lSP NO es una actividad rompehielo para reuniones

Mi colega hace una breve demostración sobre el potencial de la Metodología, señalando la diferencia con una clásica actividad lúdica utilizada como rompehielos. Aunque un poquito, ayuda, relaja, divierte. Gracias Alan. http://considiom.com/blog/tag/video-2/

Master trainer in Chile

Per Kristiansen, entrenador con el cual certifiqué como diseñadora y facilitadora de la Metodología LSP, difunde sus ventajas en Chile.

Cómo utilizar la Metodología LSP en entrevista laborales, por Omar César Bermúdez

Today, I want to share with you one fantastic experience helping one HR department with job interviews. In my +15 years of experience I participated in few job interview. I always had the feeling that I am getting “prepared” answers. With all the information we have in the internet, it is not very difficult to find the answer any hiring manager is looking for. Why is LEGO Serious Play a good tool to introduce in job interviews? I don’t have a very traditional approach when I run interviews. With the time, I tried always to put the interviewee out of the comfort zone with some “crazy” question. I got it, but after few minutes, he/she came back and I continued with the same feeling…he/she knew what I wanted to listen. Other challenge: how can I evaluate soft skills?. I know, there is a lot of test to do that, but it takes time and it is not easy to do it for all companies and/or positions. Said this, I start to discuss about it with HR team, and I found that people with +10 years of experiences doing interviews had the same concerns. It was a that moment that I said, what can I do as facilitator to help with this? With all this in mind, 3 or 4 months ago I started to work in one possible solution (for sure it is not the only one). I found it very fast, but my challenge was how to present it to HR department. As the title says, I introduced LEGO Serious Play (aka LSP) to HR people. It took a little bit of time and few talks. Of course, I got some resistances, but I also got someone interested in this new way to do job interviews. He was not sure about it, but he really though that we could try it and evaluate results. I was more than happy. Interview Goals So, I had one goal deploying LSP in job interviews: Improve the job interview. I had also few items very clear to get with LSP: Transform your 1-to-1 interview in a “lean forward” job interview. Break the ice very fast in the interview, and avoid “prepared” answers from interviewee See interviewee “abstract” behaviors as: Creativity Issue resolving Innovation Openness Personality Leadership Collaboration Interview should not be “conducted” by someone, it should be “constructed” together…all is in one model. The process Very simple procedure. It takes between 30 min and 45 min. It consists in: Facilitator ask one question Interviewee build a model Interviewee do a story about the model to answer the question Interviewers are allowed to ask question about the model Interviewee and interviewers are not able to talk outside of the build model In the last one, after listen the feedback from hiring managers, I gave 2 question cards to each interviewer. It allows to interviewers ask 2 questions outside of the model. It works very well. I will keep it in the future. The results No prepared question at all Interviewee out of comfort zone from minute one Very natural answers Very clear soft skills appreciation Hiring managers/directors want to introduce LSP as standard HR process available in each interview Now, I will work with HR and other scrum masters/facilitators to allow the full team to run LSP in our interviews. :)

Habilidades tridimensionales y la creatividad. ¿LEGO colabora?

