Chapter 3
Defining Serious Play
The next important habitat in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® territory is play—but not just any play, serious play. This kind of play has an explicit purpose and is done in a particular way. This chapter provides an explanation of what we mean by this kind of play. We'll give examples of play with a purpose and define what we mean by serious play.
The first thing we must carve in stone is that serious play is “play with an explicit purpose.” That purpose is to address a real issue for the participants around the table by getting them to lean forward, unlock knowledge, and break habitual thinking.
It is not frivolous play; it is not taking a break from work, and it is something subtly different from many other important kinds of play in which lots of learning also is involved (for more on play, different kinds of play, and ways of categorizing them, see Chapter 10).
Introduction to Play
We should probably make it clear that most play is anything but frivolous. Even the kinds in which we partake when we're young typically have some sort of developmental purpose, even though this purpose typically is not explicitly stated.
The implicit developmental purposes of play are as numerous as its subcategories. We are not going to go into all of these here. What is far more helpful is for us to present how Johan Huizinga in his groundbreaking book Homo Ludens defined what play is and what it does for children: “An activity is playful if it is: 1. Fully absorbing, 2. Intrinsically motivated, 3. Includes elements of uncertainty, or surprise, and 4. If it involves a sense of illusion or exaggeration.” Huizinga explains, “Play comes from an innate propensity to imitate, to relieve accumulated stress, or to prepare and exercise for more serious functional actions.”1 Examples here could be a child building with LEGO bricks; the child is typically fully absorbed and intrinsically motivated to build something, possibly reflecting a personal experience; the uncertainty could be related to if or how it will be possible to complete the construction; and often LEGO construction exaggerates the qualities of what it is meant to represent, and/or it is an illusion as it represents an imaginary world (e.g., where the child is a farmer).2
Dr. Stuart Brown, the founder and head of the National Institute for Play, Carmel Valley, California, makes this point as well: “Play is our natural way of adapting and developing new skills. It is what prepares us for emergence, and keeps us open to serendipity, to new opportunities. It prepares us for ambiguity.”3 Thus, play is our natural response; it helps us adapt and become resilient, and keeps us open to new opportunities—exactly the same qualities one would want to bring to the boardroom.
Clearly, there is more involved in the process of play. And while children's play is an important developmental activity, children do not explicitly choose play to develop their skills, their competencies, or solutions to a challenge that they are facing. They're simply doing it to have fun, and because it comes so naturally to them. But does it come as naturally to adults? We will return to play in Chapter 10, but for now we will use this short outline as a stepping-stone into the concept of serious play. We will later, in Chapter 10, take up this thread again.
Serious Play Defined
Progressing from the broader sense of play via playing with a purpose, we define serious play by three key characteristics:
- It is an intentional gathering to apply the imagination.
- It is exploring and preparing, not implementing.
- It follows a specific set of rules or language.
Intentional Gathering to Apply the Imagination
Participants plan the meeting and mutually agree that its purpose is to apply their imaginations to a real issue in order to develop a solution. It might be to an existing problem, or it could be a desired new state; so the goal is to close either a performance gap or an opportunity gap.
The participants know that they will be engaging their imaginations—that is, their ability to form a mental image of something that does not yet exist—in order to see things that have not happened yet. They're exploring a possible and plausible state or seeing the current reality in a different way and understanding its complexity and uncertainty in a different way.
They may deliberately do this to challenge and undo what is or simply to form a new and shared understanding.
This characteristic is clearly seen in, for example, scenario development.
Exploring and Preparing, Not Implementing
The participants are free to imagine many different things during the play process. They explore different paths, zigzag, and find what does and does not work. Many of the things that are proposed will remain merely ideas; others will be carried into action. But action isn't the point of the process; imagining is.
The participants engage in play in order to learn, generate options, and develop new understandings together. A serious play process may lead to a new vision or a business model. To achieve this, participants explore many versions. They end up with one shared model by the end of the play—the model that will guide them in making decisions about who to partner with, how to make investments, and other details about what steps to take going forward. This was, for example, what happened for Scurri, the Irish Internet start-up in Chapter 1 that used its results from a Business Model Canvas workshop to focus on a new customer segment, and to work with a different group of partners to reach that segment. In that chapter, we also mentioned how most organizations compete in complex adaptive systems, and that these are unpredictable and can be understood only by observing how they respond to events. The process of playing seriously can help do this; it makes it possible for the participants to play out events in their landscape, which is a play version of probing their complex adaptive system, thereby making it possible to make sense of the system.
Therefore, the value is partly in the process that led the participants to it, and partly in how it prepares the participants for making better decisions. It gives them guidance and direction, sometimes opening up new paths to explore.
We can clearly see this characteristic in war games. Obviously, participants are not directly engaged in a war; so in terms of war and/or security being their product, they are not implementing the war activities. But they are undertaking a process that prepares them for making better decisions, that aligns their goals and action points, and that creates new learning. Similarly, the architects are not actually building the house; they are exploring what it could look like, how the people who live in it could interact with it, and what materials would be best to build it.
We can also apply a metaphor inspired by physics to explain this: the purpose of serious play is to create potential energy. This then becomes kinetic energy when the team members implement it—when they literally put it to work. Serious play generates the kind of energy that has a significant impact on a person, team, or organization when goals are realized. But one can create this potential energy only if the process is real, it is intensive, and it involves the right organizational issue.
Hence, when decisions are made, the group must explicitly agree to make decisions when it is time to do so. This intentionality is one of the things that make serious play distinct from children's play. It is also what makes serious play risk free. It creates the time and space in which employees can challenge strongly held beliefs and modi operandi that they might not otherwise be able to. It is therefore an essential element in breaking habitual thinking.
