The LEGO experience
This post is dedicated to my parents, without whom I could never have realized my aspirations. I love you both very much and am forever indebted to you for the lessons I learned growing up, especially those I didn’t even realize were occurring, and the sacrifices you made to facilitate them.
One of the truths I see every day in IT is that things are in constant motion. Technology changes so quickly that it seems we are designing solutions for new challenges on an almost daily basis. While I’m sure this keeps some people up at night in cold sweats, it’s actually one of the things I most enjoy about my current role in IT systems design. I never know when someone is going to walk up to my desk with the need to produce some new widget, make a new application work, or just have some vexing issue that is important to solve. Recently I’ve started to wonder why I’m often been able to conceptualize multiple design strategies on the fly and I think the answer reaches all the way back into my childhood.
When I was young, I loved playing with LEGO®. I could spend whole days building elaborate buildings, vehicles and even complete cities. While I always enjoyed getting a new LEGO® set to play with and took the time to build it according to the included directions, the greatest fun came when I could spend time with my full collection of pieces limited only by my creativity. I would build, rebuild, tweak, disassemble, and build again. Each project was always a work in progress. I’m sure I didn’t think of it at the time, but this experimentation would prove invaluable years later. I truly believe that LEGO® play had a profound impact on my creative development (and still does to this day).
Well, great, I was a happy kid, but where’s the professional relevance? Fear not! I think there are several concepts which can translate into the modern workplace.
1) Understand what you’re working with – Part of that LEGO® experience was spending time learning how to manipulate a bunch of raw materials to form a solution. Through repeated tries, I learned a lot about which pieces worked best to accomplish specific tasks and how pieces could also be used in different ways when the ideal component was not available. By continuing to understand all of the “tools in the toolbox” I was able to build more complex and elaborate creations. In the professional world, some people may gain this knowledge by reviewing documentation, manuals and use cases while others may just need time to experiment to figure out what the “tool” can actually do. Irrespective of the way the knowledge is gained, this foundation will allow the construction of better and better mousetraps.
2) Find new uses for existing pieces – When I got new LEGO® sets, there would be specialized pieces like aircraft wings, antennas and the like. While this was their original purpose, very often they worked nicely to solve other problems. In the workplace, this type of thinking can help you leverage existing solutions to solve problems without additional cost or complexity. At our office we use Microsoft Live Meeting as a collaborative platform. It works great for its intended purpose but I figured out that I could also use it to record audio and video to create procedural demos that I could distribute to other engineers as a training tool. Using “LEGO® thinking”, I was able to fill a gap in training without having to invest in a separate application.
3) The creative process needs time – Part of my mother’s wisdom was the way in which she would suggest a concept “Why don’t you build me an airport?” to provide some initial direction and then leave me to my creative process, sometimes for hours. In that time, I was able to experiment and figure out what I felt was the best way to reach the design goal. While time seems to be a resource in perpetually short supply, managers and supervisors have to realize that standing over someone’s shoulder asking for a status report every fifteen minutes radically diminishes the odds of a truly creative solution to a problem. Some of the best solutions I’ve come up with for design challenges in my professional experience have stewed in my subconscious for weeks.
4) Today’s failure may become tomorrow’s success – I built a lot of LEGO® creations that were failures. Some broke, others were just ugly. Wings fell off airplanes, wheels didn’t steer, doors didn’t open and the list goes on. While all of these failures helped me figured out better ways to build so I gradually improved my skill, some of them sent me in different creative directions altogether. Just because the square peg doesn’t fit into the round hole doesn’t mean it is devoid of value. It may have incredible benefit if used in a different way.
As the pace of change in our lives and our world continues to accelerate, we will need more people with the creative skill set to meet these challenges head-on. We need people who can conceive innovative solutions, people who can develop effective and efficient process, and people who can creatively lead others to realize their full potential. I hope that the people who emerge in these leadership roles have in their own way learned the lessons that I did as a young boy with a box full of LEGO® pieces and a world of possibility.
Dan Marbes 
Leave a comment