On 31st August 2024, Philibert Braat and Sasi Kumar facilitated a Community of Practice as part of FNS’ 20th Anniversary Celebrations on Design Thinking and Lego Serious Play. Find out how you might apply user-centric problem solving and solutioning while unlocking your team’s creativity at the same time.
In early 1996, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, the Owner and CEO of the Lego Group, faced a problem. He had just returned to work after recovering from a health issue. But he saw how the globalisation of the supply chain, and the emergence of new technologies at home were changing the market for edutainment.
There was a serious threat to the core Lego business of selling physical construction materials. He recognised that the company would have to change almost everything and yet simultaneously preserve its core defining values.
The International Institute for Management Development (IMD) asked Johan Roos, who was then a professor at IMD to design a strategy program for the top 300 managers in the Lego Group. Johan Roos and Bart Victor began by putting bowls of colorful bricks in meeting rooms. But they quickly realised that even that did not create a more playful environment.
They then began to encourage managers with one simple instruction.
‘Play’.
Managers were encouraged to build structures, and then give their own subjective meanings to what they had built. The Lego Company turned around, partly because of how it re-embraced this idea of play.
This story is significant, because of how it reminds us that serious problems, might not always need somber solutions.
On 31 August 2024, during FNS’ Community of Practice facilitated by Philibert Braat and Sasi Kumar, participants finally got a ‘wow’ experience of how Lego Serious Play, combined with design thinking, could solve difficult problems.
What are you solving the problem with?
Take a step back, and the world might look in poor shape. Or you might be going through a change project at work, that leaves you close to quitting.
Whatever the problem, the answer may lie ‘in the brick’. From the outset, Sasi encouraged us to play with the bricks.
In my group, when we were first greeted with the big box of Lego bricks, I was stunned. It seemed like I was reliving a dream. I was brought back to the times as a 7-year-old, where I would be forming Lego cars, Star Wars spaceships, and Lego City structures, tackling it without worrying about whether I was doing it right.
Yet this time, when greeted with the big box of bricks, I just sat staring at it, wondering what to do. Was it appropriate to squeal with delight, hurriedly taking bricks out to form?
I squirmed in my seat. No, it may not look professional.
My tablemate, worried less. She tore open the cover, and tipped the box over, spilling the Lego bricks all over the roundtable.
Now, we could begin.
In many ways, these bricks represent you, and me. In any situations we face, we bring ourselves into the picture as the main point of intervention.
It can be a difficult conversation you have with a colleague about work that did not meet the standards.
Or it could be a crucial conversation you have with your partner about how you feel tired, and that you need more help.
Whatever we do, it is the self we use, to solve the problems we face.
If you don’t know what to build, just start building
Sasi told us to build 3 structures. The first was to build the tallest tower. The second was building a duck. Yes, you didn’t read that wrong.
A duck.
Others groaned. How could they build a duck, when there wasn’t a duck-like structure on the table?
“If you don’t know what to build, just start building.”
Sasi’s encouragement to us was that often, we would not know what exactly to build.
But starting, and building it up along the way, was a much better way of iterating than just sitting and thinking.
Even by seemingly creating a mess, structure could evolve.
But if we simply sat and thought longer, it might be harder to bring ideas into reality.
This mirrors life.
The third was how to symbolise the facilitator, through the bricks.
Many came up with creative ideas.
What struck me was how differently a single brick was to different people.
Now, these bricks were going to be used in the creation of new solutions.
Then Phil stepped in to give an overview of design thinking. He shared frameworks that might have been familiar to participants, but the process was different in how it engaged participants with the Lego bricks.
The first part was empathy mapping, and trying to understand the person (persona in design thinking terminology) we were trying to solve the problem for.
Understanding users’ problems
In the first instance, we were given a scenario of Alex, an aspiring expert. We were asked to demonstrate with Lego how Alex would be experiencing the problem he faced through his different senses.
Often, we start solving problems, without even thinking about for who are we solving the problem for.
Let us take the example of Open Government Products (OGP), the government agency behind the likes of RedeemSG, FormSG, and Parking.sg.
When they first built Parking.sg, their hypothesis was that enforcement officers were frustrated by having to do the mental calculations regarding paper coupons.
In his article, Li Hongyi, the director of OGP, shared how spending one afternoon with an experienced officer helped them to soon discover that doing these calculations was quite simple for someone doing it professionally.
That single conversation saved them months of potentially wasted effort and refocused their project on helping drivers instead.
Empathising with the “correct” end-user of your solution through in-depth conversations like that can prevent you from going down the rabbit hole of building a solution, that few would eventually use.
Then Phil encouraged us to think through was framing the problem through the ‘how might we’ exercise.
This exercise encourages us to frame the question to explore the solution. It distinguishes between the problem and the solution.
This allows us to stop and think through two things.
What is the root problem?
Does the action we propose, solve the problem, and create the outcome we desire?
Solutioning, without properly diagnosing the problem
Often, we step into solutioning, without first thinking about defining the problem. We jump into this because it seems a better use of time to solve problems, rather than just thinking through the problem.
Going back to the Parking.sg example, OGP tries to understand the root problem they are solving. This prevents them from jumping to a solution based on preconceived biases.
Organisational goals can sometimes look like problem statements.
Compare the following.
- Drivers feel frustrated when dealing with parking coupons.
- We need to build an app for drivers as part of our Ministry Family Digitisation Plan.
The second is an organisational goal, that may not necessarily be the root problem of what the end-user faces.
You may have faced this in your organisation. Your boss tells you to do something.
But you, being closer to the customer, ends up wondering how this is related to the customer’s felt need, or expressed desire.
This is where we end up with yet another white elephant in the room, something that has taken much effort to build, but has little utility beyond the initial impression.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Lego Serious Play and design thinking is the idea that while there are many serious problems that need solving today, we can also learn to relax. We can approach problem-solving with an attitude of curiosity and playfulness, rather than performance.
There is a time and place for everything. Not every problem may be appropriate for a Lego Serious Play session.
When Roos and Victor, the cofounders of Lego Serious Play, started those sessions with the managers in 1996, they too did not know where it would go. They simply built it on the fly, and trusted the process. That played a significant part in Lego’s turnaround, helping employees see problems in a different light (and brick).
So the next time you do not know what to do, you should just start playing.
Byline
John is the writer behind Gutenhag, a content agency that supports thought leaders in building content that delivers long-term outcomes.
Wished you were at this CoP? Don’t miss our last two CoPs for this year: Generative AI Experience Sharing on 12 October 2024 and The 2030 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) Game on 9 November 2024. Places are limited. Check our website at https://fns.sg/forums/ for details and register through admin@fns.sg.
