Lego Serious Play

From ArticleWorld

Lego Serious Play is a management tool that, like role-playing, encourages people to use their imagination to grasp the full potential of their place in a corporate organization.

How to play

Colleagues or team members create abstract pieces using nothing more than their hands, minds, and Lego blocks. These three-dimensional pieces represent imagined situations and the process of building them, how teams resolve the matter. As they 'play' seriously, gain confidence and feel less self-conscious, they are asked to create metaphors for how they perceive their institution – its values, its image, and their own place within it.

The point of playing

Consulting firms that are brought in to foster team-spirit and camaraderie, and improve productivity and competitiveness on occasion use Lego Serious Play. The idea is that as the participants collaborate they learn about who they are as individuals within the and how they interact with each other. This in turn helps promote non-linear, creative thinking in employees, and help them communicate more effectively, all of which helps in the ultimate goals outlined above.

Elements of Lego Serious Play

The research behind Lego Serious Play revolves around three basic schools of thought:

• Play, as a means to be creative and imaginative within a given set of constraints.
• Imagination, using which people create and describe situations which may or may not exist 'in real life', or which they wish to challenge.
• Constructionist learning, based on the ideas of the cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget, which holds that the activity of building intensifies learning experiences.