LEGO® Serious Play® Workshops
We already gamify student learning and leverage game-based applications to help students communicate and gain institutional knowledge, so why do we avoid play in our workplace? Research shows play - with a purpose - in our work creates greater motivation, buy-in, innovation, and productivity.
Our LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® workshops and presentations can help engage your whole team to unlock knowledge, find creativity, and disrupt the normal strategy sessions that are normally filled with white boards, sticky notes, icebreakers, and trait-based assessments that seem to dominate the landscape of education and non-profit arenas. Let us help you have fun with seriously unique outcomes!
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®
Dr. Dickson is a trained facilitator in the methods of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and has over 20 years in higher education administration. Using this unique model of democratic engagement, storytelling, and three dimensional metaphors, he can work with your teams on identify strategy development, action planning, teamwork, communication, and more. Dr. Dickson can work with your needs to design workshops for groups of any size and from a few hours to several days.
popular Workshops
All workshops are adaptable to meet the needs of your group. Some of our more popular sessions include:
Team Building: helping teams understand everyone's role and how you come together - great for new teams and new initiatives
Build a Better Student Experience Workshops: improving student experiences and designing ideal systems for supporting students
Vision, Mission, and Goals Workshops: creating a shared vision and major milestones toward your goals
Workplace Improvement and Engagement Workshops: burnout and policy/procedure auditing to improve morale
Student Voice Workshops: identifying, formalizing and engaging students in operations and decisions
First-Generation Student Experience Workshops: improving the first-generation student experience and reducing barriers
Support Services Improvement Workshops: addressing sludge, processes that create barriers to progression, designing the ideal system of support for students
What is it? How does it work?
GROUNDED IN RESEARCH: Serious Play® was developed by an organizational theorist and a business professor (Roos and Victor) as a methodology for engaging in team building, strategy development, communications, and vision, mission, and goal planning while using play. Building on research from Piaget, Vygotsky, Montessori, and others, this method was tested and designed to bring play into our work to enhance learning and creativity.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE: As humans we learn by doing, by using our hands. We learn through play. We learn how to follow rules, to build new skills, to socialize with others, to take risks, and create new ideas. This process is play with a purpose and core to this method.
COMPLEXITY AND INSIGHTS: LEGO® was brought into the equation later and serves as a vehicle through which the play occurs. It allows us to create knowledge outside ourselves through visual models. These models serve as metaphors for complex ideas and allows us to better sense making of dynamic and complicated systems.
DISRUPTIVE: The process is a disruptive model. It gets us away from sticky notes, white boards, and over-used business models based on over-generalized inventories of individual traits.
ENGAGING: Ultimately, it is a highly engaging and democratic process. Everyone is engaged at each step. Everyone builds. Everyone shares their story of their build. Through the use of story telling, everyone builds a model, tells their story about their model, works with the team to build consensus models, and everyone shares their understanding of the consensus model. Everyone engages in every step of the process.
Build a better Student Experience Workshops
A featured exercise, the 'Build a Better Student Experience' workshop is designed to explore strategies around the student experience with intention. This workshop is specifically designed for staff in Student Affairs and student support units like advising, career counseling, undergraduate research, student leadership programs, and more.
ViSIon and Mission Workshops
Our vision and mission workshops are designed to help you explore the core values and purpose behind your work. Everyone in the group will engage in designing a shared understanding and developing shared goals for the future.
Burnout and work Engagement
A major issue in higher education and non-profits, burnout and turnover greatly impact the work experience and those we serve.
Our sessions are designed to help organizations explore the issues impacting employee burnout and help design a more frustration-free work experience. We will explore the ideal work environment and stress-test various scenarios to identify small, medium, and large changes to improve our workplaces and retain talent.
teambuilding and Communication
These workshops are designed to explore team dynamics and communication. Whether your team is well established or newly formed, we can explore your current model, the best and worst aspects, and identify the ideal model of collaboration, teamwork, and communication. We will work through scenarios to identify potential changes to enhance teamwork and communication.
First-Generation Student Experience
The First-Generation Student Experience' workshop is designed to explore strategies around the first-generation student experience. We will explore student navigation, cultural capital, institutional capital, and the ideal model for your students' experience.
Student Voice
Do you truly know how students perceive your institution, your program, or their experience? The Student Voice workshop series explores the best and worst aspects of the student experience, explores student needs, and helps generate new methods to improve student perceptions and experiences.