Putting the 'building' in team building

We've all been to company strategy days. They promise so much but are often let down through execution. If you’re lucky, you get some team building and maybe a motivational speech before the whiteboard stuff starts. So how do you stimulate creative thinking and encourage everyone in your group to take part?

What if your boss told you to hop on a boat to Waiheke Island where you meet a guy who wants you to build a model out of Lego, as a metaphor for what’s bugging you most at work? Then you explain your model and what it represents to the rest of your team and they, in turn, tell the group the stories behind their models.

Bart Taylor, operations manager at IAG, was dubious when the idea of using Lego was suggested. He had been working with Derek Good, managing director of a training company called Rapid Results, for the past six years. Taylor, conscious of the need to up the ante every year, wanted a thought-provoking leadership team strategy day; Good suggested Lego Serious Play (LSP).

Taylor loved the idea but was doubtful about the reaction of his call centre managers. What would they say and do when faced with Good, a bunch of Lego pieces, and instructions to build a model resembling their greatest frustration at work or something resembling what they loved about their job?

He didn’t tell them what was in store, but simply said they were going to Waiheke Island for a strategy day.
“They weren’t told about Lego. Derek introduced that at the beginning of the day and I was rapt with how my guys took to it. They didn’t ask questions or debate whether or not they should do it, they just got involved.”

Good saw the concept at work in Sydney this year and decided to introduce it to New Zealand in conjunction with MCI Australia, a management consultancy company which uses LSP to introduce change, and stimulate innovation and team building.

Good has run several workshops with companies here, and with the University of Auckland. There can be initial resistance, he says, but that always disappears once the model building begins.

“At the University of Auckland, we had one guy who came in, saw the Lego on the table and said, ‘I’m past all this stuff’ and sat down with his arms folded. By the time we got into the first session, he was doing a lot of talking and really taking part.”

The idea is that creating Lego models stimulates creative thinking, prompts much fuller discussion as people tell stories about their models, and generally encourages much better team interaction and a corresponding increase in the value of discussion.

“When people start building and playing with their hands, creativity levels go up because our hands are connected with both sides of our brains. When people use the Lego bricks, they start to open up,” says Good.

The concept began around 10 years ago when two professors at a university in Switzerland created the concept of serious play and applied it to the context of management and organisations. They developed the idea with leadership teams from large companies including Lego — the Danish company that makes 19 billion Lego elements, as they call them, every year.

Lego embraced the concept after some initial wariness and set up a company called Executive Discovery to commercialise LSP. It’s based on three concepts: play, which is self explanatory; constructionism, which argues learning happens when people are engaged in constructing something; and imagination.

David Gauntlett, professor of media and communications at the University of Westminster in London, believes LSP helps shape conscious ideas or ideas that had been lurking below the surface of someone’s mind. The act of building Lego models in answer to questions helps people shape their ideas and then put words to concepts that may have eluded them at the start of the process. Our hands are said to be connected to up to 80% of our brain cells so by building models, we use our hands to unlock information from our brains.

And it can be a fun day away from the office. Bart Taylor of IAG reckons it produced the best strategy day he has ever experienced. “I’ll be honest, when Derek told me about it I was hesitant because I thought it would either be fantastic, or complete rubbish and no one would connect with it.

“But they really got into it and they all got to walk away with the Lego and all my guys still have Lego on their desks today and they have all built something or they change it around and build different things. We did that a couple of months ago and they’re still talking about it today.”