Hard Fun & Serious Work @ Serious Play Meetup#1

In August we enjoyed our first open Serious Play meetup in Iasi, kindly hosted by our friends at FabLab.

For those who couldn't make it, here are a few highlights from the 1,5 hour tasting session:

• we used Lego Serious Play, a serious facilitated technique for problem solving and real time strategy design, and tons of LEGO bricks;
• we discussed the concept of "workplace collaboration", as everyone has some relation to it, despite the participants' diverse backgrounds (academia, training, HR, IT, product development, students, business, or just curious people);
• facilitator (our Cristina Baghiu) asked gradually questions to involve participants' deeper into the subject, starting from "build a model in Lego that describes your nightmare experience of collaboration in the workplace" to "add some bricks to your model that represent you and what would be the ideal way of collaborating with your team".

An interesting concept was also introduced, your "15% solutions" (actually a Liberating Structure, but more about it later). In any situation, the reality is that you have little room for immediate influence and change. Researchers say that limit is around 15%.

So participants were asked to identify their 15%, the immediate actions, however small, that everyone can take immediately to improve their collaborative ways at work.

What is made possible? At a minimum, these small personal actions will create momentum, and that may make a BIG difference. 15% Solutions show that there is no reason to wait around, feel powerless, or fearful. They help people pick it up a level. They get individuals and the group to focus on what is within their discretion instead of what they cannot change. With a very simple question, you can flip the conversation to what can be done and find solutions to big problems that are often distributed widely in places not known in advance. Shifting a few grains of sand may trigger a landslide and change the whole landscape.

Lego Serious Play has clear rules for engagement:

• facilitator asks the questions;
• everyone builds the model in Lego bricks;
• everyone shares their views;
• everyone listens;
• everyone is heard.

The insights are always surprising, as people said at the end of this meetup: "I didn't believed myself sharing all these personal things to people I didn't know", or "the richness of the model in Lego bricks helped me understand my colleague's opinion".

For more Serious Fun, follow our events page and this presentation.