Why Lego® Serious Play® is particularly interesting for start-ups.
An Interview with the University of Oldenburg
In an interview, our trainer Katrin Elster told us more about the Lego® Serious Play® method. The focus of this article is the use of Lego® Serious Play® in the start-up environment and why this method can be used to the advantage of corporate strategy and team building.
What exactly is behind Lego® Serious Play®?
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a group process for developing strategies and solutions.
Teams present their ideas, thought models and visions for a complex project using Lego models. They test these new solutions against an uncertain future in order to make them robust and ensure implementation on the basis of common principles.
What distinguishes Lego SP compared to other creative methods, such as design thinking?
It is the ideal process to make an uncertain future comprehensible and to develop it as a robust solution based on a common understanding.
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a real-time strategy process in which the team anticipates the future of the project together and recognizes systemic connections early on in order to proactively shape success today. The Lego models are artifacts of our thinking that make ideas and the strategy tangible.
How does a “typical” Lego® Serious Play® workshop work?
A LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® always begins with what is known as onboarding. Onboarding prepares participants for the next steps both methodically and in terms of content. After the warm-up, the actual topic is addressed by building larger models and modeling the success of the project.
First, the project is built individually and then together, because every successful change starts with the individual. Everyone is jointly responsible for the design and implementation. Together, the team then takes a bird’s eye view and jointly designs the ecosystem in which the project takes place in order to understand connections and feedback. In the next step, the team uses various scenarios to experience the real-time strategy by playing through potential events in the entire model and deriving ideas and principles for current actions from them.
What can startups use Lego® Serious Play® for?
Startups in particular need visions that anchor success in the future in order to work towards it in an agile manner. Startups are also interested in what the ideal team life will look like in the future and what values they will work according to. This can also be found out wonderfully with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®.
How exactly does team development work with Lego® Serious Play®?
The LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® team process makes the team’s values or principles – which are often lived implicitly – explicit and therefore understandable. These are further developed over the course of the workshop in line with the current and future challenges of collaboration. LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® places a high focus on values or principles of collaboration, as these allow individual team members to act flexibly and appropriately to the situation while still acting in the interests of the team. The team process with Lego® is about the contribution of each individual team member and about taking a look at how people work together in team life.
How can startups develop a strategy with Lego® Serious Play®?
Startups face the challenge of presenting a clear, stable vision to investors, customers and employees, while remaining flexible enough to support the continuous learning and development process. This is where the unique superpower of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® process lies, because at its core it is about developing a shared vision from which future decision-making principles are developed. These decision-making principles enable the startup to develop agilely and provide the certainty of continuing to work on the basis of the shared vision. They form the compass for a successful future.
What role do scenarios play in this?
The shared vision is tested through scenarios to determine its robustness against possible future changes in the environment. They serve as mental and strategic preparation for the external forces that will impact the vision and its implementation. Possible and desirable strategies for successfully dealing with these possible future developments are developed. This prepares the team to better face the unknown. In addition, common decision-making principles are agreed for the team based on the solution strategies developed in the workshop.
What is prototyping? Can Lego be used for it?
We refer to LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® as prototyping mental models. This is different from prototypes in design thinking, which are concrete representations of solutions or even usable products. In a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshop, prototypes of shared visions, target images or business models are built. For these results, the Lego model is a prototype that allows the idea to be concretely grasped, tested and dynamically adapted during or after the workshop. Thinking with your hands and storytelling with the model makes the ideas extraordinarily tangible and ensures that the results are better remembered.