NEWSROOM

LEGO Serious Play workshops on offer

Staff of the University of Auckland are invited to contact the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to run LEGO Serious Play workshops for their staff or students. In particular, Unleash Space staff are interested in facilitating the use of LEGO Serious Play in curricula.

LEGO Serious Play was founded by Swiss professors in the 1990s. It is a method of facilitation that can be used to explore a huge variety of topics such as innovation, values, team culture and processes. Staff at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship are accredited LEGO Serious Play facilitators and are able to facilitate workshops for staff and students at the University.

Programme Manager Jenna Ash says “The method allows for deeper and more meaningful thinking and supports great dialogue. The physical element means that everyone can contribute to the conversation”. So far workshops have been run with students participating in Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship programmes, academic staff in the Business School and professional staff in the Faculty of Science to facilitate team conversations about improving collaboration.

The academic framework for LEGO Serious Play is supported by use of the LEGO kits. As well as free form LEGO, a second option for workshops are those based around the LEGO EV3 robots kits. The kits consist of the equipment to build, design and programme robot creations. Jenna explains that “The EV3 kits are best used as simulations to foster creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication as team work. For example, Doug Sparks, visiting lecturer from the Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business, University of Waterloo, ran a simulation where entrepreneurial teams had to ‘tender’ for a project of building a rover to land on mars. Working in their teams they had to design the robots to meet the scope, price the designs, deal with last minute changes to the scope, manage client relationships and build alliances with other teams”.

Professional Teaching Fellow Audrea Warner is one of the University’s LEGO Serious Play facilitators and encourages staff to take the opportunity to engage with students in dialogue in this novel way. “I myself have used LEGO Serious Play with my Masters students to help them understand the complexities of mergers and acquisitions in International Human Resource Management. This hands-on learning produces deeper and more enriched conversations than merely discussing cases in class.”

To register your interest in running a LEGO Serious Play workshop, please get in touch with staff at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at hello@unleashspace.ac.nz