Study Finds Spatial Skill Is Early Sign of Creativity By DOUGLAS QUENQUA A gift for spatial reasoning — the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator — may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields, according to a study published Monday in the journal Psychological Science. The study looked at the professional success of people who, as 13-year-olds, had taken both the SAT, because they had been flagged as particularly gifted, as well as the Differential Aptitude Test. That exam measures spatial relations skills, the ability to visualize and manipulate two-and three-dimensional objects. While math and verbal scores proved to be an accurate predictor of the students’ later accomplishments, adding spatial ability scores significantly increased the accuracy. The researchers, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said their findings make a strong case for rewriting standardized tests like the SAT and ACT to focus more on spatial ability, to help identify children who excel in this area and foster their talents. “Evidence has been mounting over several decades that spatial ability gives us something that we don’t capture with traditional measures used in educational selection,” said David Lubinski, the lead author of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt. “We could be losing some modern-day Edisons and Fords.” Following up on a study from the 1970s, Dr. Lubinski and his colleagues tracked the professional progress of 563 students who had scored in the top 0.5 percent on the SAT 30 years ago, when they were 13. At the time, the students had also taken the Differential Aptitude Test. Years later, the children who had scored exceptionally high on the SAT also tended to be high achievers — not surprisingly — measured in terms of the scholarly papers they had published and patents that they held. But there was an even higher correlation with success among those who had also scored highest on the spatial relations test, which the researchers judged to be a critical diagnostic for achievement in technology, engineering, math and science. Cognitive psychologists have long suspected that spatial ability — sometimes referred to as the “orphan ability” for its tendency to go undetected — is key to success in technical fields. Earlier studies have shown that students with a high spatial aptitude are not only overrepresented in those fields, but may receive little guidance in high school and underachieve as a result. (Note to parents: Legos and chemistry sets are considered good gifts for the spatial relations set.) The correlation has “been suspected, but not as well researched” as the predictive power of math skills, said David Geary, a psychologist at the University of Missouri, who was not involved in the study, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The new research is significant, he said, for showing that “high levels of performance in STEM fields” — science, technology, engineering and math — “are not simply related to math abilities.” Testing spatial aptitude is not particularly difficult, Dr. Geary added, but is simply not part of standardized testing because it is considered a cognitive function — the realm of I.Q. and intelligence tests — and is not typically a skill taught in school. “It’s not like math or English, it’s not part of an academic curriculum,” he said. “It’s more of a basic competence. For that reason it just wasn’t on people’s minds when developing these tests.” It is also a competence more associated with men than women. In the current study, boys greatly outnumbered girls, 393 to 170, reflecting the original scores of the students in the ’70s. But the study found no difference in the levels of adult achievement, said Dr. Lubinski, though the women were more likely than the men to work in medicine and the social sciences.

