Hold onto the brick

T+D, May, 2003

LEGO--yes, the toys--has brought play and, therefore, engagement to adult learning by way of the imagination of this corporate CEO, professor, and researcher.

Remember the Lonely Guy, Bart Victor exhorts trainers and meeting facilitators. It may not necessarily be a guy, but you know the one--the person in every meeting and training session who isn't engaged, who sits there thinking: This isn't for me. Why am I here?

"The ultimate source of all value for organizations is the human imagination," says Victor. "Unengaged people equal loss of value." Why do so many people remain unengaged, disinterested, bored? "The chronic issue is the ways we create and conduct these meetings. We don't allow people to be fully a part of what's going on."

To engage the Lonely Participant, consider the value of play. Play has three characteristics, says Victor: It engages the imagination, it has special rules, and its object is nor to produce something but to transform. To that end, Victor says, even budgeting is much more like play than work. Why? Because it has its own special rules. It involves imagining how the year is going to go (projecting the future), and it's "not about the direct value of the effort. No one ever paid more for a product or service because there was a budget attached to it."

But why is budgeting often a waste of time? Because it's very bad play, says Victor. "Budgeting has poor materials and is conducted in the language of accountancy. It doesn't engage the participants." Further, budgeting violates a cardinal rule of good play: "It isn't safe, it's very mysterious. One is unable to fully explore the possibilities due to the risk involved."

Victor devised his theories regarding work and play as early as 1996, when he was conducting research on corporate strategy, values, and ethics at the Institute for Management Development International in Lausanne, Switzerland. He and a colleague were called in to work with Denmark's famed LEGO corporation, which was undergoing a transformation and renewal process. Victor saw the work with LEGO as an opportunity to field-test some of his research findings. "We applied our questions and interests to the problems at LEGO, and tried to apply them to that specific context." They did that, in part, by using the company's own product.

"We started experimenting with LEGO and using the bricks as a three-dimensional idiomatic language," Victor explains. In doing so, "we developed a process better suited to engaging the collective imagination--creating a shared mind that resulted in a collective intent."

The key to that successful process of experimentation, exploration, and practice lay in allowing participants to use one wonderful tool that trainers the world over often neglect--their hands. "Our minds aren't file cabinets," Victor explains. "They're disorganized networks of impressions, insights, senses, knowledge, and so forth. Using our hands enables us to put those disorganized elements together." Indeed, 70 percent of the human brain is connected to the hands. Yet, thinks Victor, many training sessions direct participants to figuratively, if not literally, sit on their hands.

Recognizing the potential of that process, Victor lobbied Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, LEGO's CEO, to examine that potential and bring a LEGO-facilitated program to market. As a result, Kristiansen formed two organizations: Executive Discovery, of which Victor is CEO, and the Imagination Lab, a not-for-profit research foundation that investigates adult play at work. "We want to make sure that our activities are grounded in research," Victor notes.

Early in 2002, Executive Discovery officially launched its first product--LEGO Serious Play. The company doesn't sell directly to clients but focuses its efforts on training and certifying consultants who deliver the program to clients. "We don't believe it's the answer to everyone's problems," says Victor. "We believe it's an important addition to a consultant's portfolio of services." Thus far, nearly 200 consultants have taken the three- to four-day course.

As CEO, Victor supervises Executive Discovery's virtual staff of 10, who are leased from LEGO. He maintains the U.S. sales and marketing office in Nashville, where he also serves as the Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University and director of the Cal Turner Program in Moral Leadership Across the Professions. How has his experience with LEGO changed his classroom style? "Your hands are designed to help your brain. You should use them," he says. "I give my students LEGOs in class, and encourage them to doodle and fiddle."

One of Serious Play's main goals is to help companies and their employees understand the organization's "simple guiding principles." Executive Discovery has a few of its own:

* Learning face-to-face is better.

* Remember to ask why.

* Tip the sacred cows.

* Build trust.

"We take our own medicine at least once a quarter and always use LEGO principles when we talk to each other," says Victor. Executive Discovery takes its relationship with the Danish firm seriously, as evidenced in this guiding tenet: Hold onto the brick. As the only company licensed to use the LEGO brand in a product for adults, Victor says, that statement is "a reminder to ourselves about the value. The worst thing we could do is violate the values of the brand."