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Legal Geek and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®

Blog Post by SeriousWork Graduate and ProMet associate Vics Bradley.

I think most facilitators, like me, feed off of the positive energy of others. That’s why I felt so grateful to be back at a buzzing conference. I was ready to be super charged like a Tesla.

Legal Geek did not disappoint. I found myself in London, surrounded by 2000 attendees from the legal sector for a very unique conference experience. Lots of talking, lots of laughing and a casual but productive buzz in the air. For those unfamiliar, Legal Geek is a tech innovation conference for the legal sector.

I was there representing the ProMeet facilitation team to deliver LEGO Serious Play workshops with a focus on sustainability in the legal sector.

These were short workshops of 45mins that really pushed participants to think and act quickly. I often think that shorter workshops are more challenging than the usual half-day of full-day we are accustomed to.

On the train down to London, I had been watching ‘Better Call Saul’ which felt like a nice coincidence. I was expecting some Howard Hamlin and Chuck McGill style characters… I was very wrong.

Around 120 attendees embarked on a 45min introduction to LEGO Serious Play and an exploration into sustainability in the legal sector. The room was packed with what turned out to be some of wildly creative minds. There was a wave of anticipation, excitement and laughter in the air. 



Firstly we completed some warm up builds to familiarise the room with using the bricks and to encourage attendees to embrace their curiosity. After that we were ready to jump into our builds. I asked the attendees to;

“The year is 2032 and you’ve just been crowned ‘The World’s Most Sustainable Legal Firm’. Build a shared model to showcase the ideas your firm implemented to win this title.”


This question was designed to fit one of the conference’s themes of sustainability. It encouraged attendees to consider sustainability impact, and what ideas they could implement now, that could lead to sustainable change.

The shared models were quite fascinating and definitely generated some laughs. Here is a summary of some of the stories that were shared;

Make law completely open source, build better legal transparency and dissolve the need for legal firms all together.

Supporting green startups pro-bono until they grow, replant trees to become carbon negative, generate our own water and electricity.

Have our client’s lead on the design of the services they need so that we support them better.

Use less paper, make lawyers self sustaining, have more women in leadership positions and implement systems for better work-life balance.

And a crowd favourite…

“Every time a lawyer recommends litigation they have to plant four trees.”

The best thing about LEGO Serious Play is the amazing array of outcomes it produces. It’s such a brilliant mix of a creativity and process. It’s a joy to facilitate this kinaesthetic learning style. I always leave with a smile, and with my batteries fully charged.

Workshops Work Podcast - part 1


Myriam Hadnes runs the Workshops Work Podcast, and in episode 136 she interviewed SeriousWork founder Sean Blair, in her LinkedIn post Myriam said:

"Three (soon to be four) books on the subject, decades of experience facilitating workshops, and experience of training facilitators in it… Sean Blair is a #LEGO #SeriousPlay oracle! I was hoping to uncover some new insights and ideas from our conversation, but I actually found a great deal more.

Sean is such a captivating person - open and reflective - that we ended up discussing the limits of LEGO Serious Play as much as its merits.

We disagreed, we provoked, we learned. It was one of my favourite interviews to date! There’s something for everyone in this episode, so I really hope you take the time to listen. You won’t regret it"

It was great to be interviewed by Myriam, she is a gifted questioner and brilliant interviewer!


Or watch the YouTube video of both parts here.




Timecodes

01:02 When did you start calling yourself a facilitator? 

02:11 How have you changed from being a “bossy” facilitator and what have you become instead? 

05:05 How do you train other facilitators – especially in the art of dialling up and down their presence in the room? 

09:50 What does it take to create a learning space that encourages and values mistakes? 

13:54 How does speaking with your own voice play out in facilitation? 

18:28 What makes a workshop fail? 

20:55 How would you start a workshop for a group in which you know there is conflict and politics? 

25:13 What is the power in using LEGO to help us talk about difficult topics? 

28:11 Do you use ‘minifigures’ (avatars or representations of people) in your LEGO Serious Play workshops? 

32:01 How do you negotiate the risks of a representation being misinterpreted between participants and creating misalignment?

乐高 工作法 实战手册 - LEGO Work Method Practical Manual

Well this is exciting news, our first book SERIOUSWORK, first published in English in 2016, will soon be available for readers in China.

This translation been the work of Vicky Qu and Xiaotsing Ma who have also bought Cheers Publishing onboard as our publisher in China. We are incredibly grateful to Vicky and Xiaotsing for all their hard work in bringing these ideas to readers in China.

We'll update you on where it can be bought in the days and weeks ahead!

Back to School: LEGO Serious Play @ United World College South East Asia

A (wonderful) graduate story by Liam Isaac - Head of Digital Learning at UWC South East Asia.



