In #coachbetter episode, Kim chats with Joel Birch, Certified Facilitator and Pro Trainer of LEGO Serious Play.

Joel is such a pro at bringing fun, humor, creativity and play into his work. Just being in his orbit helps lighten the mood and start seeing creative possibilities you might not have noticed before. This episode is all about how to bring that kind of energy to your work – even if you’re a type A “non-creative” like me!

In this episode, Joel and Kim are talking about

the power of play to develop relationships
how to structure the implementation of play (for type-A personalities)
the impact of bringing play into a work environment
the kind of environment needed to embrace play
how informal leaders can bring play to their work
what can go wrong when you experiment with play at work

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Show Notes

Tell us about your experience as an educator. Where did you start? Where are you now? How did you get to where you are now?

Began in the primary school classroom, taught junior & middle primary, you get really good at using fun things to sneak important topics up on the people in front of you. Even though I’m not in schools anymore, very little has changed.

Lego Serious Play facilitator: to solve complex problems, communicate better, understand things inside their own head from multiple angles

We know relationships are essential in any team environment. What are some key ways that you see humor and play developing relationships – on teams, or on an individual level?

Humor and play creates a spark and becomes a social lubricant. Lets you shake things up a bit. Australians don’t take ourselves too seriously with an accompanying irrreverance to authority. Helps us conspire with each other to punch up. Vaccinating effect against anyone taking themselves too seriously.

Play vs doing things playfully

Doing things playfully lowers the stakes attached to what you’re doing, with the stakes lowered, it allows you to detach your sense of ego (and open a sense of possibility), doesn’t demand an urgent decision. Because the stakes are low, ego is in low gear, can be a really great way to play with uncertainty because initially whatever you’re dealing with doesn’t seem like a big deal.

As you build the muscle of dealing with uncertainty, lets you become more comfortable with uncertainty,

Play: make it a mindset

How would someone who is more structured make time for this?

Make time for it, make a box for doing some things to help you with uncertainty.

As that box becomes more comfortable, whatever happens in that box is by itself helping you spill out of it.

Thinking about leadership in general, what kind of impact does bringing fun & play into a working environment?

When you bring a purpose to it, and you’re trusting play as the practice and you keep the purpose high and big picture,and you pour trust into your people, to find their way in that bigger purpose play can bring out people’s best thinking and the most exciting and generous side of us, if we position it in the right way culturally.

Storytelling shifts the dynamic from listening to thinking about what you’re going to say

What good can come when we loosen the formality at work?

— Lego play time

Impact: reduces the authority distance, demands but also generates develops and depends a participatory version of leadership

Trusting play to do the important stuff does 3 things:

Play is bold: not all bold ideas will find a place in practice, but if you bite down on them before you give them a chance, the timid ideas get a pass.
Play is resourceful: as we shift from individual play to collective play, my sense of emergence and boldness of ideas begins to interact with yours, and everything I’m aware of, takes
Play is emergent: Opens up a sense of following those ideas into a special world, (Joseph Campbell, hero’s journey), shifts you from train of thought to stream of consciousness

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Show Notes continued…

What are some elements or attributes (in an environment or a person) that have to exist for this kind of play to be successful?

Starts to get contagious between people, and if it’s already there in an environment, can be contagious for newcomers.

Have the room to trust being a little bit frivolous – allows the creative parts of our minds. Allows our minds to step beyond the known and step into the unknown.

Everyone has come up with a creative way to close a suitcase that is too full at the end of a trip. Everyone is creative, not everyone is artistic.

A kind of vulnerability, like an unconscious vulnerability, where you don’t even realize you’re doing it. Be ok with speaking something out loud that you are completely ok with not going anywhere.

It’s better to put something out there and then deal with it because you can’t edit a blank page. Finished is better than perfect.

Giving yourself permission to be a little bit crap

If you face a situation and you have the choice to respond to it like Bert or Ernie, respond to it like Ernie

How might informal and formal leaders (thinking coaches, middle leaders, and school administrators) take elements of play and formalize them in the process of culture and team building?

Do it with Lego Serious Play

Use play to roll out a temporary comfort zone, create a special world environment where we do the challenging big weird stuff, we document it so we don’t miss any gold, and then we take it back to the “normal” world where we can do something with.

Find a big way to use it, and then find a lot of small ways to use it

New staff orientation along with people who have been there for a while: school values, mission – can get people thinking about how the school is communicating the way the culture is, along with the way the culture wants to be mixed in with the way the culture can be now

What are some key strategies or skills that all (in particular) informal leaders should develop to be able to bring this kind of fun, playful culture to their work?

Checklist:

Develop a keen sense of whether the answers are in the room or not – this could be a good opportunity for play
If the answers are in the room, a little bit of patience and a little bit of tolerance for a leap of faith
Comfort with suspension of disbelief – leaning into “I know it’s not that simple, can we dig into it a little bit more”
Frame really good questions

Low floor – high ceiling (Seymore Papert), walls wide enough to open possibility on the way to where we need to go

Zoom out ot a high enough altitude that it’s going to work for everyone at teh table’s unique perspective and answer form their

What are some ways that “play goes wrong” (does it)? How can we avoid that?

Three things that will get in the way: control, competition, coercion:

Control: if you go into play too invested in the specific details of the outcome, you’re going to trip yourself up. Structure is not play. When play starts to feel like pedagogy. Two episodes of Bluey: Shops (structure), Calipso (engaged autonomy)
Competition: it’s the killer, tribalizes your groups, shifts the focus from external impact to internal incentive, eyes become on the prize, not on the job you’re there to do, the stake for the group needs to be the group against the issue, not sub groups against each other
Coercion: play and games are not the same thing, games have a pre-determined outcome set by the designer, they have boundaries and guardrails, they’re inherently coercive, there are rewards to keep you going the way the designer wants, and penalties to

What advice do you have for anyone looking to bring more play, and more fun, into a “professional” environment?

Be a little cheeky, go into it with the approach that nothing is sacred, especially the most sacred things.

Find Joel Online

FIrebird Learning

joelbir.ch

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Bringing a Sense of Joy to Professional Learning Through Lego Serious Play with Joel Birch [282]