Specific Set of Rules or Language
When imagining, participants must follow a specific set of rules or language. This helps break the pattern of normal thinking and encourages participants to use their imaginations freely. They're able to immerse themselves in exploring possibilities rather than having to worry about making decisions. Most of us are conditioned to believe that we must make decisions as quickly and as early in the process as possible. Therefore, it takes a rather robust language system to break this, and help or even force the continued exploration and imagination phase.
This language helps create the space in which it is safe to imagine and challenge. The notion of the specific rules or language is very clear in the example of budgeting later in this chapter; similarly, there are clear rules and words to use when we create strategies or engage in war games. Strategy discussions, for example, may include terms like blue oceans, must-win battles, core competencies, and competitive advantage, and rules like a must-win battle has to “make a real difference,” “be market focused,” “create excitement,” “be specific and tangible,” and “be winnable”; and that before even looking at the must-win battle, one first has to “assess starting conditions” and “open windows.” We will return to the specific rules of the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method in Chapter 10.
The three characteristics listed on page 40 set serious play apart from work, and provide a clear distinction. The listed characteristics are also part of making serious play distinct from children's play. Nevertheless, play aficionados will undoubtedly find that the three characteristics are inspired by Roger Caillois.4 We will return to serious play and children's play in Chapter 10.
Keeping this definition of serious play in mind, it should be clear that the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method is not a training tool. One does not meet to imagine something that one of the participants already knows and only needs to convey to you.
Rather, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a thinking, communication, and problem-solving approach for topics that are real for the participants.
Play with a Purpose
When adults look to play as way to solve a specific developmental need, then it is meaningful to undertake play with a purpose. As mentioned, this purpose should be explicit and agreed upon between the participants before starting the play activity.
We see this kind of play often in organizations, a number of examples of which are outlined in the following pages. All of these examples have characteristics of serious play—not LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, but serious play as a play activity. Some of these examples might be surprising. We would argue that this is because the use of play has been challenged by conventional understandings of “work versus play” for a number of years.
The Army and War Games
Most armies in the world use elements of play, either when developing their soldiers or when cultivating war tactics and strategies prior to engaging in battle. Often different military interventions are played out before the individuals involved choose a final approach. Interestingly, the war room and the related vocabulary are widely used in business as metaphors. The war room is where the management team or a task force go to develop plans for “conquering new territory,” “surviving in the market,” or “winning”—that is, a place and activities that help the organization become better, not actually doing the actions.
Architects
Architects typically construct, test, and play with representations of the building or space they are creating.
Pilots
It is very hard to imagine anyone wanting to put a pilot in a plane without having him or her having built experience in a flight simulator. Such simulators help the pilots practice their flying and decision making in a playful and purposeful manner.
Strategy Making
Robust classic strategy making and strategy plans exhibit many traits of playing with a purpose. During the development process, participants imagine what markets they could potentially enter; what products, experiences, or propositions they might offer, and what each would cost; and how competitors, clients, and suppliers would respond.
Strictly speaking, the plan itself may not be part of the play. Rather, it's something one could almost see as the rule book that is generated based on what participants learn during the strategy-making process. This is one reason why companies and individuals must be nimble and willing to change plans regularly. For example, if your competitors respond in a completely different way than you imagined, then by definition the plan is also flawed—since everything that comes after this will play out differently. This relates to what President Eisenhower meant when he said that “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”
Scenario Planning/Development
In scenario development, participants meet to create narratives of a set of plausible futures, in order to use these to improve decision making. The narratives are typically developed using a very specific set of rules (process) and a unique language. While the scenarios themselves are clearly products of imagination and have no value in and of themselves, they help participants create knowledge that they can use in decision making. They also allow everyone involved to develop insights that will help them see subtle changes they might not otherwise have seen.
Budgeting
Finally, there is budgeting, which is likely not an activity that most people associate with play. However, when we take a closer look, we notice that the activities involved in the ideal budgeting process clearly exhibit some of the qualities that define play with a purpose, and are linked very closely to the three defining characteristics of serious play. The clearly and explicitly defined purpose is to imagine what can be produced and sold, and where it can be produced and sold, not actually to produce, buy, or sell anything. In budgeting, participants typically imagine what the organization is going to produce or deliver in a given time frame, and what kind of investments it would require. So, it follows the first and second characteristics of serious play. Finally, the participants in the budgeting process follow the very specific language of numbers and accounting, and rules about how things add up and for which period this is relevant. This is not a language or set of rules that most managers use in other contexts, which makes it fit with the third characteristic of serious play.
Of course, budgeting does not always follow the steps of serious play. It's often corrupted to represent something very different (e.g., competing for resources or setting oneself up to succeed). However, budgeting in its purest form can be categorized as serious play.
Resources
Below we mention a number of books as well as a website that describe processes that demonstrate serious play characteristics:
- The army and war games: Pax Ludens, www.paxludens.org/
- Strategy making: Playing to Win by A. G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin (Harvard Business School Publishing, 2013); Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt (Crown Business, 2011); Must-Win Battles by Peter Killing and Thomas Malknight with Tracey Keys (Prentice Hall, 2006)
- Scenario planning/development: The Sixth Sense by Kees van der Heijden et al. (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), Scenarios by Kees van der Heijden (John Wiley & Sons, 2nd ed., 2005), and Transformative Scenario Planning by Adam Kahane (Berrett-Koehler, 2012)
The need, the LEGO brick, and the concept of serious play are all essential elements in what comes together as the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method. We will now turn to what it is that defines the method.