Serious Play with Liverpool University and Lego
Liverpool University’s School of Environmental Sciences team approached MundoNovus to facilitate a day together to explore how the team collaborates in the running of the department and how this could be improved. MundoNovus designed a full day of activities for the team and also sourced a venue away from the University in a wilderness park in Wirral to enable some breakout time surrounded by nature.
Building Bonds Within The Team
Part of the remit of the day was to help build strength into the team and forge a cohesion and bonds within the team. We primarily utilised Lego Serious Play for this but also explored Needs using Max St John’s Needs Work framework.
Techniques used:
- Exploration of the diverse ideas at the table whilst introducing LSP with the Duck Challenge
- Lego Skills Building creating creatures and telling stories to one another encouraging each person to share their stories and to listen to one another
- Exploration of the individual Needs within the team using the Needs Work Framework
- Model building of the personal frustrations each team member had with their work day allowing sharing of those frustrations as stories
- Model building of possible remedies for any of those frustrations and sharing of the story of each remedy
- Team cohesion by building a model of another team member to represent someting they admire in that person
- Discovering of some simple shared values by exploring remedies that resonate with the team
- Collecting the shared values as a set of team value statements
This is what the clients said...
Martin and the Lego tools helped us to think more deeply about the challenges we face and what we might do to tackle them.
Lego Serious Play was a creative, reflective, mind-stretching experience. Highly recommended!
Through the use of Lego Serious Play and other approaches, Martin really helped us to get to the root of what we believe to be important, both as individuals and as a group. Highly recommended.