With the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method, we use the power of the LEGO bricks to achieve rich and meaningful communication between participants.
The LEGO group has produced an amazing diversity of minifigures. It seems obvious to use these to let our participants express fine and detailed metaphors. And sometimes it works very well for that purpose.
In many cases though, participants will use a fair amount of their time just adding more and more minifigures to their model, in order to represent a large group (for instance), or the diversity within a group, whereas a few bricks of varied colour would perfectly do.
Maybe surprisingly, sometimes it works even better without minifigures. Reason for that is that it drives the builder to focus on the qualities or the character of whom they want to tell the story. Using the flow theory as a reference, you could choose to offer less minifigures, or even none. In doing that, you use scarcity to make the challenge more difficult. Do it if you feel your participants can take it, learn more and express more as a result.
It’s a really interesting observation that you make. It has made me wonder that when use an actual minifigure we potentially bring lots of assumptions into play, and perhaps the minifigure becomes very literal in meaning, almost one dimensional. And yet when we use a brick to represent the ‘minifigure’, it is likely that the brick represents some aspect, quality, behaviour or characteristic of the person/people/group we are portraying. Will definitely be thinking about this a bit more. Thanks for sharing.
If it means anything, I have 5000 kg (5 tons) of LEGO bricks, some 40.000 minifigs, and when I started, I started with workshops with over hundred people with existing clients, always fun, teambuilding, where I gently nudge decision makers to evolve it in something useful for the firm – and I wanted to make impression, and I never bought Serious Play kits and sets, I used my own bricks – my landscape and connection kits were truly amazing, bursting of colors, shapes, ways to connect and diversity in bricks – today I use just basic bricks, as I noticed I could do this methodology with pebbles and rocks, LEGO is just more convenient as it is easy to connect and un-connect. My kits always have only one minifig, usually no print on torso or legs, four heads – male, female, monster and plain (no print), and people can get second minifig if they really need it, from extra kit – and this is said, one extra per person, I put it with humor, and that minifig is headless. People simply have amazing imagination, and whatever there is at hand, they will use it and give it meaning – sometimes impressing even me with creativity
Regarding loosing time on multiple minifigs, or anything else, when I notice a participant loosing focus from main thing by focusing on something that is not important for the workshop, I gently nudge them in right direction by noticing that is not important, as this or that. Guidance is one of pillars of the good workshop, in my opinion 🙂