Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

It is REALLY EASY to engage people if you are doing things WITH THEM rather than TO them. And general metaphors work great if you allow the participants to reframe them into something personal to the individual or tabletop.

Show someone a Rorschach (inkblot) image and they will see things. Show them a construct from something like a Thematic Apperception Test (find examples online) and they will project context and intention.

Give them LEGO and they will bridge to anchoring to some storyline or situation or solve a problem.

For 25 years, I have been showing a line art illustration of a wagon being pulled by someone and pushed by others, with the wagon rolling on Square Wheels® and the cargo being round tires. Hell, I so not even introduce myself, just stepping up to the front and showing that image and asking tabletops of 5 to 6 people to play with the theme, “How might this image represent how things really work in most organizations?”

When I was doing conferences (47 countries), my sessions would ALWAYS be the top-rated ones. People have no problems engaging in metaphor and in relating things to their own issues and opportunities. People WANT active involvement and self-learning; they want the ideas to be related to them, not some abstract.

I am guessing that a LOT of us LEGO facilitators now find it IMPOSSIBLE to sit in on some lecture unless the presenter is very attractive — when I do, I find myself doodling and outlining and playing with MY issues on my notepad. I cannot remember the last thing I learned from being lectured at…

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

I got StopMotion for my iPhone and there are others in the App store.

In a conversation Thursday with a high-tech colleague in Mumbai, he popped me two other alternatives (one not apparently available in the US). So there ARE a variety of apps out there that require no additional hardware. And my son-in-law has one on his Android and it was said that LEGO actually had one (I could not find it (yet)).

MyKidsTime actually had an article about 4 of them: https://www.mykidstime.com/things-to-do/4-nifty-apps-making-best-stop-motion-lego-movies/ — but then I will probably have to go out and find some kid to teach me how to use it!

My thought around all this is that a tabletop could present their storyline using a phone to port to a USB projector and that would also then capture the storyline and narration. If we are using it in a corporate setting and this is but one of many sessions, we develop a library.

The outcome depends, of course, on the course design and desired outcomes of the storyline. If these debriefings are very personal, sharing them is a pretty awful idea. But if the team is focused on generating some corporate process improvement or similar, having a set of these to show to senior management about what is wrong and what people want to do to fix things would be an extraordinarily powerful tool.

Hell, teach the CEO how to facilitate sessions. Maybe then, something might change. When 35% of worker say they would forgo a raise to have their boss fired (Workplace Magazine, March 2017), we KNOW that there are some issues we should be attending to in our works to implement involvement and engagement and change.

Having the possibility of doing stop-motion as a tool in our toolkits would be neat, and it can’t be me alone who is trying to invent this wheel. Anyone in here got a kid who could teach us how to do this? (grin)

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

Marko has made outstanding contributions to the organizational and personal development of tens of thousands of people, many directly but also many who have benefited from his “transfer of training” and his expertise and teachings. And his views on this question are most certainly appreciated.

Over the past 30 years, that concept of “certification” has gone round and round. ISO 9000 started with the belief that a few dozen people could be certified to do those inspections. After a dozen years, the number of people certified was in the tens of thousands, and the certification process itself became sterile and inflexible. And, worse than that, what these trained certified inspectors did was require their inspected organizations to also implement inflexible, anti-innovative policies and procedures and corporate bureaucracies to maintain those inflexible procedures!

I was personally advised from a senior member / friend in IAF that in getting their Certified Professional Facilitator certification, I should NOT do my normal kind of process, since it banged against their professional standards. Translating that to English, I ALWAYS would teach my participants in a Square Wheels training session how to facilitate with my images AND I would give them the toolkit as part of that training. But IAF was about Professional Facilitation and functionally keeping those facilitation secrets, well secret! I was told I would not pass certification if I trained the trained! (So, I did some dumb, simple thing and passed…)

What we should be doing within this group and others is SUPPORTING people who will be working with others to have the optimal desired outcomes from the time spent in training. SO much training is measurable wasted (and generally lecture-oriented, where no on is actively involved or reflecting much about anything).

What we do with LEGO (unless you are using powerpoint to train with LEGO) is get people actively and experientially engaged and involved, singularly and in small contributory, collaborative teams. THAT is what will generate reflection, considered alternatives, some cognitive dissonance around what they do and what they could do, and the peer support to try to do something differently.

Yeah, they could listen to some TED talk or watch a training video. Does anyone actually think that will really CHANGE anything?

Have FUN out There!

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

Please allow me to suggest two alternatives, both complete team building games with powerpoint intro and play and debriefing packaged up into a bundle and one that uses LEGO scenes as communications tools. And, these are designed to be easily integrated with other content, using LEGO and LSP or not. Both are anchored in metaphor and both focus on issues of collaboration (versus competition), communications, strategic planning and leadership.

“The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine” is in its 25th year of distribution and designed for a half day of play and debriefing. Any search for information will turn up dozens of my blog articles and testimonials and other information. An older slideshare overview appears here: https://www.slideshare.net/ScottSimmerman/2018-upgrade-to-the-search-for-the-lost-dutchmans-gold-mine-team-building-exercise

A new update to The Collaboration Journey Challenge is also explained on slideshare. It is wrapped around my metaphor of Square Wheels, the things that work but do not work smoothly. We use a variety of LEGO scenes to help tell the story and you can easily put it into an LSP framework. It is designed for play and replay, with debriefing, in 90 minutes. You can see an overview of play here: https://www.slideshare.net/ScottSimmerman/the-collaboration-journey-challenge-a-teambuilding-exercise

Apologies for bluntly selling within our group but I sincerely think that these two exercises, both effective, polished and impactful, would meet the need of Jaime and possibly be of interest to other group members.

