Business as unusual

We appear to be living through times of radical change. Thanks to the interference of the coronavirus pandemic, like many of you, I am now managing working from home as a self-employed professional alongside family commitments. The situation is frightening, but also an opportunity for learning and transforming our working practices.

Change on this scale is frightening because it is interfering with our regular routines and patterns of behaviour that give meaning to our everyday actions. We are working in different environments, merging work and family, improvising solutions or work-arounds all while experiencing highly charged emotions around the health risks and changing relationships we are now faced with. It can provide a sense of calm to understand how our routines convey meaning, and also how introducing practices such as play can help.

In our ordinary behaviour, we practice something called audience segregation. That is, we take on roles to present ourselves and our values differently in different places and to different people – and we try to keep those places and people separate. So at home we might be ‘children’s entertainer’, ‘chef’ or ‘building manager’, while at work we might be ‘boss who is a stickler for the rules’ or ‘office clown’. Outside of these relatively private spaces, we also have a set of behaviours and appearances which we employ in shared public spaces; to appear approachable or dignified, to convey popularity or solidarity. Appearances on digital media have a different, and emerging, set of rules and behaviours. I hope to cover these in another post as there are too many features to discuss in this one!

All of these behaviours serve a purpose, to make us feel a part of a community, to feel separate from people we disapprove of, and to support our values and sense of self-respect.

I cannot state strongly enough how attached we are to these psychological dynamics. Our mental well-being rests wholeheartedly in these routines. This is why so many advice columns out there are avidly recommending not to work from home in your pyjamas! But more than this, it is of the utmost importance to maintain positive social connection and meaningful structure.

Play can assist you in this as it engages a known routine within safe boundaries and marks a distinction between serious and non-serious activity. So why not incorporate a regular ‘play time’ into your weekly schedule? And if you want to incorporate some serious play into regular practices for personal reflection, I’ll be posting some LEGO build challenges for that on the website here.

Take some time in 2019 to play with yourself

Many people will be dusting off their old box of New Year’s Resolutions from 2018 today, acknowledging how unsuccessful or successful they were and planning some new ones for 2019. The trouble with New Year’s Resolutions is that they are often incredibly virtuous, a bit unpleasant, and too hard to keep up year-round. So to help you make your 2019 a little bit more fun, I’ve created a few videos to help you be your own coach and cheerleader. And you can do it in less than an hour a week – by playing with lego (or a similar brick-related toy product).

Play Along: the Skills Build

Part 1 – Technical skills

Part 2 – Using bricks as metaphors

Part 3 – Telling a story

Once you have completed the skills build, you are ready to move onto the self-coaching part of the process. This involves a repeatable 30 minute activity.

Self-coaching with LEGO Serious Play materials

Commit to regular play

Advice for self-coaching

Coaching yourself is much more difficult than being coached by someone else, but it can still pay off! You simply need to ensure you commit to regular sessions, and promise yourself to be honest.

Basic Coaching Questions

WHAT and WHY and WHAT. Getting great results is often about asking great questions. These question words help orient you towards a goal, understanding your current situation and considering your path towards change. What do I want to change? Why is it a problem? What can I do to make a difference? Finally, HOW will help you focus on your actions towards change.

To model your current satisfaction, fill out the Life Satisfaction Wheel

Keeping Track

The most important way to keep yourself motivated and bring about the change you aim for is by keeping track – but it doesn’t matter how you do it. You can keep a diary or bullet journal, build it using a LEGO diagram or calendar chart, or make a vlog. Just make sure you give yourself 15 or 20 minutes every fortnight to reflect and review your progress – and be playful!

Let’s make 2019 a year of serious fun. Play along!

Is LEGO seriously good for business?

The LEGO® Serious Play® Method (LSP) was developed in the late 1990s by Professors Johan Roos and Victor Bart from the Institute for Management Development, Switzerland. It might seem childish at first, but it utilises three very powerful ideas from social science to be effective;

  1. intrinisic motivation
  2. constructive learning
  3. hands-on creativity

These can have huge transformative impacts on real business challenges. Read on to learn how.

Intrinsic Motivation through Play

Play offers us the opportunity to develop competence and mastery, and in the ‘sweet spot’ of a challenge that is achievable but stretches our abilities we are completely absorbed. Csíkszentmihályi described this as ‘flow’, which we often experience in sports and leisure activities.  But it’s rare to feel it in business meetings! By introducing serious forms of play such as LSP, companies can engage employees’ intrinsic motivation to create ‘leaning in’, or direct and active engagement in the present problem or objective.

Constructive Learning

Human beings are natural experimenters, building new solutions out of previous successful and unsuccessful experiences. This experimental attitude is the basis for problem-based learning and relies on a constructivist theory of learning, that we build knowledge rather than absorb it from others (there’s an in-depth post on learning theory here).  Papert expanded on this in the 1990s with constructionism, arguing that learning is most effective when we create a meaningful product as part of the process. By thinking about learning as building, it’s clear that we don’t learn directly from simply listening to other people’s talk of their experience or understanding –  that would be like ordering some flat-pack furniture and waiting for it to build itself! Instead we combine what we already know (previous assembly) with resources (screwdrivers), stories (instructions) and feedback from others (“It doesn’t look straight, honey”) to build something new. It’s even more effective when we collaborate within a community and learn together.

This model of learning also applies to organisations; as individuals learn and adapt they pass the knowledge on to others. However, it can be very difficult for managers to ensure this process if productive, visible and effective when dealing with more abstract challenges. The building practices of LSP focus on creating visible representations of ideas that can be a focus for collaboration. Using LSP or similar processes, businesses can learn from changing environments to enhance services, strengthen teams, and develop and revise strategy more effectively.

Hands-on Creativity

Although an area which is still undergoing detailed research, the creative potential of physical building activities (‘think with your hands’) is widely praised. Neurological research into creativity suggests that activating parts of the brain which are not usually connected can be a requirement for creativity, as can the release of dopamine (which may be stimulated by play). So having an enjoyable experience such as building LEGO models can help promote a creative mindset suited to improving services, innovating new products and collaborating on visions for the future.

 

Follow this blog or add me on twitter @srslylearned to get the next instalment on games, creativity and innovation!

Learn more about LEGO® Serious Play® Workshops

Selected academic sources

Pichlis, D et al.(2015) “Empower a Team’s product Vision with LEGO® Serious Play®” in the Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement 9459:210-216 https://tinyurl.com/y9ookxb3

Primus, DJ & Sonnenburg, S (2018) “Flow Experience in Design Thinking and Practical Synergies with Lego Serious Play” Creativity Research Journal https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2018.1411574

McCusker, S (2014) “LEGO®, Seriously: thinking through building” in the International Journal of Knowledge, Innovation and Entrepreneurship http://www.ijkie.org/IJKIE_August2014_SEAN%20MCCUSKER.pdf

James, A (2013) “LEGO Serious Play: a three-dimensional approach to learning development” in the Journal of Learning Development in HE http://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/download/208/154