From the moment I heard about LEGO Serious Play, I knew that it was something that I wanted to learn more about and - thanks to a fantastic online course run by Sean Blair - last February, whilst on a ‘cruise to nowhere’, I was lucky enough to complete the LEGO Serious Play Online Build Level 1 and 2 workshop.

Whilst I instantly knew that this method had the potential to be transformative within our secondary school context, I perhaps underestimated just how significant an impact it could have, along with the range of contexts within which it could prove effective.

In one school term alone, we have used LEGO Serious Play to facilitate shared vision building workshops with educator teams, explore our Middle School students’ relationship with Social Media and challenge learners in class to use this process to enhance their learning of key concepts within different subject areas.

In the coming months, we have plans for how the process can inform our approaches; notably the engagement of our wider-school parent and alumni community as well as formally embedding the process into schemes of work, effectively making LEGO Serious Play a mainstream strategy within the ‘teacher’s toolkit’.

Here are our big takeaways regarding how and why the process has proved successful within our specific school context.

______________________________________________________

What Went Well: Reasons Why LEGO Serious Play Has Proved Successful

It is a democratic process

In the context of education, this one is HUGE. As Sean stated during training, in LEGO Serious Play, ‘everybody builds, everybody shares’. This equitable engagement can be very difficult to achieve in a ‘typical’ classroom or meeting environment for a whole host of reasons; established hierarchies, different languages, cultural norms and learning needs, as well as the behavioural chasm between introvert and extrovert personalities to mention just a few.

Regardless of whether participants have been students or staff, the feedback from our sessions have always highlighted the democratic nature of this process as a significant positive. This was perhaps best epitomised by a member of our Outdoor Education team’s administration staff who valued the process as “providing opportunities for all individuals to actively participate”. This was particularly validating as the department’s backroom staff had not always been engaged in the co-creation of department visioning.


It is a safe space for idea sharing

The beauty of communicating through models - in our experience - is that it distances participants from the ideas they are sharing. We have observed that, by allowing the model - rather than the individual - to take centre stage in this manner, participants are less guarded about sharing potentially controversial ideas. This has been particularly powerful for workshops where students have been exploring socially sensitive issues; something that can be incredibly challenging for status-aware teenagers to do; especially when this process is facilitated by very “uncool” authority figures such as their teachers.

For example, in a workshop where Middle School students explored their relationship with Social Media - very much a ‘powder-keg’ issue - participants were able to use their models to frame their own ideas as the views of both themselves and their peers, without worrying that their ideas would directly reflect upon themselves as individuals, offering us, as school leaders, a more authentic less-filtered reflection of how our student-body really felt about social media.

This ‘veil of anonymity’ that LEGO Serious Play offers participants throughout the process is a significant positive case for its’ use within schools.


It promotes tolerance

As a large international school, UWCSEA is the proverbial melting pot. With such a diverse student, staff and community population, our school mission makes explicit our aim to ‘use education as a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace’. A fundamental foundation for peace is tolerance; tolerance for the opinions, beliefs and values of those who do not necessarily share the same opinions, beliefs and values as you.

Having observed how students and staff within our school community behave during the workshops and sessions that we have facilitated, I have become a huge advocate for the extent to which tolerance is inherently built into the LEGO Serious Play process.

The focus on active listening and the need to recap and summarise the ideas of others ensures that participants must truly listen, hear and understand the stories that their peers choose to share. In our educational context, this is not always the case, with students often eager to share their own ideas whilst not fully appreciating those of their peers. This process challenges this default to myopia. As one student put it in her workshop feedback:

“I felt that it made us listen more carefully and through paraphrasing, allowed us to understand each other's thoughts and concepts better”

In our experience, the shared model build is where the processes capacity for fostering tolerance truly comes to the fore. In one student workshop, when it came to constructing their shared response to the build question, not a single student chose one of their own ‘disaggregated parts’ to contribute to the shared build; instead preferring to select elements of their peers’ individual builds.

The significance of this is that, through the process, our students evidenced that they not only heard and appreciated the diversity of ideas that emerged, they validated these different ideas by choosing to contribute these to the group response over their own.

If this is not an outstanding analogy and blueprint for peace, then I do not know what is!

______________________________________________________

Challenges we encountered

These are just some of the reasons why we continue to advocate for the use of LEGO Serious Play within our specific school context, and why we will continue to explore where it can enhance our learning program.

It is also worth acknowledging that, through our exploration, we have experienced challenges when it comes to using this process. In the interests of transparency, here are the major ones that we have faced:

Time: In schools, timetables are constraining at the best of times and, therefore, finding the often extended periods of time required to facilitate powerful and meaningful workshops with students and staff alike has been sometimes difficult

Quality Control: Running workshops with larger student numbers has proved challenging; particularly where facilitator to participant ratios are such that multiple build groups are in play. In particular, it has sometimes proved difficult to impress upon students the significance of recapping where the facilitator has not been ‘at the table’ to explicitly do so.

