Seeing with your hands

From the Executive Discovery archive: a 2002 strategy workshop in Scotland, and what it taught us about a method that supposedly depends on sight.

It began with one of the shortest emails ever to arrive in the Executive Discovery inbox.

"I am interested in Serious Play and, can you help. Thanks, Sam."

That was the whole thing. Dated 18 July 2002. We received all sorts of enquiries in those years, but something about this one held our attention, so we replied with the obvious question: yes, we can help, what is your interest?

What followed was a string of short emails, then a phone call, then a meeting eleven days later. Slowly it became clear that someone was seriously interested in how strategy could be developed with LEGO® bricks. What it would take. What it would cost. How long it would run.

The phone call went the way those calls usually go. We explained the method, how a workshop unfolds, what the commercial model looked like. The voice at the other end sounded interested, then raised the first obstacle: she represented a charity, and a charity could not pay consulting rates. That one we could work with, Executive Discovery ran a small number of pro bono workshops each year.

Then she raised the second obstacle, and it was not one we had met before.

"Great. What you should know is that we work for a certain group of people with a disability, and we share that disability. We are blind."

The objection we made ourselves

That threw us off balance, and we said so.

One of the things we had always claimed for LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is that you can see it. You build your identity, you set it in a landscape, you walk around the table and take a different angle, and the model shows you something the conversation had hidden. Sight seemed close to load-bearing.

Her reply settled the matter in one sentence.

"But we do see. We see with our hands. This is exactly why this would be so perfect."

Point taken.

Why they needed it

Ethnic Enable was a charity working with visually impaired people in Glasgow. It had existed for about a year. It had its first successes behind it, was growing, and could plausibly attract more funding.

It also had four problems that a strategy workshop was unusually well suited to.

Sight. Most strategy tools depend on it. That limitation gets worse, not better, when blind and sighted colleagues need to share an understanding — the artefacts that let sighted people align are exactly the artefacts that exclude everyone else in the room.

Distance. The team worked out of different locations, from Glasgow to London, mostly part-time, with no shared office. Alignment does not survive that on goodwill. They needed a shared set of meanings that would hold when nobody was in the same room.

Vocabulary. Of the whole group, one person had a business background. The others had none of the language — no agents, no forces, no way to name what was happening to them. That gap was quietly limiting everything they tried to do.

Complexity. Growth had made the organisation harder to hold in one head. Most of the members felt things were getting more tangled and less legible, without being able to say precisely how.

So we went for a Real Time Strategy workshop with the core group: eight people, half of them visually impaired.

What we changed, and what we didn't

Less than you would expect.

The sighted participants received Imaginopedia workbooks as usual. For the Metaphor Challenge, the options were built in advance and passed around rather than displayed. Through the rest of the process, skills building, identity, landscape, connections, models were circulated by hand before each story was told, so that everyone had met the model before they heard about it.

That was essentially the whole adaptation. Emergence and Simple Guiding Principles ran without modification of any kind.

Skills building went normally. More than normally: there was little or no difference in building skill between the visually impaired and the sighted participants. The strongest builder in the room was a visually impaired LEGO enthusiast.

The identity models exposed how differently people saw the organisation, which is the usual and useful result, and it arrived on schedule. The shared model emerged through a lively argument. Once the key elements had been identified, the building was split: sighted participants built while narrating aloud everything their hands were doing; visually impaired participants built from a precise memory of the individual models, and read the shared model back with their fingers. Metaphors locked in fast and kept being invoked, the camel's head chief among them.

The step ended with everyone seeing the model, with eyes or with hands, and the story being told. It was an extraordinary moment in the room.

Agents and connections followed the same route, and turned into the most heated business discussion of the two days, where each agent belonged, how strong each connection was, what was actually acting on them. This was the step that handed the group the strategy language it had needed and lacked. Empowerment is close to a platitude in a management context. These were empowered people.

By the time the model was finished, an outsider walking into the room would have had no way of telling that it had largely been built by people who could not see it.

What happened afterwards

This is the part that matters, and the part that is easy to skip.

The model stayed with one of the participants, sometimes partly taken apart. The limiting forces the group had identified were worked on immediately. And then the landscape kept doing work, month after month:

Decisions got made in the language of the model. Their group of volunteers kept causing problems that nobody could resolve. Revisiting the agent on the landscape, it became obvious that this was not one agent at all, it was two, with different connections and different characteristics. So they split the brick model in two: this is really how it looks. Handled as two agents, the problem dissolved.

Decisions got validated against the Simple Guiding Principles.

Meeting agendas came from the landscape. Two people would be asked to analyse a particular agent or connection further and bring it back to the team.

Induction ran through the model. Every new core group member and volunteer was walked through the Identity and the Landscape, as the fastest route into understanding the organisation and its strategy.

And the bricks travelled. Team members took LEGO into their own workplaces and used it to talk about business with sighted colleagues.

After roughly nine months it was time to revisit. The organisation had grown, the core group had grown with it, and some of the most senior members wanted to hand over parts of their responsibility. Success had also put strain on how the team worked together. So a second workshop was planned: skills building for the new members, then a full rebuild, a completely new identity, the old agents placed and rebuilt, new agents and connections added, emergence played out again, leading to Team Wisdom and a fresh set of Simple Guiding Principles.

What we took from it

Two things, and the second one took longer to understand than the first.

The first is practical. The method needs hands and it needs imagination. It does not need eyes. If you are ever asked whether LSP can work with visually impaired participants, the answer is yes, and the adaptations are small: build the metaphor options in advance, and pass every model around before its story is told.

The second is about what the method is actually doing. We had been telling clients for years that the strength of LSP is that you can see your strategy. That was never quite right. The strength is that the strategy becomes external and physical, something that exists in the room, that several people can touch at once, that stays put when the conversation moves on and can be picked up again nine months later.

Sight is one way to reach that. It is not the only one, and it turned out not to be the important one.

"But we do see. We see with our hands."

Ethnic Enable was a charity supporting visually impaired people in Glasgow. The workshop described here took place in 2002 and was facilitated by Per Kristiansen and Bart Victor , the academic who was part of developing LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and served as part-time CEO of Executive Discovery, the LEGO spin-off that managed and developed the method.