Gamification and LSP

How gamification is changing business by Caitlin Fitzsimmons BWR. Online editor “Gamification on its own doesn’t do a lot, it needs to be integrated with your overall business strategy, particularly with your digital, mobile and social strategy because they all relate to each other,” M. Raftopoulos, StrategicGamesLab chief executive. “In a Lego Serious Play process, every single person has to build their own model and tell the story of what they built to others.” “Often companies want to set out new values or set their strategy for next year and it can be very intangible concepts. People don’t really relate to a PowerPoint show but if you get them to build something out of Lego and tell the story and interpret it, they are much more committed and have much more ownership.” Meyerson from MCI. Imagine this: Your number plate is photographed as you drive through an intersection and if you are obeying the speed limit, you enter a lottery draw to win the fines paid by the people who broke it. The so-called Speed Camera Lottery was the winning idea in the Volkswagen “The Fun Theory” contest a few years ago and it went on to become reality in Stockholm, Sweden. A three-day trial showed a 22 per cent reduction in speed from an average of 32 kilometres per hour down to 25 kilometres per hour, with nearly 25,000 cars passing through the intersection in three days. StrategicGamesLab chief executive Marigo Raftopoulos describes this as an example of how the positive rewards of good game design can drive behaviour-change more effectively than a compliance-based approach. It is a lesson more companies are taking to heart as gamification – the concept of turning any process into a game – catches on in the enterprise. A growing number of companies are using games to engage and guide staff and customers. Not just fun and games Raftopoulos told the audience at AMP’s recent Amplify Festival that gamification has been “hijacked” by marketers and it can be valuable in that context but has greater worth as a strategic management tool. She points out that playing games is not just about having fun. She says interactive play causes an “amazing cocktail” of chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, testosterone to flood the brain and body, with a huge effect on engagement. “The areas of the brain that are being stimulated are learning, processing emotion, sensory alertness, spatial navigation and long-term memory,” Raftopoulos says. “What is actually happening through game play is, apart from having fun . . . that it does stuff to your brain and your system that helps you learn, and helps you engage.” The director of education at Management Consultancy International, Denise Meyerson, agrees, saying that research shows that adults as well as children learn through play Businesses are facing challenging conditions, yet only a small proportion of staff are engaged with their work. Raftopoulos cites research by Towers Perrin, involving hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide, suggesting that in an average organisation, only 20 per cent of staff are actively engaged on the job. A further 40 per cent are engaged but not committed, while 40 per cent are actively disengaged. The same study found that workplaces that had higher than average levels of engagement far exceeded the financial performance of workplaces that had average engagement levels. Meanwhile, Raftopoulos points to a 2010 study from Deloitte Centre for the Edge identifying a steady decline in return on invested capital since 1965, and work done by Foster and Kaplan on the Standard & Poor’s 500 shows that the average longevity of companies is now a mere 15 years, compared with 75 years in 1958. “It’s game-over for our current business models,” Raftopoulos says. “We’ve seen very important and structural changes happening in our business and our economy that’s making us start to think that what we’re currently doing has to change because we’re just going to produce the same results over and over again.” The vice-president international for business consulting firm Bluewolf, Sue Goble, says the term gamification is new but the concept is not. “If you look at sales reporting and sales leaderboards, it’s basic gamification because what you’ve done is create a competition,” Goble says. The current twist is that businesses are starting to apply game thinking to other areas. Goble says it is particularly effective for change management. Bluewolf implemented gamification internally for its 500 global employees to encourage staff to share sales leads on Salesforce Chatter, and write blog posts and engage on social media. From a technical perspective, the company used the Bunchball gamification engine and integrated it with Salesforce.com. The project was so successful that the company now offers gamification to its clients, using a newer product called CloudApps. Other consulting companies have identified a similar opportunity – for example, Capgemini now has a global partnership with gamification engine Badgeville. Wide range of applications Case studies in gamification are varied and plentiful. For example, accounting software company MYOB has replaced its traditional paper-based performance management system with Salesforce product Work.com, a product also used by the likes of Facebook and Spotify. MYOB chief financial officer Richard Moore says the implementation includes the collection of badges and the visual representation of goals all set on a social platform. “The most important thing for us was not only to get a platform that is much more real-time and fun . . . but also to get a tool where you could link company objectives right down to individual objectives,” Moore says. “All the goals are public . . . so you can see how all of your team members are progressing to their goals and when somebody does a great job and is thanked by a peer or their boss or anyone that’s public too. “You build up this bank of information and when you come to do your performance review at the end of the six-month period, it allows upward, downward and peer feedback.” MYOB also uses Yammer for internal social messaging to allow staff to ask each other questions and reach out across the organisation. Meanwhile, financial institution Suncorp has used gamification throughout its business, both internally for staff and externally for customers. Suncorp’s executive manager of superannuation customer distribution Cathy Duncan says the bank worked with technology consulting firm ThoughtWorks to build gamification elements into its Everyday Super product launched earlier this year. “We know that a lot of consumers don’t have a lot of natural engagement with their superannuation and there’s a lot of disengagement and inertia so we saw it as a way to try to get people to engage more,” Duncan says. The super account is available as a click-through from internet banking and customers earn points for completing actions in their account, such as providing their tax file number. The points translate into building a cartoon house that starts off basic but gains embellishments, such as a driveway or swimming pool. Offline play The term “gamification” is often used to describe software-based systems that borrow from video game mechanics such as points and badges and levelling up. However, the actual definition is wider – Raftopoulos describes it as “the use of game elements in a non-game setting”. This can include a collaboration software tool like AvayaLive Engage, which is not competitive but uses avatars and virtual settings. It can also include offline play sessions using Lego conducted by trainers registered in the Serious Play system, such as Meyerson from MCI. Meyerson is one of a handful of people in the world trained to the highest level in the Serious Play methodology and she says the sessions can bring intangible concepts to life and ensure participation of all staff. “In meetings you often have 20 per cent of the people talking 80 per cent of the time,” Meyerson says. “In a Lego Serious Play process, every single person has to build their own model and tell the story of what they built to others.” “Often companies want to set out new values or set their strategy for next year and it can be very intangible concepts. People don’t really relate to a PowerPoint show but if you get them to build something out of Lego and tell the story and interpret it, they are much more committed and have much more ownership.” Companies such as Fleet Partners, Toll People, Telstra , SAI Global, Origin Energy and Qantas have used Lego Serious Play, according to testimonials on the MCI website. Effective game design “Often companies want to set out new values or set their strategy for next year and it can be very intangible concepts. People don’t really relate to a PowerPoint show but if you get them to build something out of Lego and tell the story and interpret it, they are much more committed and have much more ownership.” Bluewolf’s Goble says the company went through a steep learning curve in the principles of good game design. “We found that it’s important to keep the games relevant and fresh when you’re thinking about the levels and the journey,” Goble says. “When the user has posted their first blog and earned 50 points, they’re excited and engaged so what comes next? It was important to make sure that people still felt they had something left to achieve. “Another thing is that you may have different job roles so if your game is very much focused on sales, it would drive sales, but if you’re trying to drive a big corporate change, you need to have something that’s relevant for the different groups.” Raftopoulos says the number one job of a game designer is engagement as opposed to traditional business systems, which are designed around efficiency and throughput with engagement a “sorry last”. “Rather than think systems, think of enabling participation,” Raftopoulos says. “Instead of thinking structures and hierarchy, think of creating experiences for people by evoking emotion and participation. Instead of thinking strategy and skills, think of creating possibility spaces. In terms of staff and style, or culture, facilitating community and connections for people.” She urges businesses to look beyond the current industry examples and make sure any gamification strategy is not stand-alone. “Gamification on its own doesn’t do a lot, it needs to be integrated with your overall business strategy, particularly with your digital, mobile and social strategy because they all relate to each other,” Raftopoulos adds.

