GAIN NEW INSIGHTS INTO YOUR BUSINESS

As the quotation above indicates, workshops are not simply about higher-order thought. Playfully building models from LEGO in response to an open challenge initiates an absorbed, non-verbal, hands-on engagement ('Flow'^[4]) which accesses deeper, subconscious and more metaphoric and symbolic understanding. Models can have profound meaning as they allow expression of people’s entire raison d’être when it comes to their job so participants in BLANKBRICKS workshops are encouraged to 'just build' without deliberating challenges in order to overcome workplace constraints on inspiration and creativity. Building shared models taps the collective wisdom of the whole group.

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY kits are specially varied, intricate and adaptive. The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology can be made to model dynamic and complex actualities and the hierarchy and flexibility of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY application techniques can precisely plan, map, simulate, track or test today’s strategic knowledge landscapes and hypothetical business scenarios based on how the workshop challenges progress towards achieving the workshop goals and the collective experience and knowledge of the participants in the room. Seeing and playing with 3-D models of current organisational challenges aids visualisation of them and tangibly supports discussion and experimentation with possibilities. Fundamentally, this what sparks workshop eureka moments and more gradual dawning realisations.

BLANKBRICKS workshops are designed to take full advantage of the method's amazing capacity to foster insight, reperception and recontextualisation. By adopting a playful mindset to explore current business issues and by using the adaptable, kinesthetic and spatial aspects of the LEGO system both the mode of thinking about and the medium of representing business are altered. Perceptions are therefore shifted triggering insight enabling generation of innovative strategy content.^[5] BLANKBRICKS expertise extends beyond LEGO SERIOUS PLAY into consultancy on all aspects of modern business and technology in order that workshop outcomes can have maximum real world impact.

UNDERSTAND OTHER POINTS OF VIEW

Different ideas, opinions and interpretations are necessary for BLANKBRICKS workshop success. In order to reach agreement, first we should accept that we all have different ideas. LEGO SERIOUS PLAY models represent subjective and abstract ideas (whereas children's LEGO models represent real and imaginary things).

Modeling in 3-D makes ideas explicit. It helps form and realise priorities for builders and manifests them for others to interact with which then functions as a basis for further discussion, sensemaking and decision taking. Using models to illustrate ideas of a shared workplace issue enhances mutual understanding by giving visible, tactile, three-dimensional form to the situation or problem 'at hand'. In this sense LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is 'cognitive sculpting' and it is true that, 'We shape our models, and then our models shape us'.^[6]

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology makes sure that everybody gets an equal opportunity to contribute to the process. 'Levelling the playing field' or suspending usual power dynamics makes for more egalitarian co-operation, honest communication and wholehearted contributions towards reaching agreement about the workshop's unit of focus. BLANKBRICKS workshops temporarily 'de-emphasise the importance of hierarchical power'^[7] making exchange of opinions regarding current strategic issues inclusive and collective.

Shared understanding results in improved team dynamics, reaching consensus more quickly, attaining durable 100% commitment to the workshop outcomes ('buy-in'), compressed development cycles and increased speed to market as well as numerous other emergent and actionable insights.

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY workshops are not business as usual. Playing with coworkers changes the mode of interaction allowing people to move beyond their work persona and bring their whole self and emotional hinterland usually reserved for life away from work into workshop discussions via the models. LEGO SERIOUS PLAY participants really get to know coworkers as people which cements and tightens social bonds in teams and organisations.

After the build phase of each challenge everyone takes turns to tell the other participants about their model while everybody else listens. This is where groups begin to build an object mediated, shared narrative understanding of whatever issue or situation they're facing in their organization (the focus of the workshop). Explaining, listening, asking, and discussing via the models using narrative helps people understand each other's perceptions of a shared challenge at work which improves group dynamics because such discussion crystalises thought. Whilst holding or touching and looking at the models, participants verbalise thinking helping them to find the right words to get their ideas across. Intricate, colourful, 3-D LEGO models plus narrative structure illustrates ideas of a shared challenge at work for everybody to identify with.

Exploring and explaining what the models mean together through play and spoken narrative is how LEGO SERIOUS PLAY creates an organisational subculture. LEGO SERIOUS PLAY models do not represent ‘current’ business knowledge in the sense that such knowledge already exists. Instead, knowledge is recast, novel connections are made, and meanings are reformed and realised anew during the workshop through construction and co-construction of LEGO models and discussion of the significances participants are projecting onto them. Through sharing discourse and model making according to the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology, groups literally and metaphorically build teams with unique identities and with enough strength and cohesion to allow open interchange of ideas and opinions leading to unanimous decisions on how to move forward.

Using narrative enriches the mode of interaction between coworkers and changes the way participants relate to each other and their jobs. LEGO SERIOUS PLAY strengthens working relationships magnifying collective focus on and maximising individual engagement with current issues and solutions. BLANKBRICKS business expertise makes sure workshop outcomes are realised in how participants live their job and work together.

ENJOY A POSITIVE EXPERIENCE

For many people, especially in larger firms, work is 'like a mild disease' in that they just want it to be over.^[8] 'Play' is commonly defined as the opposite of 'work'. The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method makes work enjoyable by using play.

A playful mindset and creative building and co-creation of LEGO^® models alone is enjoyable. BLANKBRICKS workshops are designed to address specific business needs. Workshop challenges focus on actual issues and are left open to each participant’s or the group’s interpretation. Research shows that 'ill-defined' challenges (where what to build and how to build it are open to interpretation) elicit more creative or divergent responses than 'well-defined' challenges (where a photo of a correctly completed model and instructions would be provided like children's LEGO sets) which result in convergent or prescriptive ideas and answers.^[9]

Example 1 : 'To know something means using our hands to construct it... when the PrintCo managers modelled retailers with a friendly face on the front and a tiger crouching behind a wall, at the same time they developed their own knowledge of their complex and taboo-constrained relationship with a new category of customers. Their experience illustrates that sometimes we need to construct something in order to understand what we mean. If we want to understand something together we need to construct that something together.' ^[10]