EMPIRE BUILDING
The rise and rise of Lego
AS a child, I’d spend hours building Lego spaceships on the floor of my father’s study. I was an astronaut, an alien, a mad scientist. I’ll probably never go to space, but I went there in my imagination. I have Ole Kirk Christiansen to thank. He started the Danish family-run company in his small carpenter’s workshop in 1932.
I’m digging through a crate of Lego for the first time since the ’80s in Pete Smith’s Bryanston home. The founder of Teamgel, Smith has used Lego in hundreds of teambuilding workshops for corporates including Standard Bank and GIBS over the past 10 years.
Smith, 63, says: “I play with Lego for a living.” It runs in the family. His daughter, an occupational therapist, uses Lego in child therapy.
Smith is holding a little dog — made of Lego. He has people build batteryoperated pooches in teams. “People immediately interact. You hear this hum in the room. ‘Where does this go?’ and ‘Can you help me find this piece?’ Then you see people in suits cheering a plastic dog across a boardroom table. Adults get as much of a kick out of Lego as they did when they were kids.”
People even name their dogs. Fluffy is the most popular. Julius Malema is losing to Bliksem.
“We associate Lego with kids, but we should associate it with creativity. Fun is seldom frivolous. In the workplace, play is powerful, not as an alternative to work, but as a way of working.” Smith’s biggest challenge? “Where to store all the Lego. I have a garden hut.”
In the workshop, people use Lego to tell stories in the same way that kids use it to enact their fantasies, but about workplace challenges. Each team member will build models of, say, what they think is causing conflict and their ideas for solutions. Smith also uses Lego to help companies brainstorm new products.
To demonstrate, Smith gives me a task, an icebreaker he often uses.
I’m to build a mother-in-law from hell. “My first challenge is to get people to use the Lego; then the Lego works for me.”
I stare at the pile of bright blocks on the table. “Let your fingers do the thinking,” he tells me, adding that the pieces can symbolise anything I choose. I’m told this triggers creative right-brain thinking. When Joburg executive coach Daphna Horowitz asked a client to build a Lego self-portrait, he chose a Lego man holding a sword. “He felt he was always in attack mode at the office,” she says.
Another client of hers built a wall symbolising a barrier he faced. “I said: ‘Break it. Go on. It’s just Lego’. But he couldn’t.” A wheel often represents workflow (or what you’d like to put your mother-in-law under); a ladder could mean bridging a communication gap, but Smith says everyone’s interpretations are different.
I forget he’s sitting there observing me. A previous client of his, Arina Olivier, says: “For two hours all I thought about was putting one block on top of another. Nothing else mattered.”
He poses questions about the pieces I’ve chosen — their size, shape, colour, and the distance between them. “I interrogate the model, not the person, so instead of asking, ‘What do you think of the boss?’, I’ll ask why they’ve used black blocks, and they might say: ‘Because he has dark thoughts’.”
I’m baffled by my own model. People often are, says Smith. “You can express ideas you weren’t conscious of. You’re not only having thoughts; you’re thinking about your thoughts. I don’t believe logic alone covers what the human brain does.”
He didn’t play with Lego as a child: his parents couldn’t afford it. He wanted to be a psychiatrist, but ended up working in HR and marketing for 40 years before a Lego retailer head-hunted him to run Lego workshops. At the time, it was just a lot of fun, he says. “Then I saw something deeper happening. I saw all the theories I’d applied in training sessions, for instance at Ford in the early ’80s, acted out in the way people built a little plastic dog.”
He believes Lego has struck a chord with adults today because, in a technology-driven world, it takes us back to basics. “Lego cuts to the core of our humanity.” Smith also makes a case for using your hands, encouraging me to feel each piece I pick up. Now you can play Lego in cyberspace, which seems a very un-Lego like thing to do.
“You don’t put on airs when you play Lego,” says Smith, who uses it to assist companies with recruitment for this reason. (I’m picturing job candidates being asked to build a 3D Lego model of their five-year-plan.) “People can become rude and controlling, so in workshops we can address their management style.” But generally in a team environment, he says unless you’re a megalomaniac who refuses to share toys, people feel comfortable enough to ask, “Why’d you call Jane an asshole?”
After a workshop, someone told him: “You peeled us layer by layer like an onion.” He says: “I got a kick out of that. I think I’m starting to understand what humans are about.”
Lego is a great leveller, which makes it particularly relevant in SA, says Smith, who hopes to bring Lego to the rest of Africa, where he believes it’s needed. Imagine using it as a peace-keeping tool, with world leaders hunched over their little Lego models. “You’ll find people calling a managing director who was only referred to as Mr So-and-So by his first name. Lego has taught me that we’re all sommer people. This is my laboratory for life. I learn from this.”
Smith isn’t the only one blurring the line between work and play with Lego. At Ogilvy & Mather’s Bryanston office, I watch people build a game of Tetris on a wall with Duplo blocks. Marion Bryan, who heads campaigns for their clients, came up with the “Play Wall” idea early last year as an initiative for their 400 staff. “I’m always standing on my kid’s Lego. Then I thought: what better way to remind staff to play? We could have put up a corporate poster telling people to be playful, but that’s so not playful.” She’d seen freestanding Lego word art on the internet. “People are doing amazingly weird things with Lego. It has touched the
collective consciousness.”
It took a week for Bryan and her team to build onto an existing wall. “We had a few disasters with sticking the plastic back-plates onto the drywalling.” To surprise staff, they only added the final touches over the weekend — 10 000 Lego pieces to spell the word, “Play”. Bryan says that’s exactly what people did when they saw it. “They couldn’t keep their hands off it. What we love about it is that it’s interactive and people can change it daily.”
Aside from games and impromptu artworks, they’ve created Twitter hashtags out of Lego to promote social-media campaigns. It’s a good typography exercise for their young art directors. “We also get the odd unmentionable word that we quickly delete.”
Bryan says: “Everyone could afford to be more playful. It makes for better work. We’re all born children. The trick is to remain one.”
YOU DON’T PUT ON AIRS WHEN YOU PLAY LEGO
LEGO TRENDING • David Robertson, who was the 2008 Lego professor of innovation and technology at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, has just published Brick
by Brick (Random House, R250), an analysis of how Lego transformed itself into one of the world’s most successful companies after coming perilously close to disaster. • Scheduled for release in March 2014, The Lego Movie is the story of the Lego lad next door who becomes part of a quest to stop an evil Lego tyrant from gluing the universe together. Voice artists include Channing Tatum, Elizabeth Banks, Will Ferrell, Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman. Everything is made of Lego. Superheroes star as their Lego selves. The hype is building …