El Metro de Londres celebra su aniversario 150 con mapas de piezas Lego

Por Simon Busch (CNN) — Al parecer, cada día surgen nuevas funciones para las piezas de Lego: desde causarte molestias cuando se quedan atrapadas en tus suelas hasta ser un juguete para tu perro o material didáctico para tus hijos. Aquí hay uno reciente: para celebrar su aniversario número 150, el Metro de Londres creó una serie de mapas de las estaciones con estos bloques. ¿Por qué Legos? Bueno, tendrás que preguntarle eso al departamento de patrocinio del Metro, pero lo que sabemos es que los mapas muestran a la red subterránea de transporte en varios puntos de su historia. Cada mapa está hecho con más de 1.000 ladrillos Lego y tardó más de cuatro días en construirse. El primero muestra cómo se veía el Metro en 1927. Otro lo representa en 1933, cuando las copias del conocido diagrama del Metro de Harry Beck se distribuyeron al público por primera vez. Una versión del diseño de Beck aún se utiliza hoy en día. Otro predice cómo se verá la red en 2020. El Metro de Londres es el sistema ferroviario más antiguo del mundo. Cuando se inauguró, en 1863, los vagones de madera impulsados con vapor y encendidos con gas resoplaban a través de los túneles. En la Primera y Segunda Guerra Mundial, muchas estaciones fueron utilizadas como refugios antiaéreos. También hay terminales en desuso, con los muebles y la publicidad originales. Algunas han sido locaciones para películas y otras solo decaen poco a poco. Exactamente 150 años después de su fundación, el Metro ahora tiene 402 kilómetros de vías que se extienden entre 270 estaciones. "Esperamos que los mapas inspiren a los jóvenes ingenieros del futuro", dijo un vocero del Metro de Londres. Los mapas se exhibirán en las estaciones durante el verano, en caso de que quieras pasear y ver uno. Sin embargo, aún no sabemos por qué están hechos de Legos.

hacia dónde vamos

La incertidumbre ante traslados laborales, impacta sobre las familias, especialmente en los niños que desconocen la trascendencia de los cambios culturales, de idioma, la duración de las mudanzas. ¿Cómo anticiparse a temores y desconciertos? Jugando seriamente, se pueden facilitar los cambios y mitigar los efectos negativos.

Fusión Emprendedores & Empresarios

Invitada por MundosE realicé una demostración de la Metodología LSP, que les permitió apreciar la profundidad de su alcance y el potencial de su utilización a la hora de definir fusiones, analizar sucesiones, revisar equipos de familias y planificar estratégicamente el desarrollo de la empresa.

