Design Thinking  - Storytelling with “LEGO® Serious Play”

Selection and Challenge

Storytelling is a professional method to transform implicit, often emotional thoughts into  understandable and tangible informations. Nearby, the empathic power of storytelling  increases commitment und visualizes complex ideas. For example through metaphors.

Comprehensive research shows a bright variety of the storytelling-toolset. One is LEGO®  Serious Play. It is a kit of uncountable, colorful plastic-bricks and characters which the involved  people normally know from their childhood. It helps to get metaphoric thoughts in a literally  tangible story to tell. It guides teams to communicate visually, share ideas and last but not  least: think and tell their story “with their hands”.

In the concrete case, storytelling with LEGO® was used to work with my team on a vision,  mission and basic understanding for our new department, called “Information Management  Sales”. The department’s scope is to collect, bundle, manage and control informations. Until  now, that was not existent: informations were spread without clear rules and organisation  from 30 inhouse units all over the company to 4.000 salesmen.

Application

The idea for the Application came within a team-meeting. The participants were outdoing  each other by using metaphors. Specially for their sight on the new departments role, scope,  behaviour and approach. We had to short cut that process by using the storytelling-method,  guided with the LEGO® serios play set.

In the beginning, we had some warm up-exercises to get used to the LEGO® set – and to get  focused on the story, not on the bricks:

• “Build a duck using 7 bricks” – and

explain, why it’s still a duck, unless you  remove 3 bricks.

• “Build your dream colleague” – and

comment it with post-its*.

The transitory and modifying character of their first prototypes helped moreover to eliminate  the fear of failure in the next steps.

In the second task everyone had to “build” his own story according to the new department  key questions and comment it with post-its*. The team was split in 2 groups and the team  members told their stories to each other.

The key questions were:

• Assignment of the department: Describe the role of the new department in context

to the other departments.

• Processes and Scope: How do we want to act to get maximum information benefit

for the salesmen – and minimum conflicts with the other departments.

In the third iteration every group hat to build ONE shared story out of the individual stories.

As the provided questions were equal for both teams, the last step was to show the results to  each other and merge them to one story, called “the model”. The final story presentation was  documented by video. All steps were embedded in short timeslots, controlled by a time- boxing-clock. All in one, it didn’t take 2 hours.

sticky small paperstripes which can be commented with a pencil

Insights and Approach

Story telling - especially with the LEGO® toolset – was the perfect choice. The team-meeting  started with gamification and ended with one serious, well-„told“ story. All main questions  got answered. The team was encouraged to listen to each other and reached a new level of  common ground. Every voice got heard and all ideas got shared equally. The incremental steps  helped to modify and fertilize the ideas. The team developed a deep understatement of the  challenges and committed itself to the work results. At the end, they were able to take a  strategic decision and to derive operative binding to the next steps.

I know weaker approaches to design new departments. As alternative – before i knew design  thinking – i would have used „visualisation at flip charts“ with two contents:

• Defining „in and out of scope“ of the new department and

• Visualising the new role and interfaces through the SIPOC-method (lean six sigma

toolset), that delivers insights about the suppliers, their inputs, the process, the  output and the customers (=receivers) of the informations.

But the gamification-based storytelling with LEGO® was the better way, and new for me! A  very valuable method for my future and daily work.

I think, story telling is usable with tremendous diversity, that it bursts my imagination. And it  helps even interdiscplinary teams to communicate, understand and commit. Collaboration  becomes so easy and without time-eating detours – even with heterogene participants and  difficult, complex challenges. LEGO® was a good carrier of the metaphoric ideas to become  tangible „stories to be told“.

I became a fan of storytelling!