Focus: Working with children is an amazing experience. They tend to bring considerably less ‘baggage’ to the table than we adults do. The pay off for this enthusiasm is that it can be challenging to maintain focus. As with any learning experience, keeping learners on task, whilst maintaining the levels of creative freedom necessary for the LEGO Serious Play process to be effective has been a balancing act.

Moving forward, we are excited to see the potential positive influence that this process can have upon our school community. Significantly, we would be very excited to share our experiences with other educators to build a professional community and learn from each other's successes and challenges.

Contact Liam via LinkedIn

Note from SeriousWork founder Sean Blair: Liam, thanks so much for sharing your brilliant story, to see such a wide range of uses in such a short time since training is truly impressive. Thank you for attending out online class from Singapore, and working so late into the night to learn these skills you have evidently mastered so well.

What would you do if you had all the free time in the world?

This is a (brilliant) guest blog post from SeriousWork graduate Stella Kasdagli, Co-Founder Women On Top


In my SeriousWork two day Online LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) facilitation training course, Sean asked us to facilitate a shared model to show the key benefits of using LEGO Serious Play. Little did I know then how much this model would expand (in my own mind at least) as soon as I started putting the LSP tools in practice, in my own work (and, as you will see, even beyond that).

When our training ended, Sean advised us to start facilitating LSP groups, however small, within a week of our first training. Hearing that, I felt my heart sank. I didn’t feel I had the technical skills to run an online workshop so soon and, due to COVID restrictions, a large in-person working group was out of the question. I almost gave in then to the idea that I would let things slide and resume this amazing work as soon as our circumstances changed.

Thankfully, I already had a very real challenge that needed solving and, as it turned out, LSP was an amazing tool for me to tackle it. My 11-year old daughter had been struggling for some time with motivation and time management issues: she felt pressured to do things she didn’t love doing, she felt that she didn’t have enough free time to devote to leisure, plus, when she did have the time, she couldn’t think of what she really wanted to do with it (this is puberty, for those of you who are lucky enough not to have come across it, as bystanders during your adult lives). Conversation alone hadn’t been very successful in moving this issue in any helpful direction -but could perhaps LEGO do it? I decided to give it not one but two shots.

Ultimately, I wanted to do an LSP values workshop with her, but for that I would need some help from a dear coach friend who happened to be out of town for the weekend (stay tuned for this second part of the experiment). So, I chose to do some individual rich model building with her around the question of :

“What would you do if you had all the free time in the world”

It goes without saying, I would be building along with her. Our first building round offered some great insights (gardening, hanging out with friends and ceiling gazing) and some vague ideas with builds representing “adventures” and “various activities”. So, we decided to go with a second 3-minute building round and then a third, a fourth and a fifth. Every round started with a specific question of “what do you mean by that” and it helped us unpack for her both “adventures” and “activities” but also “art”, “travel” and “sports”. What she ended up with was an amazing building board full of ideas, not only to fill her free time, but honestly, to live her life to the full.

After finishing this first part of the experiment with her, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much richer those LSP benefits seem, now that I have really started seeing other people work with bricks. These benefits are not just for children but looking at my daughter unpacking issues that were hard for her to approach before, made me appreciate this work in a host of other ways. Here’s what I found:

Detachment

Putting our ideas, dreams, feelings into concrete shapes somehow helps us detach ourselves from the responsibility of owning and expressing these thoughts. It is as if we become less critical of our inner selves when we can present them not in our own words but in shapes that are not us anymore.

Storytelling

Sharing your models with other people forces you to create a coherent story -and we know how much stories help us put our chaos in order and make sense of our own selves and the world around us.

Thought

Those few minutes of individual building are like a silent space that we give ourselves to really think before we blurt out whatever we would have blurted out if someone asked us the same question we are building around. By giving ourselves the time to process our ideas we arrive at a much more thought-out conclusion than the one we would have reached if we had just talked about it.

Truth

Because building takes time (more time than talk), we end up building only the things that are important to us and this selection and investment process help us become more truthful around what desires and thoughts are essential to what we want to say/achieve/share.

Practice

Because we are using our body to give shape to our ideas, we end up with an imprint of the thought process we went through on our hands and eyes -to say the least. This is probably the most valuable dimension of every learning process: the chance to leave our learning spaces with a physical sensation of how our new ideas feel when we get them out in the world. And this is something that my daughter is now going to carry with her while she’s navigating the treachery waters of puberty, adolescence and beyond.

*Stay tuned to learn about the results of our values LSP workshop with my pre-teen.

Stella Kasdagli is a writer, facilitator and the co-founder of Women On Top, a non-profit organization working for the professional empowerment of women and for equality and inclusion in the workplace.

Stella on LinkedIn

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