Externalising...

Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking about ways to help people get ideas out of their heads and into playable forms and media.

Conversations with people trying to discuss what's in their heads can be really hard.

It's one of the reasons why I've played with cards for many years now, whether John V Willshire's wonderful Artefact Cards, colourful blank canvases that can be used with individuals and groups to get stuff out of heads and onto a tabletop, or my own Meerkat Cards.

A couple of weeks ago, I added a new technique to my toolkit—Lego Serious Play—courtesy of Amale Ghalbouni 's Brick Coach course.

I've previously been a bit sniffy about LSP, but I put my reservations aside to join the two-half-day program. I think my sniffiness comes from using the word "serious." Why do we need to make everything "serious?"

As it turns out, whilst the technique can certainly shortcut to some serious conversations, there is an inherent playfulness involved and very few "rules". You use some Lego bricks to build metaphorical representations of your world. You can then point at things (and, indeed, move them around) to explain your field of view.

It's remarkably simple and remarkably effective in eliciting perspectives that would otherwise remain unsaid. It becomes easier to talk about things if you point at an object and explain what it is rather than trying to dredge that description out of your head.

It is a physical technique, though, so using it in geographically distributed circumstances requires a fair bit of pre-planning (Amale had sent all of us packs of bricks in advance). That pre-planning isn't always available to us.

That is why last week, I also refreshed myself on a similar technique, Rich Pictures, which my dad introduced me to many years ago. It was originally coined by Peter Checkland as part of Soft Systems Methodology. Still, other than its slightly fancy name, Rich Pictures are little more than sketch notes—doodles, diagrams, arrows, and labels used to describe a particular circumstance, much as LSP does but in two dimensions.

However, in the era of Miro, where icons and clip art are but a search away, the online version of Rich Pictures overcomes the common hurdle of people saying, "I can't draw." You no longer need to that talent to compose engaging and valuable Rich Pictures.

The problem space a colleague and I examined was complex, and drawing out the picture was messy. But by mutually having something to point at and move about, we progressed our joint understanding much more quickly than if we'd just talked or tried to represent it using a more formal technique.

It's easy to fear breaking out the Lego bricks or opening up a new virtual whiteboard. But without helping people externalise ideas, collaboration can be immensely slow. Finding ways that work in the context of our increasingly complicated ways of working and having a trusty toolbox of techniques to play with is more important now than ever.