Virtual Lego Serious Play
Now more than ever,
the world needs to PLAY
With face to face meetings and workshops being onhold for the foreseeable future, our remote working reality has created a demand for new ways to connect and to feel a sense of belonging at work. This has also been a time to rethink on many fronts: for teams to imagine what’s next, for us to rebuild our businesses, our ways of working and ultimately ourselves.
While LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® was born in a very different analogue era back in the early nineties, the relevance of productive brick play at work could not be greater. In fact LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® could easily have been birthed in the work-from-home era. Our current sense on disconnection and always-on work lives have demanded more humanity in our work, and nothing is more human than play.
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LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® takes the heavy weight of working through a pandemic off our shoulders, quiets the inner critic and allows us to meander through new possibilities in an enlivening way, and the best part...we can do this all together.
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Our work lives for the past year have involved staring at talking heads in a Zoom gallery with participants drifting off into multi-tasking mode. Not exactly a recipe for breakthrough thinking. LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is the exact opposite. The colourful bricks are irresistible to our tired minds.
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With LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® multitasking stops, we switch from talking heads to talking hands, from literal to metaphorical, from data to storytelling. Participants get into flow and lean in to contribute.
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The beauty of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is that it has always started with the individual perspective. Everyone has their own set of bricks which they use to build to a challenge question. With the help of Video Communications such as Zoom and MS Teams participants then share their builds with the group, talking through the meaning behind their builds. Visual collaboration canvases such as Miro and Mural provide a great opportunity for keeping the models in view as we listen to the stories.
This basic level of individual sharing and reflecting on a topic is easily achieved in a virtual context. Some key differences being that individual bricksets need to be shipped to participants ahead of time. Also some time needs to be allocated to the session for the tech setup so we can see what is being built and orientating participants on how to share their models in full speaker view for a better experience for all.
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The next level of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is achieved when we take individual perspectives and co-create a shared perspective on a topic. This is done by taking elements of our individual models and placing them on a communal LEGO® base plate. In a virtual context we are able to re-create this shared model when one person rebuilds all individual models and then under the instruction of the model owner places the individual model on a shared communal LEGO® base plate. This process takes a bit longer than an inperson shared model building exercise but the outcome is the same. An important aspect of shared model building is hearing the story of the shared model from the perspective of each person.
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At Faculty of Play we believe that now more that ever the world needs to play and so since May 2020 have bought Virtual LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® into the home offices of over 200 people.
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