Eli De Friend

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Irene, based on the Open Source license, you are licensed to facilitate or train even without being trained or certified yourself.
Technically, there is no official training curriculum or certification process. So if you wanted to create your own one, that would be completely OK as long as you respect LEGO’S Branding and trademark guidelines, which I believe you can still find on this site. The question to ask yourself is whether it makes sense for you to develop your own training programme and material. If your core business today is training, this may make sense. If your core business is workshop facilitation, you might want to consider bringing in an experienced LSP trainer who already has spent months developing the content and years refining it. If you are a management consultant, offering training may water down your credibility in your core business.
I hope this gives you some food for thought.
All the best,
Eli

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Werner, I hope you managed to get yourself included in the Slack Channel as per your request some weeks back.

I feel compelled to respond to your post on the Impact in the Business World, because you make some very valid points, but also some erroneous assumptions or perhaps misinterpretations.

When someone asks to have a script for running a workshop, the following thought process almost invariably runs through my mind:
1) The facilitator has proven they can design a workshop roadmap. Otherwise they wouldn’t be certified. So why are they asking on this forum, rather than just getting down and doing it?

2) Anyway, even if they do get a script from another facilitator in the same language, who is to say that the script for one facilitator with his/her own personal sense of humour and presentation skills for a particular client with a specific corporate culture in a specific business context, with the specific individuals in the workshop, is necessarily going to work for a different facilitator with the same group on a different day, let alone with a different client and business context, etc.
– the new facilitator is still going to need to tailor the roadmap to his/her client’s specific requirements.

3) Even if I happen to have a nicely packaged roadmap ready to share with others, what happened to the business model that was the justification for making LSP Open Source? The whole idea was that we should be able to establish a market to sell our Intellectual Property to our LSP-facilitator colleagues. I can sell my presence to a client, but the client isn’t prepared to pay for the days I spend crafting a powerful and impactful roadmap, with supporting material. On the other hand, I should be able to monetise that investment by offering it to other facilitators.

Did that work? No! Why not? I can only guess. Perhaps every certified LSP facilitator believes they are better than the others and so anyone else’s material would not be worth paying money for. Or perhaps there is the fear/realisation that customisation would still be needed and so you’re going to have to spend time at your desk anyway – might as well do the whole thing and save some money.

I have already made some of my applications available on this site for free. One of them was the business modelling application. Instead of everyone re-using the one we made available, they re-invented their own. Some of them went on to create there own certification training packages for facilitation of workshops using the Business Model Canvas with LSP. I remember at an LSP meeting before the establishment of the seriousplaypro web site, Denise Meyerson shared her whole folder structure with anyone who had a USB stick. Did any of us use it? Probably not! Why not? Well in my case, it was first because I didn’t have a client with those needs and in the intervening time, I have even forgotten what that application was. And in any case, I would prefer to use my own approach rather than Denise’s.

The subject of this discussion is Impact and your mention this in your penultimate paragraph. You assert that you shy away from running an Agile/Scrum or Design/Thinking workshop because of a lack of detailed references. Are you talking about references as in customer testimonials or a previously proven script with which to conduct the workshop? On the second point, well that is the biggest challenge isn’t it. How do we know if our client and has used anything of what we did? What they say to you in an after-workshop debriefing session is one thing. To what extent your workshop or series of workshops actually helped the client organisation address its problems is another. How does Harvard know whether its Executive MBA helps get people better jobs or whether it only selects the people who get better jobs as participants on their Executive MBA programme.

I like to think that I have contributed to
– a more collegial and effective management culture in the world’s most prestigious hotel school
– allowing Swisscom to catch up a 5 year lag behind Orange in human-centred design thinking, overtake it and then watch Orange disappear from the market in Switzerland
– uncovering a management disconnect and improving project management in the R & D division of one of Honeywell’s major businesses.
– improving the way the United Nations supports the development of a community after a disaster
– ensuring that the Airbus A350 was actually sold to airlines
– the decision to reduce fossil fuel subsidies in Indonesia, thereby reducing the green house gasses in a country which is the world’s 4th largest emitter of GHGs

But who will ever know if the LSP workshops were the game changer in any of these interventions?

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Gonzalo,
I think I understand perhaps part of your problem. Many clients see LSP as a fun thing to do that facilitates a discussion about work in a fun way and supports team-building. I don’t know whether it is through simplistic journalistic coverage or practitioners elevators pitches, but clients often think that, if they need help developing a sustainable strategy that will genuinely give them at least a level footing with their competitors, or even better, a competitive advantage, they should turn to McKinsey & Co. For many clients LSP is a fun activity for an end of year retreat, where executives can let their hair down, while not completely forgetting they have a job to do.

From what I have read on this forum, many of our colleagues don’t really comprehend the full potential of LSP. So they don’t try to sell it and their customers aren’t expecting. Most of the time I am in front of a client, I am trying to encourage him or her to spend more time to get the most out of this tried and tested process.

So my guess it that very few facilitators ever get their clients through to SGPs.

