How LEGO® Serious Play® helped a Birmingham charity build a fundraising plan

Birmingham and Solihull Women's Aid provides emotional and practical support to women and children affected by domestic violence and abuse. Its people are busy, stretched and dedicated to supporting those who need them, which can make it hard to involve the whole workforce in fundraising.

First, build the skills

In a LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) workshop, the first step is skill-building. Nobody starts by running. We crawl, stand and walk first.

We began with an Explorer Bag containing 124 identical LEGO® pieces and one simple instruction: build a tower and place a minifigure somewhere on it. It never ceases to amaze me how differently people interpret this. Almost everyone puts the minifigure on top, and usually finds something to make a hat.

I then asked everyone to build a model of their superpower. It is a useful team-building exercise because we often keep information about ourselves hidden when we do not think it is relevant to the workplace.

Examples included cooking for huge numbers of people, expertise in technology and speed-reading a book in a day, all created with just a few LEGO® pieces. The magic lies in people's ability to make sense of why they chose each piece, what it represents and the story their model tells. Within 20 minutes, the cross-functional team had surprised themselves with how much they did not know, or make use of, about each other's strengths.

Then, ask the challenge question

The second step was the challenge question. By this point, everyone had the skills and confidence to turn creative thoughts into three-dimensional LEGO® models. We asked: "How do we engage the whole BSWA workforce, around 150 people, to support our fundraising work?"

The fundraising team was joined by colleagues from finance, marketing and communications. A cross-functional approach works well when seeking creative solutions because people bring different ideas that others can build on as the shared landscape takes shape.

We ran two rounds using the same challenge question. The first idea tends to come from fast, automatic "system one" thinking, often described as gut instinct. The second round allows people to go deeper with slower, more considered "system two" thinking, giving new ideas time to surface.

Ideas the team could act on

In two three-minute rounds of building, suggestions evolved to include:

• Remove barriers to employees contributing ideas, especially the belief that suggesting an idea means having to deliver it.
• Make fundraising fun, including the idea of a ball at the botanical gardens.
• Encourage rule-breakers to amplify ideas.
• Make better use of the charity's wider network of relationships.
• Create an employee committee to generate ideas and support the fundraising team.
• And my all-time favourite: guilt-trip them into it!

Everyone voted. The favourite breakthrough idea was to create a fundraising committee for idea generation. The team then built a practical plan covering governance, reward, accountability and vision.