AND, if anyone in our network wants to work with me to expand either of these into a full-day LSP-anchored training program, let’s chat. My goal is to have EVERY business use LEGO and an experiential training framework to powerfully impact communications and teamwork within their organizations. We need to implement BIG changes in how things work within nearly every organization!

Help me help others to help many. All of us know so much more than ANY of us and we should be heavily involved and engaged in a collaborative effort to leave some footprints on the world around us.

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

I would focus them on a task to improve something, a shared issue. We are playing with the design of a course around this kind of situation, so please allow me to share some ideas. If you want a LOT of details about how to run this, please contact me directly. I am also looking for people who might want to partner more closely on the design of this workshop.

First, we will share a metaphor about organizational performance improvement. For the past 25 years, we have been playing with a metaphor of Square Wheels®, representing things that don’t work smoothly and the Round Wheels that already exist. Have them discuss what they perceive as the SWs in their workplace and select a SW to focus on.

(There are some related activities for team networking in situations with more than a few tabletops but these four people should accomplish this pretty easily.)

Second, they download and learn how to use a stop-motion app on one of their phones.

Third, they now put together a scenario whereby they discover their SW, identify their RW possibilities, analyze and strategize how to deal with the roadblocks to implement, address their needed resources, and design an implementation plan.

They then play out the stop-motion, putting together a process of problem identification, problem solving, and their strategies and tactics for implementing a real solution in their real workplace. All this is captured in the images as they play out their scenario.

They each get a copy of their narrated work. In a group setting, each group presents its successful scenario and the workshop captures the future-paced ideas around workplace improvement, something that can be shown to other groups that then work through their own scenarios.

Experience has shown that you can generate dozens of Square Wheels, things that work that do not work smoothly. And there are many ways, based on individual perspectives and experiences, to discover and implement Round Wheels. You can have the group discuss the BEST proven ways to implement new ideas within their organization (Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny) and a GOOD discussion of how to best manage roadblocks to achieve implementation success can be a powerful facilitated discussion.

Capturing successes to show to senior management is also a real possibility, as well as building a Learning Organization and Knowledge Organization database / library.

No sense re-inventing the wheel, right?

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

Alan and Rodrigo offer great comments. Let me add one more set of ideas:

I am one of those non-certified folks, but I also have 25 years focused exclusively on facilitation and went through the Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) offering of the International Association of Facilitators and am also a Certified Professional Trainer (CPT) from the International Association for People and Performance Improvement in addition to a doctorate (Ph.D.) in behavioral neurophysiology from UNC-CH.

My Square Wheels® metaphor has moved from using line art representations of how things really work in to LEGO-framed scenes and tools. We have online facilitation-skills teaching on Udemy for The Square Wheels Project and I have two board games that use LEGO as part of the teaching metaphor about implementing improvement.

We also have a new Roadblocks Management toolkit that uses LEGO scenes to engage people.

Instead of using LSP-created delivery frameworks, which are great, we simply go in another direction. At age 70 (with a birthday this week), I do not think that certification in LSP has much benefit for me or my customers.

There is a LOT more out there about interactive engagement that is not included in LSP certification. There are a LOT of facilitation skills that use METAPHOR more than construction to build the future. The issues are around active involvement, dissociation, reframing, future-pacing and lots of other constructs about how to generate communications and innovation. All the answers are NOT in LSP certification and many new and better ideas about improving skills and perspectives are out there!

And I just started a new Facebook Group called “Serious Playing with LEGO” to focus on sharing a very broad framework on interactivity.

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

Pamela –

GREAT that things went well. And wonderful that you found a lot of information to mix and match to produce the session that you wanted.

What the GROUP might find helpful is an overview of what you actually did in enough detail that they might be able to reproduce key outcomes. Modeling is such a useful endeavor and we would all benefit more from all this information to know more about how you sorted the ideas and framed the facilitation.

Are you up for a little more investment of time? (Thanks in advance.)

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

Years ago, using Tinker Toys, I would read from a list as to how an object was to be constructed, with commands such as,

– take a round, 8-hole wheel and put a 4-inch blue stick into the center hole
– on 4 of the holes in the rim of that wheel, put 2-inch yellow sticks.
– on the other 4 holes in the rim of that wheel, put 1-inch green sticks
– on the end of the 4-incl blue stick, place another round 8-hole wheel so that the blue stick goes into one of the holes on the rim.

and so forth. Maybe 20 steps, You could also ask for a volunteer and then have them read the instructions. You can also add a time limit, no-talking rules or whatever.

Needless to say, the results vary!

You could certainly read to the group a set of instructions about how to assemble the duck with LEGO and you could play games with availability of different pieces across tabletops, having missing pieces you forgot to distribute, etc.

And you could combine this with Rodrigo and Lise’s ideas.

The KEY is to generate a debriefable outcome, one that matches your session goals.

[Scott Simmerman, Ph.D. CPF, CPT]

Are there any anchoring frameworks to the issues of TRUST with this play?

Any ideas as to how to build in some accountability or interpersonal trust between people in play?

If you look globally at exercises and tools, there are only a few things like trust falls and trust walks that seem to be used to demonstrate these behaviors and patterns.

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