Challenge & Selection

Our Managing Director needs us to evaluate our accomplishments and failures. After  that, we have to define new goals and aspirations for the year ahead. Since we do not  always succeed in the goals we set out to do, or the concepts and goals are not always  understood in the same way by everyone. Therefore, I have introduced “LEGO Serious  Play” methodology (LSP) to visualize what we were going to discuss and agree. I have  formed a workshop with one goal in mind: What is our shared vision on the 2021  strategy program roadmap. By building LEGO bricks and using LSP methodology, we  can share our thoughts and visualize our shared vision.     Application

The workshop was mainly divided into 4 sections:

1. Build models for a clear and shared understanding of the current state of our

strategy department, including the challenges we faced.

2. Build models for a clear and shared understanding of the aspirational state of our

strategy department.

3. Define possible strategy led initiatives to get us from the current state to the

aspirational state

4. Define a prioritized plan of action and roadmap for these initiatives

During the workshop, I facilitated our  teammates. There were 4 core steps with the  use of LEGO bricks and LSP methodology.     Core step 1: Posing a question: the  facilitator poses a question or challenge.     Core step 2: Building a personal model:  everyone builds a model to answer the  question using LEGO bricks. The available  bricks are designed to inspire the use of  metaphors and story making.     Core step 3: Sharing the model: everyone is  invited to share their model with other  participants. This ensures 100% participation  and 100% distribution and understanding of  the knowledge.     Core step 4: Reflecting on the model: try to  distil some insights, point of attention,  clarifications in relation to the model.

Everyone has the opportunity to think about themselves and share their own answers.  Lego bricks breaks habitual thinking and makes dialogue more "safe", thus adding a new  dimension. Just as "doodle" can help you concentrate, physically processing tangible 3D  objects can also visualise your thought, stimulate your thinking and guide you to  unknown answers and knowledge. As a facilitator, we will also guide each conversation

in a way that is related to the construction of the model and the concepts or metaphors  behind it, not to the person who built the model.

Insight & Approach    By building models with LEGO, everyone were engaged due to all the ideas, concepts  were visualized and meaningful to all the participants. Taking any of those models in the  workshop, colleagues would all be able to tell which of these initiatives we would tackle  (prioritisation) and what the strategic initiative consists of. They would be able to do this  even for those models they did not create themselves, and long after the workshop took  place. That's one of the real benefits of facilitating a meeting or workshop with LSP,  which LSP helps visualization.    Design thinking involves lots of idea creation. Visualization is very useful to help  stakeholders to have the same understanding and picture for further evaluation and  discussion. By building models with LEGO bricks, it is fun and helps people who does  not like to draw visualise their idea.     I will apply visualization with LSP methodology next time as well. Because LSP allows us  to handle very diverse issues which can cover from personal or team development all  the way to enterprise development. It can deal with challenging constraints, and it can  also deal with situations where it is necessary to define a real-time strategy initiated in a  complex system in which the impact on the system will continue to change. The key of  LSP is to let everyone visualize the issues and the solution, even the linkage of each  constrains. Similar to design thinking, LSP can define the “what is” and “what if” by  building different models to represent each stage of the design thinking process.

