Rewire through Serious Play.

In our last blogs, we’ve introduced our REWIRE program, which is all about approaching the post-pandemic business environment with a pioneer mindset of curiosity and openness. We have outlined 3 main areas for rewiring organizations

1.             Strategy

2.             Leadership

3.             Operations

Starting with a diagnosis, specific Focus Points can be identified for each of the three areas and act as pivotal points for leverage. In metaphorical terms, we consider Focus Points as points on the body, where an acupuncturist will insert needles to alleviate dysfunction or improve a condition that can create a ripple effect on the whole organism.

Today we would like to focus on HOW to reconnect teams in the next normal and use their collective intelligence to REWIRE their organizations. After one year in the working-from-home mode, there is a strong desire for effective, physical connections and reunion of teams across all functional areas. Through accelerated vaccination programs it will be possible to satisfy this deep-rooted human need again in the coming months and bring people together to collaborate on rewiring their organizations.

One of our preferred methods, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, is built on human touch as an important part of non-verbal communication and the hand-mind connection, where we use our hands to accelerate our learning and reaching into the parts “we don't know we know.”

We believe that LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® can be a powerful tool in face-to-face meetings in the next normal, as it enables:

1.     Higher Engagement, through serious play. As Andreas Wagner says, “One hallmark of play is that it suspends judgment so that we are no longer focused on selecting good ideas and discarding bad ones.”

2.     Higher Creativity, through hands-on building models, fostering mind wandering and through this incubation, “and when that mind incubates the problem, it can stumble upon a solution”. As in dreams, play allows, “our minds are at their freest to combine the most bizarre fragments of thoughts and images into novel characters and plot-lines. ” Thus unlocking tacit knowledge where normally effective solution resides.”

3.     Psychological safety, using the models as a focal point. Any conversation starts only when everybody built a model, creating perspective-taking and a uniform playing field. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.

4.     Learned strategy, using the different application techniques carefully designed by certified facilitators. The workshop produces an emerging approach, where the strategy emerges over time when intentions collide and adapt to a changing reality. It is a more bottom-up, frontline-oriented approach where solving real business problems leads to new strategies. In today's more volatile world, the emerging strategy seems to fit better.

So, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is hard fun. Hard fun boils down to the conclusion that anyone appreciates a tough challenge. Combining our newfound freedom with our habitual dynamism towards things, we can sustain our vitality in a meaningful way: by stimulating and refining our minds, broadening our horizons, and finding satisfaction, while solving complex organizational matters like those required today by high-performance organizations.

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is not team-building with LEGO®, it is creative thinking 3D using the easiest (and rich in details) tool to build 3D models to be used to find robust solutions to complex problems and challenges. That’s why for rewiring organizations to become more antifragile LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® will be our hero tool to help teams to do a deep diagnosis of their Strategy, Leadership, and Operations and to unleash the critical focus points in the post-pandemic world.

Fabrizio Faraco