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All children are born artists by Sirte Pihlaja

We need a more experimental, startup mentality to disrupt our old ways of thinking and doing in today’s business world. The best way to achieve this is to inspire creativity and build a sense of empowerment in our co-workers by bringing more PLAY into our organisations.

We are all born creative. We don’t grow into creativity, but instead, end up growing out of it. During all of our education, schools teach us convergent thinking, which drains divergent thinking - CREATIVITY - out of us.

“Children have an extraordinary capacity in creativity. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They are not frightened to be wrong. That’s not to say being wrong is creativity in itself. But if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you have no capacity to come up with anything original”, as Sir Ken Robinson warns us.

Most adults fear being wrong and making mistakes. Similarly, most companies want to play it safe, or rather they don’t want to play at all. Unfortunately, that’s not enough anymore. We need to re-think our purpose, and whether that purpose is even relevant anymore to our customers and employees.


“All children are born artists.

The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.”

- Pablo Picasso


The future seems more uncertain than ever, so we all need to seek out that creative five-year-old within us to see positive effects play out. We need PLAY in business to do just that. We need to start looking at things through a playful lens, that lets us think out of the box and gives our brain a hand.


Happy people think about others

Play helps us connect with the people around us, and can bring about a new wave of valuing other people, relationships, and supporting each other in business. It leads to lower levels of stress and healthier and more engaged employees. These are all signs of a forward-looking company.

Play is often associated with happiness, joy and having fun. In a business that has instilled play, people are allowed to experiment, find their “flow” effortlessly, and take creative risks. When it is ok to fail, the whole organisation learns and succeeds faster, propelling business growth, profits, and success.

People need to be HAPPY, so they care about delivering happiness to others. Without happy employees, you cannot have great customer experiences. In a company culture that advocates for play, people feel refreshed and energised, and learning and creativity get a boost. A playful organisation has motivated and committed employees, who are inspired, have fun together and perform better as a team.

Play has an essential role in business, as it puts us in the right mindset and allows us space to think differently - to be CREATIVE. As the need to introduce more creativity in an organisation is vital to its well-being, it’s time to PLAY. Seriously.


Ingrain play into your working habits


Play is not about external facilities like building a “creative environment” for your employees. Especially now, since almost everything happens online, it should be about the ways of working. So, the only investment you need to make might very well be between your ears.

Enter LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP), a creative methodology, initially created by the LEGO® Group for themselves, and later on open-sourced and applied to many different domains and disciplines. We’ve designed our application (http://www.cxplay.fi) to help understand change and ease transformation in the realm of People Experiences. LSP has also been translated to the online so that attendees can join the sessions from all over the world.

Using LSP, you can imagine a new story for your organisation, brick by brick. Through building your individual models and constructing shared ones, you may start by re-defining your purpose or create the strategy you need to reach that purpose. You can re-imagine new audiences and their customer journeys with your company, as well as do market research studies with existing ones. Just pick your bricks and tell your story.

You can also depict the various agents that affect the future of your organisation. But it doesn’t stop there. You can, together with your team, ideate and evaluate all the different scenarios that your people working in customer-facing roles might encounter. That allows you to create simple guiding principles, which empower everyone to do the right thing. Always.


Become the story you are building

There are numerous ways in which you can benefit in practice from a creative methodology, such as LEGO® Serious Play®. Most importantly, LSP skyrockets the capacity of your organisation to plan and prepare for the future by fast-tracking the discussions you need to have to make these scenarios and decisions possible. It lets you literally play all of them out before they happen.

The playful atmosphere in LSP workshops creates a sense of safety - an environment where everyone feels comfortable to share their experiences and innermost thoughts. It also provides an energising context for you to co-create and bring to life People Experiences, together with your colleagues and customers.

And just like kids become part of their story, instead of just telling that story to you, your co-creators internalise the shared ideas when they play. They learn and remember better, and implementing these experiences becomes much simpler and quicker as everyone has already invested themselves in the concepts discussed.

LSP is a serious tool for facilitating change. It reignites our innate creativity and directs the artist within us to create wonderful, new masterpieces to ensure our sustainable business growth also in the future. So...are you ready to find that five-year-old within yourself? Get ready, get serious, PLAY!

- - -

This blog post is republished with permission from Shirute Ltd. It has been originally posted at https://www.shirute.fi/en/blogs/all-children-are-born-artists.

Sirte Pihlaja (Certified Customer Experience Professional, LEGO® Serious Play® Trained Facilitator) is the CEO of Shirute, the first customer experience agency in Finland. She heads the activities of the global Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) in Finland. An internationally known CX/EX expert, coach, designer and strategist, she has over 25 years of experience in advising large international corporations and brands in different industries. Sirte is known for translating customer understanding to concrete actions and results in a fast and cost-efficient way. She is especially fond of creative methodologies and regularly plays with LEGO bricks together with her clients.

Sirte recently wrote about LEGO® Serious Play® in her globally best-selling book Customer Experience 2, co-authored by 24 highly experienced international CX professionals (http://bit.ly/cx2book).

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