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Serious Play at the Business & Management University
December 2008 A new experience in management innovation
Invenzyme recently had the opportunity to work with the Business & Management University (BMU) in Geneva, Switzerland to give faculty, graduate students and members of the local business community in Geneva a hands-on introduction to LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY™. Such an innovative approach isn’t often covered in a business school curriculum, yet it’s very much at the cutting edge of strategy and organisational development. As a forward thinking institution, the BMU was open to exposing its stakeholders to this new way of conjuring up radical strategies and enhancing the way businesses communicate. As a LEGO SERIOUS PLAY certified partner, Invenzyme was looking to promote the approach and test the Geneva market. The seeds for collaboration were sown and two two-hour workshops, facilitated by Invenzyme Director Jim Paton, took place in June and November 2008. These provided a hands-on demonstration of the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY experience. BMU faculty, MBA students and local business representatives were exposed to a series of simple exercises, and quickly learned the essential ingredients of serious play: constructing and describing LEGO models. And not just any old models...
Child’s play! Or is it?... On the face of it, it may look like child’s play. But serious play is adult play with a purpose. After a few warm-up exercises, participants quickly got their teeth into building models that represented something more serious, such as a business goal, a difficult colleague, or something they were passionate about. The insights that came out of the process were striking. “The session triggered the many questions about our company. To be continued...” said the Director of an IT services firm. Participants who had never even met before found it easy to communicate and they were able to work collaboratively to create something that they all had a stake in. For instance, participants in the November workshop built models representing dream organisations that they wanted to be a part of, and then worked together to create a single model of their collective dream organisation, with themselves as an integral part of the model. "One point (among others) that won me over - said one participant, a banker - was the ease with which we were able to express ourselves even though we didn't know each other. The LEGO focused the discussion on what we had built rather than on each other, which allayed any tension and allowed openness. It was surprising..."
In one case, the group’s interest in aeroplanes and travel allowed them to create their perfect organisation as an airfield, where each participant contributed something unique. One individual turned his interest for analysis and numbers into the control tower. | Communication and creative thinking Typically, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is used with groups of people who know each other already, and where they may be significant issues at stake. It enables everyone to speak their opinion without being threatening or indeed feeling threatened. It’s hard to get upset about a LEGO model – unless you break one or throw it at somebody!
At its core, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a business tool that stimulates creative thinking and gets people to work more collaboratively, and it has been applied to challenges as diverse as developing a corporate vision, creating a new product, aligning team goals or post-merger integration. The approach builds on research carried out by such eminent psychologists as Jean Piaget and his disciples, such as the fact that we think differently and learn better when we build something with our hands. Building on science
LEGO SERIOUS PLAY also builds on the thinking of strategic gurus such as Gary Hamel and Henry Mintzberg. It was, however, the brainchild of two IMD professors, Johan Roos and Bart Victor, and then CEO of the LEGO Group Kjeld Kristiansen. Like Hamel and Mintzberg, they recognised the limitations of conventional strategic planning, and by the late 1990s they too were searching for a way to enable companies to develop radical, innovative strategies. And they believed that serious play was the answer. 
Think back to when you were at your most creative... Chances are you’ll recall events from your childhood, rather than recent business dealings. Yet in today’s fast-paced business world, creativity is just what is needed to help organisations to adapt and businesses to prosper. So if children can unleash their creative energy through play, surely we can do the same as adults? As Roos and Victor argued, playing allows you to try out new ideas and explore new worlds without the fear of making the wrong decision, or being ostracised for trying something new, or having every word taken down (or worse, sitting in someone’s email folder) and ready to be brought out and used in evidence against you when it’s blame time! | Playing for strategic advantage Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the most innovative companies of the last ten years are those that have a playful streak. Who would have imagined that Apple would now be selling phones and mp3 players? Who would have guessed just ten years ago that the low cost upstart easyJet, with its online booking, in-your face marketing and free seating, would now be the largest carrier at Geneva airport? And how did Wikipedia, updated by anyone and everyone, become at least as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica? Not by extrapolating last year’s sales and fighting last year’s competitors, that’s for sure! 
More and more successful businesses are moving away from traditional strategic planning or have never even used it. Strategic “planning” was all the rage in the days of vertically integrated, centralised and regulated businesses of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Yet in a more dynamic internet age, with decentralised, flat, global, and increasingly virtual corporations, the limitations of planning and control are hopefully self-evident. It’s no longer about developing this year’s version of the “Model T” or fighting well-defined competitors. Instead, the real winners are those companies who innovate in everything they do, allowing their strategies to emerge collaboratively, and able to seize the opportunities arising out of chance events. The purpose of strategy is natural selection, and innovation has become the key to successful strategy. Jim Paton, December 2008 |
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