Back in the beginning of July Kate Butcher and I attended a “Ready your Rebels” workshop in Bournemouth, the day started at 5.30am aided by lots of coffee (I’m in no way a morning person, but it did mean the M25 was clear which was not the case on the way home!) I arrived to find some delicious pastries and to learn that ‘Serious Play Lego Practitioner’ is a real career option, they didn’t tell us that at school!  The idea behind Lego serious play is that if we have deeper more concrete experiences then we are more likely to retain that information.  

After the usual introductions we got stuck into building our Lego, the main task of the morning was to work with others on your table and use the Lego to explore how we can unlock innovation whilst thinking about a particular theme. Our table thought about unlocking innovation by harnessing positive energy.  

We set about building the below masterpiece, some of the core components we included were:  

• Flags – to demonstrate sign posting and championing to create a positive culture.  
• Ladders and bridges – to represent ways into getting involved in the journey.  
• Circular shape – to demonstrate continuous engagement. 

We discussed that people don’t always get onboard with the vision for change immediately, so we need to make sure we support them on those journeys. We also talked about using feedback mechanisms to harness ideas and positivity from people, as well as sharing success in line with real life stories to make it tangible and accessible, with success then becoming aspirational. The circular shape represented to need to loop around to encourage and support those who did some on the initial push with us (their heads may be spinning like our Lego man with a spin top on his head) and highlight the good that is being achieved. 

The other tables had different topics including unlocking innovation when operating within traditional processes/structures, unlocking innovation by empowering middle management and unlocking innovation through communities, diversity and inclusion.  

I left the session thinking about how we could use the insight gained from the day when designing the Continuous Improvement Forum particularly about how we could make the CI portal interactive to gather feedback and the importance of making sure we share real life outcomes of the ideas that progress through the CI Forum.