Strategy Development with Lego® Serious Play®

The Opportunity

Already an industry leader in customer service, Skipton Direct – the customer facing arm of the society – had initiated a strategic planning and operational improvement programme to ensure that it remained fit for the future.

Rather than hand over the task to an external consultancy, with the concern that it would provide vanilla recommendations and impact staff morale (as had happened recently), our client was keen to ensure that the process;

• Meaningfully engaged a large number of Skipton Direct Staff, and
• Was conducted within a clear positive narrative around improvement from a strong base, maintaining already excellent levels of service delivery.

When Tricordant became involved, the client had developed a framework for operational improvement that fit with the wider Society strategy and sought our support to bring to life four work streams relating to efficiency, customers, colleagues and technology.

The Tricordant Approach

Tricordant developed a process that was designed to deliver a programme of work, led by the Skipton Direct strategy team and co-created by staff with all levels working together in a series of innovative workshops.

We facilitated a small ‘Design Team’ to oversee the process and developed 1.5-day scoping workshops for each workstream which involved 30-35 members of staff in each.

We then ran these workshops using the LEGO Serious Play method in order to rapidly build psychological safety so that staff could generate, articulate and effectively share and build on each other’s ideas.

In each workshop, dozens of ideas were developed and prioritised – and the most promising were further developed by multi-disciplinary teams.

Further workshops to integrate the results of the workshops and create workplans for selected projects were then run, enabling the Skipton team to develop a board proposal for projects that would need investment.

Several of the quick wins developed during the process which didn’t require investment were implemented immediately – and in some cases spontaneously – by staff.

The Outcomes

Our client kindly attended a Tricordant network event six months after the project had finished and reported on the positive outcomes of the process.

In terms of tangible outcomes;

• The programme of activities developed during our engagement had been signed off by the board;
• Many of the quick wins identified during the process had been immediately been implemented with measurable results in terms of efficiency and staff happiness; and
• Staff turnover had fallen.

Our client also noted that, while she had been sceptical about the use of LSP prior to the project, it had been a key element in the project success.