Your Basket (0 items)Sense Making using LEGO® Serious Play® and the Cynefin Framework
“there are few if any context-free solutions, but many valid context-specific ones.”
― Dave Snowden
Last month I was invited to join the Senior Leadership Team at the English Schools Foundation to facilitate their strategic away day. Using LEGO® Serious Play®, we explored their current reality and aspirational future state in relation to their key priority areas: Belonging, Personalisation and Engagement.
Using LEGO® bricks to first make systems thinking visible, we utilised the Cynefin framework to facilitate a process of sense-making, along with the elements of the Futures Thinking toolkit for intentional strategically aligned action-planning.
At the core of the whole session was this critical question:
How can we make sense of the system and context within which we operate – and how can we positively influence system behaviours?
Complex Adaptive Systems and Cynefin: What we can Learn from the Literature?
A complex Adaptive System (CAS) is a network of interacting agents, the behaviour of which adapts in response to environmental changes (Holland, 1992). Significantly – due to the complex nature of these agent interconnections – CAS behaviours are not necessarily predictable, not least of all because each system-agent can evolve and adapt with experience.
A person is a great example of a complex adaptive system. The human body and mind, with their numerous interacting components, are highly complex and adaptive, capable of changing behavior and learning from experience to achieve goals (Miller & Page, 2007). And if you have spent any significant amount of time (or not!) with another human being, you will appreciate the unpredictability of CAS behaviours.
When you consider that any typical school might comprise of a student population of hundreds – potentially thousands – of these micro-CAS’s, each of them an agent within a much more complex web of relatedness and interdependencies (macro-CAS), then it is clear and obvious to see why a knowledge of complex adaptive systems and how to understand and positively influence their behaviours matters.
Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework is a decision-making model that helps school leaders to navigate the complexity of complex (d’uh!) adaptive systems.
Graphic Representation of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework
Cynefin – a Welsh word that roughly translates to “place” or “home” – categorises problems into five domains: Clear, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Aporetic. Each domain requires a different approach, affording leaders the opportunity to take adaptive action, matching their responses to the situation. The framework brilliantly compliments a systems thinking approach with its focus on emergence and its caution against linear reductive thinking, emphasising that not all problems are equal (Snowden & Boone, 2007; Snowden, 2010).
The English Schools Foundation had already been utilising Snowden’s work to inform their long-term approach to sense-making and strategic decision making. My brief was to help them bring this work to life by making their thinking visible through LEGO® Serious Play® – First by helping them to model their complex adaptive system, before then animating it to identify leverage points, ripple effects and emergent system behaviours.
Our Approach: Sense Making with LEGO and Purposeful Play
Here I will offer a brief overview of the workshop – along with some hopefully helpful insights from along the way!
The Current Reality and Aspirational Future State
‘An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision’
– Peter Senge
We began with a critical reflection of the current reality. Members of the senior leadership team co-created their shared understanding of this current reality before then capturing the story.
Interestingly, the group found this activity challenging as they were unable to reach consensus on the role of school leaders and themselves – along with the relationship between the two – in making progress in key priority areas. It quickly became clear that this work and the problem of understanding this current reality was complex, with meaning emerging through the process of co-construction and storytelling, but also that there was a degree of confusion as to what the current reality actually was.
LEGO® Serious Play® Shared Model of ‘Current Reality’
This is where LEGO® Serious Play® – and using the bricks to make tacit understandings explicit – was an invaluable addition to the process of sense making. With key ideas made concrete, every member of the leadership team was able to clearly identify the elements of the story that they found problematic, offering the group clarity regarding where their thinking was aligned, along with where it was not. The iterative nature of building and rebuilding using LEGO® afforded the group the opportunity to also test out and critically challenge alternate perspectives and ideas through the model.
LEGO® Serious Play® Shared Model of ‘Future State’
We followed this up with the co-construction of an aspirational future state; taking the best bits from the current reality, and then adding to these to create a vision for the foundation’s future in relation to its progress against key priority areas.
Interestingly, the group found this visioning exercise much easier, suggesting that the complex work of defining their current reality – along with working through some of the confusion – helped to make their response to this problem clearer. Whilst undoubtedly still a complicated problem, in Cynefin terms, the group were able to learn from and leverage their experience to intentionally inform their responses.
A key strength of LEGO® Serious Play® for this type of visioning is that the process is not really about the construction of models, but rather about the stories associated with these models. And when we communicate through story, we forge connections between people, as well as between people and ideas – making the process of meaning-making more powerful.
