LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Community Days 2020
We have been going to these meetings since 2002. Personally, I have hosting them every year, first as an employee of Executive Discovery then as Head of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY at LEGO, and now as Master Trainer in the Association of Master-Trainers.
Borrowing the tagline from Tivoli Gardens here in Copenhagen then it is safe to say that the meetings are: “always never the same”, and then add “but never different”
The first meeting was at a watermill in the South of France, 20 facilitators met to speak about their early experiences with LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, among these facilitators were Jens. Already the following year we were +100, the venue was a monastery south of Munich.
As the community became more mature, the meeting settled in Billund, and typically in October. We have been at the LEGO House since it opened. Always totally packed with ca 200 facilitator (maximum number allowed) from all over the world, always lots of powerful presentations about using the method in very different areas, and always lots of long breaks for networking, networking which always has led to new great cross-border collaboration.
This year was different, and it wasn’t.
Different because we were only 20 people in the room, the same because we were always ca 200 participants. Different because most people were on Zoom. The same because participation was global, different because Asians and Americans (South, Latam and North) were rarely there at the same time. Different because from Trivium only Kåre and I were in the room, the same because we were all present but Jens, Fabrizio and Jake were on Zoom.
However, the positive bottom line is the meeting was as energizing, stimulating, motivating, eye opening and re-assuring as always. Well, almost. We missed the unstructured and brain-connecting dialogues in the breaks and at dinners.
So, was the key learning that hybrid meetings are as good as pure in-person meetings?
No! Au contraire, it confirmed that successful and powerful virtual and hybrid meetings build on networks, relations and trust which has been built in physical meetings. There is no doubt that the virtual meetings offer great options for information sharing, but for deep mutual impact, for emergent learning, for weak link to lead to great ideas, then meeting in-person remains “best in class” 😀
This was also confirmed by the many excellent presentations on using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY remotely, e.g. via Zoom. It works, done well it creates value, but…
So what was the key insight?
For me it came when Bart Victor adressed the facilitators and observed that "You work on the frontiers of Imagination"
If we want change, whether it is in leadership, in governance, in schools, in how we treat children or other vulnerable groups, etc, then it is our responsibility to keep pushing this frontier, no matter how uncomfortable it may be at moments
Stay Safe and Play Well