LEGO Lean Canvas

Using LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® with the Lean Canvas The initial part of any Lego Serious Play intervention is the framing of the problem to be addressed and developing a roadmap for the workshop. Although I am qualified myself in the Lego Serious Play method, I asked a good friend Per Kristiansen to run the workshop as: It was a new experiment with LSP and I valued Per’s vast experience I felt we needed an independent facilitator to remove any bias I might introduce if I facilitated I wanted to be in a team role during the workshop rather than in a facilitator role As with a lot of things, the preparation for an event like this makes all the difference, so I had a couple of skype calls and emails with Per before hand, where I described what we wanted to get out of the workshop. We looked at both the Business Canvas and Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas and from that we agreed how we would approach the workshop and what I would like to get out of it. Basically what I was looking for was a deeper shared understanding amongst the team of each of the elements of a canvas and how the team saw that the elements fitted together. This I hoped would overcome the issue I sensed whereby everyone on our team did not have the same picture in their mind of how all the elements of our current model fitted together and more importantly the relative importance of each element. Introduction to Serious Play Per started out the workshop, as always, by introducing the team to Lego Serious Play and how to use the tool. This is like learning the language of Serious Play and through a series of quick exercises the team learned the four core steps in Lego Serious Play: The facilitator poses a question. The participants in a workshop are asked to build with Lego and create stories in response to a carefully posed question. The question is clear but is very open ended. Individuals build a model. Each participant builds their own 3D model in response to the question that has been posed. Participants works with the special set of Lego bricks that are designed to inspire the use of metaphors and story telling. The Individuals make a story. Each participant shares his or her’s model’s meaning and story with the rest of the team. It is critical that every person shares their story as this enables 100% participation during the session which builds a commitment to shared action Questions and Reflections. The facilitator and participants crystalise key insights that are arrived at from the process by asking clarification questions of the models. The facilitator sums up surprises and connections. Tackling the Problem Lego-Lean-Startup "Like Spartans, our small team is agile and smart enough to beat much larger but less agile competitors" Once the team had completed this stage we quickly got down to business with the team individually building the core of what Scurri.com was to them. Stories were told about these individual models and the shared understanding of what the team believed about the organisation was unveiled. The next stage was to combine these individual models and stories to build a shared model to share what the team members believed was the core of the organisation in the context of the current strategic direction (or canvas) and to tease out the value proposition. The discussion and dialog about the value proposition really moved up a notch from previous discussions amongst the team. The Lego metaphors allowed each member to really explain what they mean and how they felt about the issue and the models became a very visual and concrete reminder to the rest of the team as to how their colleagues thought and felt about what was being discussed. Customer Segments The next step was we simply worked through the elements of the canvas that we had identified as important. So for example we spent particular time on customer segments which was an area that we were struggling to get a handle on which segments were appropriate for the current business model and to get a feel for their relative importance amongst the team so we can test our hypothesis. Customer-Segments "Speed and ease of use" Again the team built models representing the segments they felt were most important, and interestingly each member of the team built a model representing a different segment. For example one of the team built a race car to signify that the medium sized business segment was all about speed and ease of use of the service. So when all the models were revealed it became instantly obvious that we all had different channels at the top of our mind. The next exercise involved us voting on the relative importance of the channels by using a finite number of bricks, this exercise was completed as a team and it forced us to discuss the relative importance of each of the channels and to trade between options with a clear small business segment rising up as the most important. This action now allowed us to see that the collective wisdom was that this channel was important to test and we then prioritised our experiment to prove or disprove this assumption that the small business channel was the one with the most potential. Scurri_landscape A Lego 3D version of the Canvas What to Tackle? An important point is that we also did not attempt to complete the full canvas but simply took the elements that we were having some difficulty with and the ones where we thought it was appropriate to work on. In the end we built out those elements in a landscape that attempted to show the scale and relative relationships between the models. This was done by simply placing the models we had created where it felt they made sense and where they related to each other whilst taking into consideration the elements and relationships of the canvas. The result was a very powerful 3D picture of our business model, built by the team where they all felt they had input, they had shared their insights and have a sense of real ownership of the results. More importantly we were quickly able to prioritise the next set of experiments that were required to test these hypothesis and the great thing was we had an unanimous agreement on what needed to be done. The workshop also brought the team closer together in sense of understanding of what needed to be done in order to prove or disprove the current business model. The Results So did the experiment work? Our initial workshop was very powerful, worthwhile and helped us a great deal to understand what the rest of the team was thinking. We got a greater alignment and a much stronger understanding of the business model element we were trying to put together. I think the Lego Serious Play / Lean Canvas mashup is a very powerful combination and is certainly well worth considering if you have the same issues. Lessons Learned: Using Lego Serious Play with the Lean Canvas is a powerful tool You must prepare well for the workshop It’s not necessary or perhaps even advisable to complete the canvas in the workshop The ROI is best realised when faced with complex and challenging issues Get an experienced facilitator to set you up with the LSP skills

