Earlier this week I took part in a workshop to discover and express the business side of me in a better way. It was a lovely afternoon spent in pleasant company, and led in a very relaxed, yet to the point manner by Wiro. The best part was that we were allowed to play with Lego, seriously. Wiro uses Lego Serious Play as a method to literally construct the concepts you’re trying to express. I absolutely fell in love with this approach.
These are the constructions that tell a story about me. (Note: all built within strict time constraints of a few minutes)
My expression of me, building upon one of the pre described recipes for a walrus. I chose this animal, because I like to grit my teeth in a subject or a project. I added the eyes and an antenna for expressing my biggest strength: observing. While observing I dig deeper for a better understanding, so I can move forward or help the client progress.
This expresses why I do what I do. I built a Christmas tree as a social object, which serves as a means to connect to one another and that makes people feel good. It’s a pretty object so people love to look at it, touch it. The people take their hat off to express their appreciation. In short, I want to create pretty things to touch other people’s lives/hearts.
Last up was building a few simpler objects expressing some values how I do my work.
I built a 360 degrees rotating head with a binocular, a colorful tower and a bridge, representing me as good observer, expressing in a colorful way and translating the complicated into easier to understand.
We ended the session with writing down our Golden Sentence, using all the elements we built during the afternoon. I’ll spare you that one, just in case you will accuse me of too much bull-shit lingo.
I loved the effect of building things. At times I was really frustrated and didn’t know what to build, but then I just randomly grabbed a brick and something would emerge and to my surprise it often made sense.
Biggest breakthrough for me was this: the project I currently work on didn’t really make sense in my view of what I do for a living, yet, by expressing that I want to create pretty things to touch others, it suddenly makes perfect sense to lead a project to create a new web platform for 17 existing online communities with around 8000 members in total. I may not be the one to actually make the platform, but I’m going to make sure others will build the best and prettiest platform I can imagine!
In the coming months I will make sure I grab my own Lego more often as a tool to think. In case you want to use it too, you can even buy kits from Lego. I used a starter kit and that includes a whole range of Lego pieces to get creative.
A closing gift to my Dutch readers:
(The Lego Song used in ads in the ’80s)
