LEGO Serious Play is an interactive workshop technique that can help teams become better aligned with their corporate goals and the needs of their market. Let’s take a few moments to explore why that matters.
When a team is aligned with its corporate goals and the needs of the market great things happen. A famous example is Steve Wynn, the founder of Wynn Resort & Casino, and his family’s experience on a trip to Paris:
They were staying at a Four Seasons, and breakfast had been delivered to the room. His daughter had ordered a croissant, but she only ate half of it, leaving the other half to nibble on later that day. Wynn and his family left the room to explore Paris. And, upon returning to the hotel, his daughter began thinking about that croissant. But when they entered the room, the pastry was gone, taken by housekeeping. She was disappointed. Housekeeping assumed the half croissant was trash. Or did they?
A light was blinking on the room’s telephone. It was a message from the front desk of the Four Seasons to the Wynn family. The clerk stated that housekeeping had removed the half croissant from the room, assuming that upon return the rightful owner of the croissant would prefer a fresh pastry. So the front desk contacted the kitchen to set aside a croissant, and room service was informed that upon request, they would need to deliver the pastry post haste.
“What makes this story so powerful?” asks Nathan. “The level of teamwork and communication between different departments is simply amazing. All participants understood the end game—customer satisfaction. And, everyone accepted their role in making the experience fantastic. These are the stories that Steve Wynn shares with his teams—and you can witness that level of teamwork at any of his properties today.”
While most of us have worked on teams that had this type of alignment, there are probably more cases where teams were not as effective.
Google Project Aristotle
Project Aristotle was a two year project where Google tried to codify the secrets to team effectiveness. Specifically, Google wanted to know why some teams excelled while others fell behind. As reported by Michael Schneider:
Before this study, like many other organizations, Google execs believed that building the best teams meant compiling the best people. It makes sense. The best engineer plus an MBA, throw in a PhD, and there you have it. The perfect team, right? In the words of Julia Rozovsky, Google’s people analytics manager, “We were dead wrong.”
Fast forward two years, and Project Aristotle has managed to study 180 Google teams, conduct 200-plus interviews, and analyze over 250 different team attributes. Unfortunately, though, there was still no clear pattern of characteristics that could be plugged into a dream-team generating algorithm.
As described in an article in The New York Times, it wasn’t until Google started considering some intangibles that things began to fall into place.
“As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as “group norms” – the traditions, behavioral standards, and unwritten rules that govern how teams function when they gather… Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound.”
The Google researchers leveraged a concept known as collective intelligence (abilities that emerge out of collaboration) that came out of a research project from psychologists at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Union College. Google concluded that there were five factors that drove team effectiveness:
So how can the Google’s research be used to improve the effectiveness of your team?
Market-Driven LEGO Serious Play Team Alignment
Market-Driven LEGO Serious Play is an approach that leverages the philosophy of Market-Driven Business with the workshop process of LEGO Serious Play to tackle key initiatives like team alignment. To learn more about the concepts and methodology of Market-Driven LEGO Serious Play check out this article. The foundation of LEGO Serious Play “is a facilitated meeting, communication and problem-solving process in which participants are led through a series of questions, probing deeper and deeper into the subject. Each participant builds his or her own 3D LEGO model in response to the facilitator´s questions using specially selected LEGO elements. These 3D models serve as a basis for group discussion, knowledge sharing, problem solving and decision making.” Our approach supplements traditional LEGO Serious Play with the elements of Market-Driven Strategy. The core challenge with traditional LEGO Serious Play is that the ideas created by the process are limited to the information the participants bring into the workshop. This usually results in taking an Inside-Out perspective. The Inside-Out approach is guided by the belief that the inner strengths and capabilities of the organization will produce a sustainable future.
When it comes to sustainable innovation, however, market-leading companies adopt an Outside-In perspective. Outside-In can be defined as consistently successful companies that start with an external market orientation and vigilantly study customer trends in order to design their strategy. According to a study conducted by Ranjay Gulati from Harvard Business School, companies that adopt an Outside-In philosophy: 1) Delivered shareholder returns of 150 percent while the S&P 500 has delivered 14 percent and 2) Grew their sales 134 percent while the S&P 500 has grown just 53 percent.
Project Overview
A typical project consists of four major phases:
Project Planning
The project begins by mapping out all of the requirements to ensure its success. This includes identifying an executive sponsor, selecting workshop participants, identifying and recruiting interview participants, arranging project logistics, and establishing a project schedule.
