Presentation at Restauro 2013. Text transcription.

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When I’ve met Patrizia Betini [see at http://legoviews.com/], she talked me a lot about the LSP method. She was (and she is!) really enthusiastic about the method and soon I became too. She explained me the method’s goals: team building, sharing visions, creating identities, define strategies and negotiate decisions. While she talked about LSP application in management, all descriptions (about gaps in team work) seemed to me perfect to describe the gaps I see in my activity at the University.

My course is Architectural Representation Techniques and it focuses on BIM, Building Information Modeling, a particular sector of IT applied to Architecture or, if you prefer, a special branch of Architecture that use IT in the design process. To implement BIM processes, team work is an essential success criteria. For this reason, I tried in the past years to create condition to simulate team work, to encourage cooperation between students, to observe individual behaviours in a group context. For example, I proposed to students to work like in a editorial staff, designing a Magazine, sharing and making decisions on all aspects, from graphic to details, inviting them to develop their critical approach, and then asking them to produce the content of their magazine, from modelling of existing building, to photorealistic pictures, texts, schemes, that describe the building itself. Other students group worked on project that aimed at creating an exhibition, designing the set, designing and producing models in scale and other things… Or to create a videos, from script to story board, from modelling to editing…

Why all this? Well, I know that my students, the architects of tomorrow, will work in a team. Everyone works in relationship with others, regardless if you work in an organisation or that you are a freelance professional. Every day we compromise decisions, actions, results. Therefore, I wondered: Is it possible to learn team work? I think that team work management should be a discipline, like Maths or Literature…

Generally in Architecture’s Courses, team work is variously exploited and students are invited to take part to group and collective activities. Often, telling the truth, grouping is the short cut to manage a large number of students: generally it is much easier to deal with forty groups, composed by three people each, rather than with one hundred twenty individual students… So, The frame is very simple: if every job or professional activity requires team work, one of education’s task is to teach how to work in a team.

But in the past years, I didn’t ever obtain successful experiences. Students are too often focused on their own academic career, examinations are like a job for them, not a formative experience, evaluation is like a payment rather than the confirmation and assessment of assimilated competences. In this frame, most of students are not invited and encouraged to go beyond the minimum required…It’s a shame, because I conceive University like an ideas’ farm, not like an executors’ factory… Patrizia told me how shared processes could generate new ideas. She wrote a lot of articles about this argument, like the one I love which is about the Harkness Table and LSP. Sharing ideas is the way to create a collective mind. Many of us think that creativity is like a single genius’ capability. it’s true, Leonardo worked alone. However, today this is almost impossible. We are not all writers, painters, poets.

Have we to give up creativity? Have we to miss the chance of innovation?

It’s a common experience: an early valuable idea (as a genius’ product!) is not put into the right practice because of the lack of appropriate managing processes that take into proper consideration the innovative aspects. This is how the best ideas become bad ones, due to the wrong compromises required by inadequate management processes. I’ve read some definition about the differences between ‘group’ and ‘team’. The first one is merely a set of people, the latter are people working together focused on the same goal. To avoid that the “best” turns into the “worse” we can focus on differences between “compromise” and “negotiations”. Compromise’s results are an average result in a group, a strange hybrid displeasing one and all. Compromise come in play when each player in the group defend his position in the field. On the contrary negotiation come in play early in the team’s process. Compromises focuses on final results, Negotiation focuses on needs and aims.

Summarizing:

• my target is architects of tomorrow
• they will work in a team
• they will be architects, not merely executors
• they have to manage a sort of collective mind to pursue the shared best, not the average worse

LSP looks good to pursue team building, negotiation and to encourage new ideas and, specifically, encourage a critical approach on course’s theme: heritage and sustainability. Patrizia, designing the workshop, told me that LSP application are quite different compared to our situation and needs.

From a brochure by Robert Rasmussen:

When is it a good idea to use the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY METHOD?

Purpose

It is a good idea to use the LSP method if it is important:

• that everyone is able to contribute her or his knowledge and opinions on a level playing field OK!
• that the meeting includes honest dialog and collaborative communication – that’s the goal!
• that no one participant dominates at the expense of others, for example, by pursuing a personal agenda good one!

Subject

It is a good idea to use the LSP method when:

• the subject is complex and multifaceted, and there are no clear answers PERFECT!
• there is a need to grasp the big picture, see connections and explore various options and potential solutions IT WAS OUR NEED!
• the participants are diverse in age, professional background or training (engineering and marketing, for example), or organizational status… Gosh! Our participants were same in age! They were same in training! That was their training….

