“I want an employer who allows me to ‘fly away’ now and then”; is how one of the participants sees her future career. A team of trainees joined a Lego Serious Play workshop at the LEF Future Center of Rijkswaterstaat (NL). It delivered great insights into their personal career growth path as well as they learned how different each individual participant feels about their future.
This article is about how this pile of Lego Serious Play (LSP) bricks helped them to visualize their career paths.
Phase 1
We started the workshop using the LSP bricks to make a model of ‘How does my ideal employer look like?’. The participants constructed models that visualized how employers should be:
- empowering me
- creating environmental friendly products,
- helping me to overcome hurdles,
- allowing me to ‘fly away’ now and then,
- giving me the freedom to be creative.
Phase 2
We continued by making a model on ‘What does success look like for me?’. Different type of successes were built with the LSP bricks. Participants want to be:
- working with a diverse team with a shared focus,
- working in an office with a great view, but preferably working a lot outside the office in nature with groups of people (see next picture),
- finding the ‘treasure chest’ – although I do not know at this moment what is in it; except that it is not money (see next picture)
Phase 3
In the next step the participants made a model of ‘What is my individual strength, my added value, that I bring to the company/to the team?’. Strengths were for example:
- I bring new tools and knowledge into the company
- I am target-driven and always aim for the best results
- I bring creativity as one of the pillars for new product development
- I try. And I am OK to miserably fail. But sometimes my ‘errors’ lead to success.
Phase 4
Finally we made a connection between the ‘success’ and the ‘individual strength’ where the models showed ‘How am I going to use my strengths to get me to the success I visualized?’ .
One participants made a model that showed: “I bring new tools and knowledge into the company to help people build bridges to gain understanding and focus in such a way that we are all on a ship going towards one shared focus” (see picture).
More insightful models were built with energizing stories of how individual strengths will bring participants the successes they visualized. It offered all participants an opportunity to visualize their future career and learn from others.
Interested?
Are you interested to use the Lego Serious Play method to work with your team and gain insights in individual strengths, teamwork, new product development or strategy?
Contact me and we will organize a customized workshop using the Lego Serious Play method.
Nel Mostert
06-101714