Desarrollo Institucional de Fundación Brincar, por un autismo feliz

Así como maduran los frutos en la naturaleza, también lo hacen los procesos grupales que surgen del empuje del amor y la búsqueda de soluciones a dificultades que la vida presenta. La visión de dos personas convocó un buen grupo en pos de un mismo objetivo. Lentamente, fueron asumiendo y repartiendo responsabilidades, llevando a cabo acciones que no tardaron en recibir aprobación, seguidores y mayor demanda. Llegó entonces el momento de mirar hacia adentro y fortalecer el incipiente desarrollo institucional de la Fundación Brincar. Para ello, dedicaron tiempo y creatividad a profundizar en el propio reconocimiento, en el reconocimiento del otro y en la consolidación de sus vínculos. Confirmaron, de esa manera, las líneas de trabajo, lograron conformar equipos responsables de cada línea, y delinear un plan de acción. La tarea de reflexión personal se completó en un nuevo encuentro plenario, el que a través de un soporte metodológico, facilitó la visualización de la situación presente y su proyección en el tiempo. El trabajo, apenas acaba de empezar. Sin embargo, ya cuentan con varias herramientas que facilitarán cada nuevo paso a dar.

Desarrollo profesional SK

Profundizar en el conocimiento y comprensión de las propias capacidades, como punto de partida para definir futuros pasos. Preguntarse, y volver a preguntarse sobre el orden, el ritmo, la profundidad de esos pasos junto con los apoyos externos necesarios para darlos.

País Vasco: LSP e innovación

Curso Lego Serious Play Imagina el futuro, explora tu entorno y construye tus oportunidades utilizando la metodología LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP). LSP es una metodología de estrategia en tiempo real que permite comunicar ideas complejas de manera simple y concreta. LSP es un proceso de aprendizaje vivencial para crear nuevas formas de pensar y mejorar los resultados del negocio, perfeccionando el desempeño de las personas. LSP es, simple y llanamente, un lenguaje gráfico en 3 dimensiones. LSP está basado en investigaciones que han demostrado que los proceso de aprendizaje en los que se vincula a las manos con la mente generan una comprensión más significativa y profunda del mundo. Dirigido a: Directores de marketing, ventas, procesos, productos o servicios, emprendedores de nuevas y pequeñas empresas, científicos o innovadores en cualquier tipo de campo, estudiantes a punto de graduarse con interés en crear nuevas empresas, miembros de incubadoras, políticos y empleados del sector público del gobierno interesados en promover la innovación, miembros de las cámaras de comercio y profesores de materias duras (ciencia, tecnología, procesos, administración).

Taller de Desarrollo Personal LSP CSM y FH

Ingresar, casi jugando, en los curiosos caminos que se tejen entre lo profesional, lo personal, lo familiar. Observar sus puntos de contacto, su mutua interacción, lo inesperado. A partir de esa primera intuición, animarse a construir una realidad que soñamos, modificando el presente que nos puede resultar anodino, agotado. El trabajo de construcción con los ladrillos, nos lleva más allá de lo tangible y nos acerca el mundo del sentido profundo de las cosas, de la mano de la metáfora.

Taller de Desarrollo Personal AL

Un trabajo de autoconocimiento y autodescubrimiento basado en el juego. La posibilidad de construir un camino de transformación que pueda incidir en la transformación de nuestro posicionamiento ante lo que nos toca vivir. ¿Cómo colaboramos con nosotros mismos? ¿Cómo desarrollamos estrategias personales que nos lleven a cuidar de nosotros mismos? La metodología nos permite imaginar otro futuro posible y el camino adecuado para alcanzarlo.

