new breed of therapists encouraging grown men and women to stop working and start playing –

I found this 2 year old post about Lego Serious Play by Agile Partnership consultant Ellen Grove from her blog. There is also a great team facilitation case study that includes an interesting responsibility game –

LEGO Serious Play Transcript by Massimo Mercuri

Lego Serious Play facilitator and our community member Massimo Mercuri has published an interesting post on LSP Facebook group showing how he has transcribed the models that they have built. It is an interesting concept and can add useful perspective to the client. Probably a good idea to report back upon the LSP session. Look at the two pictures closely. Have you done something similar – what do you think of his approach?

LEGO Serious Play Transcript by Massimo Mercuri

Schoolkids playing with legos. From: fastcoexist.com

Fast Co Exist has published this article about the linkages between Lego and creativity.

By: Jessica Leber

Creativity is in decline around the world. But a new school built by the toy block company that focuses on play might unlock the secret to a solution.

If successful companies and societies of this next century are defined by their ability to innovate–a trope repeated constantly in business seminars, surveys, and speeches–then the U.S. may be headed for a rough time: On average, Americans’ ability to think creatively has declined.

This trend has been called “the creativity crisis,” and was defined by a major study in 2011. Researchers looked at a common measure of creativity in 300,000 kids and adults over time and found that, unlike IQ scores, creativity had been declining since 1990. The effect was most marked in elementary-school-age kids.

Why exactly creativity measures are declining is still anyone’s guess, although evidence and intuition points to the growing emphasis on testing in education as a factor. Kids are taught to learn by understanding “the one right answer” they need to find, and what they need to do to find it. (On tests of how kids do at brainstorming ideas, 98% of three-year-olds register as “creative geniuses.” By the time they are 25? Only 2%).

“There’s an immense and growing pressure to be able to standardize approaches in the school to ensure quality. And this is an interesting contradiction, because standardization never leads to quality when we talk about learning. We’re not producing products. We’re trying to educate children,” says Randa Grob-Zakhary, CEO of the Lego Foundation.

The foundation, endowed by the Lego Group, is now focused on revamping education systems to try to shift this dynamic at all ages–mainly by incorporating structured, hands-on “play” that fosters creative thinking. “A lot of work is focused on how can we better teach and more quickly teach reading and math–literacy and numeracy,” she says, speaking with Co.Exist at the United Nations’ Global Compact summit in New York City last month. “There’s still a very big gap in defining how can we better equip our children with creative and critical thinking skills to equip them to face tomorrow’s challenges.”

Last month, the Lego Foundation opened its own international school in Billund, near the company’s headquarters in Denmark, where the foundation will attempt to rigorously test and measure some of these ideas by incorporating “hands-on learning” into the curriculum wherever possible–with Lego bricks, but also with other toys, building materials and even robotics technologies. The school will build on the work of the foundation’s existing projects around the world. One, in South Africa, is where today 40,000 kids in grades K to 12 at 25 schools are working with a curriculum that includes play. Anecdotal evidence from this project shows that tests scores have gone up and teacher turnover has been “transformed,” says Grob-Zakhary, though no rigorous studies have been done.

She envisions a key role for the foundation in building a network that moves educational and psychological research on the topic of play and creativity out of academic journals and into the hands of teachers and policymakers. She is also looking to attract buy-in from the business world, which often invests in workforce training in college programs but rarely focuses on early childhood.

She believes that businesses need to start taking a longer-term view. “If we don’t start in those first five years, we have much less possibility to create that workforce we need. And yet very few businesses who would benefit from that kind of agility and adaptiveness built in the early years actually invest in it. It’s a really significant issue.”

Sjra Puts has produced an exciting action trailer about Lego Serious Play in progress. Enjoy! :-)

31Volts is a young and experienced service design agency based in the Netherlands who work in the overlap of business and creativity. They have recently posted a video of one of their Lego Serious Play sessions to Vimeo

Students’ Union of the University of the Arts London published a short case on Managing Stuckness with Lego Serious Play

So, apparently Lego Serious Play (LSP) is an actual thing. I signed up to this