Lego plays seriously

[Jipay]

The article is about lego selling a new concept: the serious play. The goal is to realise meeting with employees with lego bricks.

Here is the website adress of seriousplay :

serious play

Personaly it makes me laugh. Now it's always good for lego to sell stuff...

Economy LIFE OUT OF BOX - To play Lego, it is strategic! Behind the closed doors of a room of conferences, the management of the firm met for several hours. The program is important, it acts to define a marketing strategy for the next months.

Today, however, the meeting is not like the others. Far from the traditional presentations around an overhead projector, the most important persons in charge for the company to half are lowered on the table and assemble bricks of color scattered in front of them. The hanging tie,a smile vagueness on the lips, they play Lego. More precisely, they build a small-scale model of their company. One builds a factory, the other a small car, whereas a third assembles a kind of frightening dragon representing competition.

As for the director, it hesitates over the place where to place the figurine which symbolizes it in the medium of an inextricable tangle of cables. Executives fallen down in childhood? Not really. This board of management implements the last-born child of the methods of decision-making aid strategic: Serious Play.

This new concept was launched last January by Lego, which is persuaded that its famous system of plastic Meccano can render immense services in company. The postulate of the Danish company is simple: one is never also creative and imaginative but when one is playing.

According to Lego, its small bricks make it possible to model situations much more complex than all than the managers could make on paper. And especially with infinitely more pleasure. You estimate that your position on a market is solid like a rock? Assemble a gray brick mountain and place a figurine smiling to the top. Does your unit marketing play a key part in the company? Represent it by means of a notched wheel which would activate a whole series of others of it. Is one of your employees very aggressive? Put it in scene in the shape of a catch by continuing another with a bludgeon. The metaphors of these languages symbolic can be extremely effective.

Raised with the row of decision-making aid strategic, Serious Play from now on is sold by Lego as a method turn-key that especially trained consultants apply in company. The principle is as follows: each participant in the "play" joined together around a table is invited to build up a representation of its company. In a second phase, it surrounds it of what constitutes its "environment": competitors, shareholders, banks, customers. Thirdly, finally, it establishes connections which connect the ones to the others each one of these entities.

Relations of being able, dependence, flow of information, etc. Comes then the strategic phase where the play can really start. "And that would it occur if the competitor dragon came to be placed on such market?"

"What would occur if such employee whose figurine supports a whole brick side came to fall down ?"

Each change of the structure of Lego makes it possible to visualize a new situation, to envisage a new strategy. Surprisingly, the principle is a striking down success.

According to Per Kristiansen, person in charge for Europe for the concept Serious Play at Lego, of tens of companies already let himself convince by the method. Nokia, Orange, Firmenich, Tupperware, SAS and well of others still use Lego to lay down their main trends. As for the Internet website, it receives nearly 25 000 visits per week. Cliff Denet, member of the think strategic tank of the Orange direction, tried out several times the method. "A the end of the one of these meetings, none the managers wanted to leave the table of play. What they had just assembled was their company and nobody wanted to dismantle such a perfect representation. Finally, they took photographs to be sure good to remember!"

This article is a translation from an article from Pierre Nebel

[ApophisV]

erm.. now... if it works... :blink:

thats something VERY crazy... but what is it good for??? only to help to understand the own company's structure?? or is it useful for planning something???

[Jipay]

I don't really know what it's used for. I guess it is to help people realising what is important for them n the company and to show what is curcial and what is not.

I know that lego did that when they had financial problems and after that they decided to fire people >x<