Now to come back to your original question. Here are the standard building steps you use to get to SGPs

1. Brainstorm some scenarios you would like to play out on your landscape. They can be plausible, impossible, negative, fun

2. Choose 3 of those scenarios to play out on your landscape

3. Remember the current status of your landscape. Take photos if necessary.

4. Play out the first scenario.
a. imagine the scenario has just taken place
b. identify the elements of your landscape that are impacted
c. flag (flags and poles are good for this) all the points of impact on your landscape as precisely as possible
d. memorise where the these impact points are (photos are useful)
e. brainstorm what could be done by the various actors in this scenario, play these actions out if you want to see the impact of the action
f. brainstorm what should be done (could be one of the sets of actions already played out)
g. play these actions out in the landscape
h. discuss why this is the right thing to do
i. from this insight of why this is the right thing to do, identify Simple Guiding Principles that reflect the values underlying the right thing to do and define why it is the right thing to do.
j. individually, build a model of one of the simple guiding principles you have uncovered

5. Repeat steps 4a – 4j for at least two further scenarios.

6. Review all of the Simple Guiding Principles that have been built and select which ones should be retained as the strategic architecture of the organisation.

The price of this service should be no less than €20,000 and more in the order of €100,000. It should take several weeks with several teams to complete. It should also be revisited every 3 to 6 months.

And thus you have a very robust and powerful strategic framework, which should ensure that the organisation will thrive for many years to come.

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Gonzalo,

Originally, LSP was a strategy development tool and Simple Guiding Principles (SGPs) were some of if not THE core outputs of the process.

Uncovering and building SGPs used to be part of the standard facilitator training. In 4 days we covered everything. But in those days, the assumption was that the participants were already experienced management consultants. Perhaps your trainer covered the material, but the material didn’t mean that much to you as a physician, or perhaps your LSP trainer has split the full course into multiple modules or levels and you have to complete all of the training modules for you to become a facilitator of workshops using the LSP methodology. You might want to address this question directly to your trainer or perhaps to Robert Rasmussen and Per Kristiansen, who together represent the original LSP as described in the Open Source document.

I do not dare give a more precise answer, because I know that training practices have evolved over the last 10 years.

Kind regards,

Eli

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Gonzalo,

Originally, LSP was a strategy development tool and Simple Guiding Principles (SGPs) were some of if not THE core outputs of the process.

Uncovering and building SGPs used to be part of the standard facilitator training. In 4 days we covered everything. But in those days, the assumption was that the participants were already experienced management consultants. Perhaps your trainer covered the material, but the material didn’t mean that much to you as a physician, or perhaps your LSP trainer has split the full course into multiple modules or levels and you have to complete all of the training modules for you to become a facilitator of workshops using the LSP methodology. You might want to address this question directly to your trainer or perhaps to Robert Rasmussen and Per Kristiansen, who together represent the original LSP as described in the Open Source document.

I do not dare give a more precise answer, because I know that training practices have evolved over the last 10 years.

Kind regards,

Eli

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Gonzalo,

Originally, LSP was a strategy development tool and Simple Guiding Principles (SGPs) were some of if not THE core outputs of the process.

Uncovering and building SGPs used to be part of the standard facilitator training. In 4 days we covered everything. But in those days, the assumption was that the participants were already experienced management consultants. Perhaps your trainer covered the material, but the material didn’t mean that much to you as a physician, or perhaps your LSP trainer has split the full course into multiple modules or levels and you have to complete all of the training modules for you to become a facilitator of workshops using the LSP methodology. You might want to address this question directly to your trainer or perhaps to Robert Rasmussen and Per Kristiansen, who together represent the original LSP as described in the Open Source document.

I do not dare give a more precise answer, because I know that training practices have evolved over the last 10 years.

Kind regards,

Eli

[Eli De Friend]

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

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Werner,

I believe that Marko is managing the Slack Channel. When it was first set up, I was unaware of what Slack was and when it was explained to me, I felt that it did not reflect my working habits. So I have stayed away. For communication with the seriousplaypro community, I use this WordPress-based site. For bi-lateral asynchronous communications, I use email. For bi-lateral synchronous communications, I use phone and Skype. Many people have tried to convince me to use WhatsApp, but I can’t see any advantages, just disadvantages, particularly as it is device dependent (WhatsApp web still requires your original device for authentication) and when you have multiple phone numbers on multiple devices, things start to get challenging. In Outlook on my PC, I can manage multiple email addresses in one place, WhatsApp web doesn’t allow this. As for Slack Channel, as I have never used it, I cannot comment on its strengths or weaknesses and cannot tell you to what extent SeriousPlayPro members are using it.

Sorry not to have been able to be more helpful.

Kind regards,

Eli

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Werner,

I believe that Marko is managing the Slack Channel. When it was first set up, I was unaware of what Slack was and when it was explained to me, I felt that it did not reflect my working habits. So I have stayed away. For communication with the seriousplaypro community, I use this WordPress-based site. For bi-lateral asynchronous communications, I use email. For bi-lateral synchronous communications, I use phone and Skype. Many people have tried to convince me to use WhatsApp, but I can’t see any advantages, just disadvantages, particularly as it is device dependent (WhatsApp web still requires your original device for authentication) and when you have multiple phone numbers on multiple devices, things start to get challenging. In Outlook on my PC, I can manage multiple email addresses in one place, WhatsApp web doesn’t allow this. As for Slack Channel, as I have never used it, I cannot comment on its strengths or weaknesses and cannot tell you to what extent SeriousPlayPro members are using it.

Sorry not to have been able to be more helpful.

Kind regards,

Eli

[Eli De Friend]

Hi Juanfra,

This URL is fully shareable and permits multiple answers from the same respondent (not that this has been a challenge in the 6 years since I created it) :-)

http://survey.sogosurvey.com/r/agPCV0

I haven’t tested it in years either, while the underlying software (SoGoSurvey) has been upgraded. I don’t expect there to be any problems, but I just thought I’d give you a heads up, before you send it out “en masse”.

All the best,

Eli

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