How LEGOs Can Change Your Life
Imagine you go wild and decide to throw a party at your place with a few friends and family. Once it’s in full swing you go around checking to see if everyone is enjoying themselves. Aunty Agnes and Aunt Sally are in the kitchen gossiping. Your friends from work Dave, Marc and Enriqueta are in the living room playing a weird card game. The teenagers have commandeered the computer in your office. And your niece, Sandy, has locked herself in the bathroom for some reason. Then you decide to go and take a little time out on the terrace with something cold and refreshing.
At that moment, if anyone were to ask you where Aunt Sally, or Marc or Sandy was, you’d be able to tell them without much effort.
This mental task is quite complicated (try programing a computer to do it), but to us it’s easy because our brains are naturally "programed" to think in terms of social and spatial relationships.
Now compare that to the task of remembering a new name or a phone number. It’s easy for a computer to store abstract data. But for us it’s not so simple. Thinking in terms of letters and numbers is not a natural process so it’s harder to do which is why we fail and forget so much. This is also why it’s often difficult to solve problems using abstract concepts in our heads. It requires a great amount of mental effort. What would make it easier would be to convert ideas into something more tangible, more visual, more three-dimensional.
Problem Solving with LEGOs
This is just one of the reasons why LEGO Serious Play (LSP) can be a powerful problem-solving tool. A few months ago, I became initiated into LSP methodology on a four-day intensive training course here in Barcelona given by one of its creators Per Kristiansen. I was already aware of some of the ideas behind it, but during the training, I had my own Eureka moments as new ideas started to emerge and (literally) click together.
Used in the right way, LEGO serves as a vivid three-dimensional language which allows us to express ideas we didn’t even know we had. Because our LEGO models are solid 3D representations, other people can also see them and understand them better than via normal verbal communication. And whereas words are ephemeral, LEGO models stay put, serving as conceptual placeholders on which you can (literally) build further new ideas.
Although, getting the utmost from an LSP session is an acquired skill, experimenting with it is easy. It’s essentially a simple two-step process: firstly, by expressing your concept by creating it out of LEGOs and secondly, by reflecting on what you’ve created and exploring how making minor modifications would alter its meaning.
Here are a few suggestions of things you can build to get some surprising insights:
- How you see you and your family.
- How you see your relationship with your partner.
- How you see yourself at work.
And if you’d like something a bit more challenging, try building your perfect family, boss or job, and see what you discover.
LEGO Serious Play can be used to gain insights and solve problems related to personal well-being, relationships, team-dynamics and even business strategy and it’s used by IKEA, Virgin Atlantic, Samsung, Hitachi and many more. So if you are thinking of throwing a dinner party, how about breaking the ice by getting guests to build a LEGO representation of themselves? It’s much more fun than the usual small talk and they might get a useful insight that could serve them for a lifetime!
Happy building and happy learning!
Ian Gibbs is a certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitator and a specialist in personal learning strategies. More information ian@iangibbs.me