The path to creative ideas and innovations is a hard one. Anyone who has already participated in innovation meetings without an innovation method knows how difficult it is to get from a defined problem to a solution. With the LEGO Serious Play method, this is a thing of the past, because everyone can playfully come up with new ideas.
The LEGO Serious Play Method, LSP for short, promotes innovation and creativity in meetings. Participants not only increase their understanding of the company’s current problems, but also gain a deeper understanding of the issues and solutions through a playful approach. This “hands-on” approach is based on dividing the complex topic into smaller pieces. In this case the Lego building blocks. This simplification helps to structure the problem and to try out new possibilities in the form of stories. The brain, according to the findings from LSP, concentrates only on the concrete question during construction and leaves out disturbing factors such as social restrictions or fears.
Procedure of a LEGO Serious Play session
After the participants have become familiar with the LEGO bricks again, the idea seekers learn to recognize metaphors for problems in the different connections of the bricks.
Normally, an LSP session is conducted in such a way that the moderator asks the participants a question that they must try to solve in LEGO. First the solution is built alone. Then you describe your model to the other participants. When describing their model, the builders are only allowed to refer to parts of the model and nothing that is not shown on it. Questions are also welcome and increase the creative process. Afterwards the moderator usually asks to join together as a team and combine the ideas in a common model in order to represent a common understanding of the problem. LEGO Serious Play is all about the story. In solving the problems, the teams should articulate their thoughts and feelings in the form of their models and thus create new ideas and innovations.
Building with LEGO bricks provides a good space to be creative and let your ideas run wild. You are not limited by your own abilities, such as the ability to draw, but you can create a myriad of combinations and solutions with the individual blocks. The abstraction with the blocks forms a good mixture of rationality and creativity and enables you to approach particularly complex topics creatively and openly.