Making Systems Thinking Visible using LEGO® Serious Play® Serious Play
A glorious lunch at the top of a very tall Hong Kong tower recharged the group’s batteries and, having co-constructed their future state, we then set to work on co-creating a model of the complex adaptive system within which it would exist.
The group first built physical models that represented the critical agents that could potentially influence their system. I challenged the group to construct these agents in cycles, with each cycle focussed on a different sphere of influence.
The sphere of influence model (Covey, 1989) is a powerful way of structuring the way groups consider system agents as it challenges them to consider the degree of control – if any – that they have over the agents that can influence system behaviours. This not only helps them construct a diverse range of agents initially, but also – later on in the process – supports decision making regarding where they should focus their own efforts and attention. Given the choice, it is better to focus on an agent you have control over, rather than one you do not.
We then organised these agents into a series of clusters through a process known as landscaping – think affinity mapping but with LEGO® models instead of post-it notes.
Group landscaping agents for their LEGO® Serious Play® Systems Model
Finally, the group was challenged to connect these agents – both to other agents and the aspirational future state model that sat in the heart of this systems model. As with the building of agents, this connection process was given a specific focus. The team had to explicitly build the system connections that were vital to progress against the identified key priority areas.
System Animation and Observing Emergent System Behaviour
With the system model complete, the final act was to use it to help the team better understand the influence that they had on it.
LEGO® Serious Play® Systems Model
Each member of the Leadership Team were asked to place themselves into the system using a model they had constructed at the start of the day. Once in, they then connected themselves to various parts of the system to identify key relationships and feedback loops. For each connection, participants had to share what it represented (eg. an initiative, idea, existing relationship, etc.)
With themselves connected, participants then shook their modelled representation of themselves to observe the influence that their behaviours had on the system.
The ripple effects and emergent system behaviours were recorded in real-time before these notes were used to make meaning from what was observed. We used a simple ‘See, Think, Wonder’ framework to aid this process, with the group concluding by sharing key insights, emergent questions and possible actions.
The next step will be to rationalise these potential actions and generate a potential change timeline, before then using backcasting to recognise the inputs, actions and events required to bring this change timeline to fruition.
Systems Thinking, Cynefin and Sense-Making using LEGO® Serious Play®: Key Learnings from this Experience
This was an incredibly powerful experience for the senior leadership team at ESF. Whilst they had long been using the Cynefin framework, the use of bricks to bring the influence of these ideas on their own system and context to life was transformational. I look forward to working with the team again in the future to continue building on this initial systems-level foray into their ongoing strategic planning and delivery.
Here are my three key takeaways from this experience:
- LEGO® Serious Play® is a fantastic tool for making thinking visible – particularly when coupled with frameworks like Cynefin that require groups to embrace ideas of complexity. We are not well equipped to understand and think in systems. Therefore, tools that help us to grasp ideas of interconnectedness and ripple effects in real-time are invaluable
- How often do we have the opportunity to truly understand complexity? Particularly where there is disagreement or different opinions and perspectives. Co-creating models of the current reality forces participants to commit to an idea. The iterative nature of LEGO® means that the model – and therefore story – is open to change, but the act of placing something down for people to agree with, or not, is a great way of surfacing misalignment. Emergence in action!
- It is not about the LEGO®. This might sound counterintuitive given my drive to champion LEGO® Serious Play®, but it really isn’t. What you really create in LEGO® Serious Play® is stories, and subsequently, meaning. The LEGO® is just the mechanism through which participants make this happen.
Want to Learn more about LEGO® Serious Play®?
Join a SERIOUSWORK Advanced LEGO® Serious Play® Facilitator Training Class.
Building Better Learning: Using the LEGO® Serious Play® Method in Education: – I wrote this book to enable educators to use LEGO® Serious Play® in school settings.
SERIOUSWORK’s LEGO® Serious Play® Education Training: Based on the book, this training is designed for teachers who want to become accredited LEGO® Serious Play® practitioners.
References:
Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change. Free Press.
Holland, J. H. (1992). Complex Adaptive Systems. Daedalus, 121(1), 17–30.
Miller, J. H., & Page, S. E. (2007). Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. Princeton University Press.
Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review.
Senge, P. M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization (Rev. ed.). Doubleday.
LEGO Serious Play Systems Model
Liam is a learning designer and professional facilitator. As the Director of Learning and Innovation at SERIOUSWORK he works with people and organisations to help them meet their specific needs and learning objectives. A specialist in Purposeful Play, Design and Systems Thinking, Liam has over 15 years of experience as an international educator and leader of learning. Prior to his work in education, Liam was an architect. He draws on all of these diverse experiences to design and deliver learning programs and experiences.