En palabras del Master Trainer

“Necesitamos romper el pensamiento lineal” Per Kristiansen, instructor original del método Lego Serious Play.   Por Sebastián Vega M. 
Diversas son las metodologías para aumentar la productividad y el rendimiento empresarial, pero muy pocas usan el potencial creativo del juego. Lego Serious Play (LSP), por ejemplo, es un método que busca profundizar los procesos de reflexión y entrega de soluciones efectivas, diseñado especialmente para mejorar la innovación y el rendimiento de las organizaciones. A través de los famosos bloques de plástico desmontables que creara la compañía danesa Lego en la década del 30, LSP desbloquea las capacidades de las personas a través de workshops y talleres donde participan desde gerentes de rangos medios y altos, hasta jóvenes emprendedores de startups. 
“Lego Serious Play se basa en la creencia de que la gente es inteligente y lo que hacemos es desbloquear lo que hay en sus cabezas. Las personas necesitan hablar de lo que se les ha ocurrido para poder llegar a una solución nueva”, explica Per Kristiansen, uno de los dos instructores más importantes y originales de esta metodología en el mundo, de paso en la reciente 5° Bienal de Diseño realizada en Chile. “Necesitamos romper el pensamiento lineal, porque si sólo aplicas análisis y sigues un paradigma, entonces continúas hacia la misma dirección. Si logras liberar el conocimiento de todas estas personas, entonces ves caminos distintos y llegas a cosas distintas”, explica el experto. Impacto empresarial
 Los líderes o gerentes de compañías están permanentemente cerrando complejos negocios, implementando planes estratégicos y ejecutando un sinfín de tareas vinculadas al desarrollo de las firmas. Es en ese punto donde esta herramienta cobra mayor sentido. “Al final la gerencia se ve de una manera diferente, se abren las fronteras con esta metodología, se aprecian los productos desde otra óptica, no sólo tecnología, sino como una propuesta de valor”, puntualiza. 

Ejecutivos utilizan modelos de Lego para diseñar estrategias de negocios en Venezuela

