At Gennova last week, we continued our storytelling theme. Our guest was Robert Rasmussen, one of the main architects of Lego’s Serious Play. I’m hopeless with construction toys and score very low on spatial abilities (I failed Johnson O’Connor’s Wiggly Blocks test), but even I got it that there’s something very powerful once you get your hands to think for you. As Robert puts it, the hands unite the right and left sides of the brain which have been traditionally separated. They have, he says, “their own intelligence” and are better connected to what we really know. (I did wonder at this point whether the fact that my hands have been connected, pretty much 8 hours a day for over 30 years to a computer keyboard, has pretty much wired me away from visual thinking).

The session led us all into serious reflection about what is present for us in our lives right now, things that are not completely clear, and validated some of the insights about Serious Play:

• Playing with blocks (and the Serious Play kits are specifically designed to include elements that support this kind of investigation) “makes new pathways in the brain” that you can later follow. That is, it opens up thinking in new ways.
• Serious play lets everyone in a group be 100% present in contributing to a problem. Everyone works on their own construct, and then the conversations that follow start the flow of ideas and cross-connections. This is better than the traditional brainstorming because traditional brainstorming requires listening to others and that takes away from active creativity.
• Working with the hands means that you are not “having a meeting with yourself” and over thinking a problem when the answer can emerge from the play
• The hands “act as a search engine”

Serious Play is a serious way to tap into collective intelligence, giving people equal time to find what is deep inside their own heads and sharing what emerges with others.