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I presume that you are completely new to LEGO Serious Play methodology and would like to know about its very basics.
The term “serious play” comes the essays of Plato, who has said that play can have may purposes. Most people enjoy playing games to spend their time. Plato suggests that it is much more worthwhile to engage in play that comes with a purpose of education. This is what he calls serious play. So “LEGO Serious Play” uses LEGO bricks for purposeful play.
My friend Sean Blair has suggested that LEGO Serious Play is like making 3D printouts of your thoughts. It is a brilliant metaphor.
Before recording this video, I was thinking about a grand piano. It took me approximately two minutes to jump head first into my box of lego bricks, find the suitable black and finish my prototype of grand piano for everyone to see.
Once you have your building ready you can take the next step.
LEGO Serious Play goes beyond making models of physical objects. By building a model of a grand piano I can also tell you a story about my love for music. About how I have practiced it for years. How I first bought my grand piano and what my family members thought of it when they found out that our living room is full of this majestic instrument. I can use this model as a prompt to tell the stories of the past or also as a tool to talk about my future aspirations. Even though – let me be honest with you, I would never have much aspiration to become a concert pianist, so actually I do not need a grand piano for my daily practice.
Lets look at a different model. It is a very simple model that only consists of 4 LEGO elements.
This is me and that flower over here represents my new business idea. As you can see, this flower is small and fragile. This means that the business idea is still at its infancy and it requires lots of attention and care from my side to ensure that it will grow and start blooming.
Can we reflect for a minute about what I was just telling you about? I had only used four bricks from my LEGO kits. A minifigure, a small base plate, a flower and a flag pole. I assembled those 4 in just 10 seconds. And still – using only 4 LEGO bricks I can likewise tell a long story about what I have done about this business idea to date and what will I be doing with it in the future.
LEGO Serious Play at its core requires 3 skills:
We have two models. Majestic grand piano representing the love for music. Gardener with fragile flower representing entrepreneur nurturing the start-up business.
Coming back to the question that we started with. What is LEGO Serious Play?
In very simple terms, it is a tool for communication. I build things with bricks. I create 3D prints of my thoughts. I talk about them by using colourful metaphors that are easy to remember. As a result, together with other people we understand each other better.