innovative meetings Christopher Durso Snap-to-itiveness

LEGO Serious Play can take abstract problems and intangible solutions and make them real — one building brick at a time.

M

embers of the Manufactur- ers Association for Plastic Processors (MAPP) tend to

be practical-minded, linear thinkers, according to Laurie Harbour, president and CEO of Harbour Results and a member of MAPP’s board of directors. In other words, despite the fact that they work for companies that make all manner of toys and games, they’re not a group you’d think would enthusiasti- cally embrace the LEGO Serious Play program, in which conference partici- pants explore their business challenges by building with LEGOs. And yet there was Robert Rasmus-

sen, a certified LEGO Serious Play facil- itator who helped create the program when he worked for LEGO, leading a session at a recent MAPP Benchmark- ing Conference in Indianapolis — and people loved it. “[Rasmussen’s] exercise really got people who were very tradi- tional thinkers in how they ran their manufacturing businesses,” Harbour said, “to open their minds a little bit more and think of different ways to pro- cess problems.” In fact, one of the strengths of LEGO

Serious Play is its hands-on literal- ness, asking participants to make the abstract concrete, one brick at a time.

“There is the whole notion of what is called ‘constructionism,’” Rasmus- sen said in a Skype interview from his native Denmark, “in terms of how you build knowledge up here.” He tapped his temple. “We know that that process of constructing in here actually goes faster when you construct something physical, out in the physical world.” LEGO Serious Play can be fitted to

a variety of meeting types and goals, including board retreats, brainstorming

36 PCMA CONVENE JUNE 2013

sessions, and team-building activities. At a conference like MAPP’s, with about 350 attendee participants, Rasmussen will split people into groups of six to eight; each person gets a small LEGO kit with bricks in a variety of shapes and colors, and builds a model that answers a central question posed by the organiz- ing group. In smaller programs, work proceeds to combining the individual models into one agreed-upon final model; in larger groups, the emphasis is on each person sharing his or her story, and then arranging the models into a

“super story.” “After four to five minutes, everybody

has a model standing in front of them,” Rasmussen said. “And then you go around the table and everybody shares their story. And then based on what you learn, you reflect. That is the basic pro- cess: question, build, and typically give the LEGO models metaphorical mean- ings. If I build a rose, it would not really be a rose, right? It would maybe be a story about something that is beautiful or something that is sticky.” At MAPP’s Benchmarking Confer-

ence, “each table was tasked with thinking about different things that are happening at their business today,” Harbour said, “and using LEGOs to depict what the problem was at their organization.” The program left its mark — on

Harbour and everyone else. “I see those guys a lot in [MAPP], and they still talk about the LEGO exercise,” Harbour said. “People were just so engaged, whereas usually people are falling asleep by the end of the day.”

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Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene.

PCMA.ORG

Picking Up the Pieces At the MAPP Bench- marking Conference, participants identified the biggest challenge they face at their com- panies, then used LEGOs to represent it.

BREAKOUT

Storymaking “LEGO Serious Play is really, really good to think about achieving some status that is not yet there,” Robert Rasmussen said. “You are always about, how can we become a better organization? What is a new strategy? How can we become more creative? It is always about thinking about some state that is different from where you are right now.

“When we build a story about that, we actually call it storymaking as opposed to storytelling, which is very much about the past — I am telling you a story about some- thing that has happened. We make a story about something that we would like to happen in the future.”

ON THE WEB

› To learn about LEGO Serious Play, visit seriousplay.com.

› Watch a video of a LEGO Serious Play workshop at the University of Ferrara’s Department of Architecture at convn.org/lego-ferrara.

Innovative Meetings is sponsored by the Irving Convention & Visitors Bureau, irvingtexas.com.

ILLUSTRATION BY BECI ORPIN / THE JACKY WINTER GROUP