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YCN's LEGO Serious Play Workshop

ycn lego serious play

A few weeks ago our Humans of Holitions attended  YCN’s LEGO Serious Play Workshop. The workshop gave insights on building 3D LEGO Models and how these can be used to help with inter-organizational communications, with the ultimate aim of encouraging innovation and improved business performance.

 

The LEGO Serious Play methodology

was developed by Johan Roos and Bart Victor in the 1990s and involves a group of individuals and a certified facilitator. Participants are asked to build LEGO models to express different concepts or answer different questions (e.g. What should communication within our team be like?) and later on share the story around their models and reflect on each of them as a group. Since each participant builds a LEGO model, the method allows all the group members’ views to be expressed and heard.

 

The methodology is an increasingly popular tool for team development discussions also due to its visual nature and the ability to gamify more formal team meetings. The bricks boost participant’s creative thinking by encouraging a shift in their mindset from “work” to “play” as well as their ability to convey metaphors or more complex and abstract ideas/concepts, rather than relying solely on verbal communication. LEGO’s visual language also facilitates the expression of these views or thoughts, which in turn enables the others to listen more attentively and understand these ideas better.

 

In addition to its more widely acknowledged benefits for team/organizational management, LEGO Serious Play is also being increasingly considered as a potential tool for UX research and design. While building 3D LEGO models can represent a new projective method for primary research in the form of in-depth interviews with users, UX teams can also use them for creating personas, storyboards or reflecting on user journeys due to its benefits.

 

This was a great avenue to learn more about alternative means of communicating ideas; and after putting the methodology into practice at the workshop, we found that the LEGO Serious Play methodology can potentially be an effective tool for team development in organisations that are considering slightly more unconventional approaches to internal meetings and discussions  (with the assistance of a certified facilitator). Even though its applications for UX are still at an early stage, it’s worth being aware of these possibilities for future reference.

ABOUT YCN:

Established in 2001, YCN (You Can Now) is an award-winning learning network. YCN helps creatively-driven organisations to build the capabilities they need to achieve their goals.

References:

https://medium.com/@ergomania_UX/lego-serious-play-usage-in-ux-design-4c27c54e1451

https://seriousplaypro.com/2015/09/04/lego-case-study-user-experience-design/

https://www.lego.com/en-us/seriousplay