Mantener al grupo enfocado, evitar que el lenguaje se preste para agresiones personales y el uso eficiente del tiempo son algunos de los retos de toda reunión dentro de una empresa. Cuando el objetivo del encuentro es fijar el plan de desarrollo para los próximos dos años o detectar las fallas de comunicación entre dos gerencias diferentes, sentar a los ejecutivos en una junta no parece el mecanismo más efectivo para encontrar la solución. Las empresas ahora apuestan por una fórmula más práctica. Reúnen a los equipos de trabajo en una sala, le presentan a un instructor y les entregan un tobo con 240 piezas de Lego y les piden armar un modelo tridimensional. “Lego Serious Play” (El juego serio de Lego en español) es el nombre de una nueva metodología que las empresas internacionales usan para tomar decisiones sobre los planes futuros del negocio y que en el país comienza a aplicarse para diagnosticar cómo los trabajadores entienden los objetivos y los procedimientos de la compañía. “Cuando se le pide a un equipo de trabajo que represente cómo está su empresa en un modelo 3D, lo que cada quien hace es abstracto y la única forma de entenderlo es que cada quien lo explique. La ventaja de la metodología es propiciar una nueva forma de comunicación a propósito de las maquetas que se arman con Lego. Se garantiza así la escucha del otro y eso ya es una enorme ganancia”, explicó el psicólogo Renzo Castillo, quien fue profesor universitario de la cátedra de Psicología del Aprendizaje y se acreditó en julio del año pasado como instructor de la nueva metodología. Lego Serious Play nació en el año 2002 dentro de la propia empresa danesa de Lego, cuando buscaba un nuevo rumbo para que sus juguetes pudieran competir en un mercado dominado por los videojuegos. La herramienta fue creada por Robert Rasmussen quien es psicólogo y cuenta con una maestría en educación de la Royal Danish School of Education de Copenhagen. En Venezuela, Alcance Consultores y Ludo Consult son las firmas de consultoría certificadas para desarrollar las sesiones con los ejecutivos. Citibank, Laboratorios Calox y Laboratorios MSD son algunas de las compañías que ya utilizado la metodología en el país con objetivos tan amplios como mejorar la integración de equipos de trabajo o diseñar una nueva estrategia de mercado. Entre los objetivos más comunes aparecen la comprensión común entre un grupo de trabajo sobre la situación actual de la compañía, el establecimiento de los principios de la empresa, el desarrollo de planes estratégicos o de comunicación, así como el desarrollo de un acuerdo entre la junta directiva sobre la dirección que debe seguir la empresa. Los fundamentos. La dinámica puede desarrollarse en los formatos de 4, 8 o 16 horas para un máximo de 20 participantes por sesión. Sin embargo, la herramienta necesita que se realice un proceso previo de diagnóstico para evaluar cuáles serán los modelos que se les pedirán a los ejecutivos construir durante la dinámica. La lógica detrás de la metodología no es que los ejecutivos jueguen o reduzcan sus niveles de stress con el kit Lego durante la sesión. Los dos principios básicos de la dinámica es que ningún liderazgo empresarial puede desarrollarse si no se escuchan e incorporan todas las voces del equipo de trabajo y que todo trabajador quiere naturalmente contribuir a mejorar su empresa. “Cuando se construye una maqueta de Lego se disparan una serie de procesos creativos que hacen más fácil la representación que con otros procesos formales como una matriz Dofa (debilidades y fortalezas) o un análisis de causa y efecto. La máxima es que la gente se deje guiar por sus manos para crear el modelo y así, una tortuga puede servir para representar la lentitud de los procesos administrativos dentro de una empresa”, detalló Luis Garmendia, quien es psicólogo, tiene 18 años de experiencia en consultoría empresarial y también es facilitador acreditado por Lego. Los resultados conseguidos con el uso de Lego Serious Play fueron tan positivos que ahora Google la utiliza para probar a sus candidatos para las gerencias, la Nasa para definir las misiones de sus equipos, Ebay para integrar a sus equipos de trabajo y otras compañías como Microsoft, Kraft Foods, Unilever, Ikea o Laboratorios Roche la aplican para establecer sus estrategias de negocios. Reglas de juego A la hora de implementar Lego Serious Play dentro de las empresas casi siempre afloran tres perfiles de ejecutivos muy distintos: los jugadores de Lego que se muestran confiados, los descreídos que les gusta Lego pero son cautos sobre su utilización en el mundo empresarial y los escépticos que en principio creen que se trata de una total pérdida de tiempo. Los instructores de la metodología, por eso, incluyen una explicación básica sobre cuál es la dinámica antes de empezar. La primera aclaratoria suele ser que la sesión es no para que los gerentes demuestren sus capacidades manuales, lo que importa es la representación de la empresa y no la calidad de la maqueta armada con los Lego. Otra de las reglas de juego fundamentales es que los ejecutivos se refieran siempre al modelo y no, sobre personas específicas o experiencias pasadas, porque eso desata tensiones en la sala.

Architects-to-be play with LEGO

The Video is cilp taken from one of the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY workshop I run at the University of Ferrara, Faculty of Architecture in November 2012. Students taking part to the workshop are currently working on a course project on Heritage; their main focus is Ahmedabad Heritage Walk (India). The aim of the workshop was to create a team out of the group of individuals working together and to lay the foundations for their collective work. To achieve this students engaged in a classic LSP workshop: they were first asked to define what Heritage is by building an individual LEGO model of their personal concept. Each student built their own vision and shared it with others. Sharing individual models and ideas let differences emerge: it came out that though they were all working and researching around the same topic, their individual perceptions, their focus, their ideas were very different: some students focused on the time dimension, others have seen heritage as coming from a relationship between present and past, others have highlighted the confusion and chaotic dimension related to the idea of Heritage, and others focused on the subjects who perceive, define and socially construct the concept of Heritage. A number of bright ideas had been discussed by the students in the three hours length workshop and at the end they were asked to build a shared model: after each of them presented their personal idea, after discussing and investigating the individual models, the group was asked to become a team by building a single shared model. Students have taken their individual models, have negotiated their visions, their ideas, their concepts and they come out with a new model. The new model is simply a shared knowledge literally constructed and agreed by all participants and that final model represents the new roadmap of their project. This is a clip of what happened… (Video is in Italian with English Subtitles) A big thank you to the Faculty of Architecture at University of Ferrara, to the professors and students who allowed this experience and who engaged in this experience.