Ok! Reading forward:

Result

It is a good idea to use the LSP method if it is important:

• to make decisions that everyone commits to and honours after the meeting, even though s/he does not agree 100% with everything YES!
• to make sure there are no excuses or lack of initiative after the meeting because participants feel they were not heard nor involved in the decision YES!
• to give all participants a common understanding and frame of reference that will impact their work together after the meeting YES!

One LSP condition, at least, sounds different comparing LSP traditional application and our attempt in education. It meant that we didn’t applied the method, we were experimenting something new… To verify the real LSP effect on students work, I divided students in two macro groups: one group worked with LSP and focused on Heritage, one as not involved in any LSP activity and focused on Sustainability. To verify groups dynamics We divided the first macro-groups in three groups, a dozen people each.

Switching fom experience to experiment we needed also some indicator to verify results:one related to quantitative data: Do our heroes (students) fail to work together until the final examination? The second one is a quality factor: Do teams express some of new, deep, original and fresh about Heritage? Established the starting point, we began to play.

The question was: What is Heritage? This is one video we record related to one of three workshop. Some player are here today, thank you guys!

This video shows all workshop phases. Observing the workshop I see the LegoViews’ motto in action! How Patrizia says: “.. because hands know more than you know!” It was very interesting to follow all workshops. I invite you to watch the video: it takes less than five minutes but I think it’s very exemplifying…Three groups, three workshop, generated three different approach to Heritage.

The first group’s definition is “Heritage is like a filter/wall. Our identity is situated beyond the wall. To find our identity we need to overcome and go beyond the wall and to leave behind that cultural lenses that deform our view of the world”. The second group’s definition is “Heritage is a common experience, over all. Everyone is called to contribute. We can develop every day a newer shared concept of Heritage, building a common memory of values”. The third group’s definition is amazing: “Heritage is not a place, it’s not an object or a set of art works. Heritage is exemplified by the human brain, because it is in the mind that every connection between memory, knowledge, innovation, emotion, past, present and future, takes place”

I admit that each of these definitions came back to my mind the weeks after the workshops. These twenty years old girls and boys stated something really new and fresh and deep, deeper than many Heritage definition… (WIKIPEDIA). Students had to transpose the idea (their Heritage definition) in a tangible exhibition proposal. The filter/wall became a set of perforated panels. By projecting the video on the panel we can get a set of different combinations of messages. The filter/wall catches only a part of the message, the rest goes on the back stage panels. Staying before or beyond the filter panel changes our perception. The filter/wall could be a frame. To get to know Heritage, to preserve it, implies a continuous  movement around and beyond the filter/wall that represents our cultural comfort zone. The second group proposed an exhibition titled “Shake, Shape, Share”. The Shake section tells the story of last spring’s earthquake effects in Emilia and shows images of churches and monuments before their distruction. Shape shows the modelling process for each of that monuments and churches. Students modelled in a virtual space the buildings and imagined an exhibition of plaster cast models in scale. The last section is dedicated to share the proposal and to share memory. The final panel is significant… And at the end, the Brain became like a bunch made of monitors, each of one showing the same video – a dreamlike vision of Nagaur fortress – to represent the unconscious knowledge. All around the monitors, a number of panels show the conscious part of knowledge. The exhibition’s title is Atman, a Sanskrit word that means ‘self’. In Hindu philosophy, Ātman is the first principle,the true self of an individual beyond identification with phenomena, the essence of an individual.

Going back to the goals I’ve stated, regarding the first one, Do teams express some of new, deep, original and fresh about Heritage?, the experience clearly demonstrates that yes, the goal was achieved beyond expectation. Students shared, week by week, their ideas referring any decision or action to their shared model and to the common definition of Heritage they all agreed on. Week by week the group turned into a team. Such a knowledge sharing and deep thinking was lacking in the  control groups that worked without taking part to an LSP workshop, allowing us to hypothesize that the results can be attributed to the bricks.

About the second goal (Do our heroes fail to work together until the final examination?) I can tell you that in seven years of teaching, it has never happened before that all students, sixty-eight girls and boys, passed the final examination all together. Well, this happened past february.

I’ve started with a question: what is Heritage? Now I ask myself and you: what is creativity? Maybe creativity is just about taking a method conceived for business organisation and using it in education, and I am very grateful to Patrizia for her creative approach. I’m not alone thinking that creativity and innovation are the true challenge for the future.

If we’ll begin to place creativity as a key part of processes, innovation can not but arise from here.