External Interviews
The next step is to conduct interviews with individuals external to the workshop team. Depending on the nature of the project, this could include customers, members of other internal departments, and even partners. The goal of the interviews is to gain an understanding of how the team is perceived from an external perspective. The interviews are recorded and transcribed. The results are analyzed to identify common trends, opportunities, or challenges.
The resulting summary and transcript are distributed to all workshop participants in advance. The document serves as a narrative memo – the type that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has mandated for all important meetings.
Goal Validation
The next step is for the project leaders, the executive sponsor, and the workshop facilitator to identify and clarify the team’s goals. This is critical – it establishes the foundation of what the team needs to achieve. The workshop process helps the team to understand why they are not achieving their current goals and follows that up with Simple Guiding Principles that will enable the team to achieve the goals.
Onsite LEGO Build Workshop
The final step in the project is to conduct a one or two day onsite workshop where the LEGO Serious Play methodology will be used to help the participants develop the simple guiding principles that will enable their team to achieve their goals.
Market-Driven LEGO Serious Play Workshop
A typical Market-Driven LEGO Serious Play workshop consists of six major activities:
Build 1: Build Your Role & Share
The first activity focuses on building confidence with the LEGO process. Participants use LEGO bricks to describe their role in the team. They then share their interpretation with all of the other workshop participants. This is known as Personal Identity. The LEGO models are a metaphor. Each participant tells a story about their model to the entire group. No one expects that a LEGO model will be a perfect representation of a concept. It is the story the model builder tells about the model that is important. Building 3D models leverages a concept known as hand knowledge. Research shows that the hands are connected to 70-80% of our brain cells. Our brains are limited as to how much information they can consciously handle at one time, the so-called working memory. But with the help of all the neural connections in our hands we “know” more than we think we know at any given moment.
Build 2: Build Your Neighbors Role & Share
In the second activity, each participants builds a model that describes their perception of their neighbor’s role. This is known as External Identity. This activity helps the team understand how they are perceived in the ‘as-is’ situation. It is the first step to tackling two of the five principles Google identified as critical success factors for team effectiveness: Psychological Safety and Structure & Clarity.
Build 3: Team Connections
In the next activity, the participants identify the fixed and flexible connections between their individual models. They answer the questions “where do you sit in the machine? What is the machine? What is the nature of the connections?” The interconnected models describe how the team is functioning today. It also serves as a foundation for discussing how things can be improved in the future.
Playing the Past
In this activity the team has an in-depth discussion about how the team has worked in the past. How have decisions been made? What are the outcomes? Replaying the past helps uncover patterns of decision making which may not be optimal It also helps uncover patterns that work well that may serve as the foundation of becoming the best possible team). Typical activities in this phase include:
- List of some of the events that have transpired in the last 6 months
- Play these events out with the team, flagging impacts
- Discuss impacts (Understand
what happened and why)
- Does it have an impact?
- Where does it impact?
- What is the impact?
- Does this force you to act?
- What could you do?
- What would make this the right thing to do?
- Identify Simple Guiding Principles
Simple Guiding Principles are one of the key takeaways from the workshop. The principles:
- Are not rules or instructions.
- Are simple but give rise to complex and sophisticated behavior.
- Are the ‘basic laws’ against which every choice can be measured.
- Represent a link between the competitive posture of the business and the event that is emerging at that time.
- Should be few and clear, and taken as a set.
- Should seem just like common sense, but common sense in relation to your team’s role in the company.
- Underpin the performance of any great business.
Discuss Expectations & Goals
In this activity the team reviews their goals and the organization’s expectations of the team.
Playing Emergence
Playing Emergence is the culmination of the workshop. In this activity the participants examine a number of topics:
- Outline scenarios that could happen in the future that impact
- Outside the team
- Inside the team
- Impact one team member
- Play the scenarios out with the team, flagging impacts
- Discuss impacts (Understand what happened and why)
- Does it have an impact?
- Where does it impact?
- What is the impact?
- Does this force you to act?
- What could you do?
- What would make this the right thing to do?
- Simple Guiding Principles update
Market-Driven LEGO Serious Play Team Alignment Summary
The LEGO Serious Play methodology has been used successfully for almost 20 years to help align teams and spur innovation. The combination of 3D modeling and discussions structured by an experienced facilitator leads to better team alignment and business performance. Market Driven Business’ innovation of prefacing workshops with structured interviews of key external parties (customers, other departments, etc.) provides the foundation for overcoming the challenges of ‘Inside-Out’ thinking that dominates most organizations. Successful Market-Driven LEGO Serious Play workshops can help organizations achieve the five critical success factors for teams that Google identified in their Project Aristotle research.
