Category Archives: Culture

LEGO System: A tool to think with

image courtesy of Nathan Sawaya. www.brickartist.com

LEGO play, I have learned, is one of the most powerful ways to unlock curiosity, imagination, creativity and learning. It draws strength from a system whereby you don’t need to know each individual brick, to intuitively know how you can fit them together. Moreover, the bricks can be put together and taken apart by someone as young as 2 years old. Without being shown how to.

While there are many different creative pursuits in the world, not many are so easy to pick up and possess such power to express almost anything you can imagine – simple or complex. The more I see of fans young and old making creations out of LEGO bricks, the more impressed I am with the sheer power of imagination when given a tool inherent in its simplicity, but powered by a system enabling endless ideas. Rebrick.lego.com is probably one of the easiest one-stop shops to visit for a glimpse of this kind of inspiration.

Some four years ago I got the task of heading up the LEGO Learning Institute and to define how the LEGO Group should expand its academic collaboration in pursuit of continuing its mission to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow in its products, services and experiences. This work led me to a close collaboration with academic experts from different fields, to define just what is the kind of creativity that LEGO play encourages, how this systematic creativity is taking shape in an increasingly digital world, what the future of play is and this year, we will be launching the report looking into the future of learning. Each report is a combination of a thorough review of the latest research in these fields, as well as with an in-depth analysis of what the future holds and how it relates to the LEGO system and play.

In the process of all this work, I have seen how the rate of discovery in these areas has begun to accelerate powered by a series of break-throughs in fields as different as motivational psychology and neuroscience, not to mention much more research inspired by the increasingly social spaces online, which add context, connectivity and meaning around individual contributions and creations. While online communities have grown exponentially and add fuel to the creative pursuit, the power of hands-on play and its ability to capture the imagination and focus of the mind has not diminished.

The LEGO Group is turning 80 years old this year, thriving due to our fundamental human need to make things with our hands, create from our imagination, communicate and share our ideas. While LEGO is often seen as a child’s toy, increasingly adults have discovered its power as a tool to visualise everything from metaphors for company strategy, architectural prototypes, levels in computer games or indeed search engine and software architecture. Progressive and innovative teachers use it in schools to teach science, technology, engineering and maths and others have discovered that it is a great tool for team building.

Learning about all this has convinced me of the importance of supporting creativity and learning in all walks of life as it can be such a source of personal growth, development, life satisfaction and not to mention source of company growth and adaptation. While harnessing creativity and learning may very well begin with playing with LEGO bricks, this type of creative play is something way more powerful than messing around with a simple toy. The LEGO system is a creative medium, a tool for thinking and a language of communication in an increasingly digital age, where amidst all connectivity and technology we still crave human contact and the pleasure of making things with our own hands.

Why I did an MBA

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As 2011 finally drew to a close and the New Year now beginning, I am looking forward to finishing my last module of the TRIUM Executive MBA program in New York, starting in a few days time. 2011 was quite an undertaking, combining full-time work with studies, and in the last two months, courtesy of a massive organisational change; finishing an old job, starting a new one AND studying at the same time.

It has been as much a test of grit and perseverance as a test of my ability to plan, prioritise and stay calm in the face of excessive demands and challenges. It does raise the question though why do it? Surely work is demanding enough, why cut away an extra 15-20 hours a week to devote to studies on top? I have spent much of this year trying to explain it to people, and reading this article helps put this further into context.

Back in the day I did an International Baccalaureate. While well renown, the effect it had on me, emerging after 12 years of solid schooling, was that I simply couldn’t face the prospect of going directly to university. Firstly, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to study, let alone managing to muster up the motivation of sitting some more years at the school bench studying about what the world was like, instead of finding out for myself. So I went and got a job, working for a children’s charity sponsored by UNICEF and UNESCO, focusing on empowering young people to affect positive change in their local communities. This work got me acquainted with everything from the United Nations, international politics, sustainable development, project management, fundraising, communication, marketing, lobbying, team leadership and so on. Like many charities, the agenda and ambitions were huge, and the staffing level always below adequate so I got to try my hand at many things, learning by doing, being thrown into the deep end, and gaining a ton of valuable experience at the tender age of my early 20s. All the while also having a chance to travel to many countries all over the world – thus developing a wide frame of reference and point of view.

In amongst all this activity I also realised a very fundamental thing about how I learn. I need to have a reason for learning things, just being told it is ‘important to know or it’s part of the curriculum’ simply doesn’t do it for me, I need to know what I can use the information for. It means I have to stumble on a question, which triggers my insatiable curiosity, which then motivates me to go find the answer, applying both my creativity, perseverance and ingenuity in coming up with the answer (and learning).

Fast forward to some years back. At this point I had got my degree in product design and had been working at The LEGO Group for a few years, developing new toy lines from concept through to production and enjoying quite a bit of success. I was getting pretty efficient at it. Perfecting the process, skills, approaches, research, development… it was beginning to feel formulaic (read: I wasn’t learning enough new stuff every day). So I began thinking about the next step. Where does one go from here?

I realised that one of the greatest hurdles to innovation was old business models. Meaning, one can come up with the greatest idea in the world, embellish it with beautiful design and it still won’t work, unless the business model underneath is as well thought out as is the design. Designers are great at dreaming up the value propositions that consumers love, but we often lack the tools of business model engineering to craft the concept from ground up, including the financing to get it off the ground. These are the things we don’t get taught in design school, and it can become the wall we spend our life running into – unless we come up with a way to get around it.

I tried to think of the kind of ‘polar opposite’ to a design education and came up with the idea of an MBA. In the wake of the financial crisis this qualification appears to have got a lot of bad press. In some respects it’s hard not to agree – but going back to my earlier point, an MBA is only worth a quarter of its value if you undertake it without a significant amount of work experience in different fields as a basis. If you have wrestled with the innovators dilemma, you will be able to extract the learnings in a much deeper level. This is where executive MBA education can offer a far more rich learning environment than doing this qualification right after high school with only a few years under your belt.

Reading the article mentioned above, I realised that unwittingly the secret to my most successful learning throughout my life, and also when deciding to do an MBA, has been following the principles for continuously growing your mental and learning capacity:

1. Seek Novelty
2. Challenge Yourself
3. Think Creatively
4. Do Things The Hard Way
5. Network

Thinking about the MBA and choosing one for me was about seeking out the novelty, doing something as nigh on the polar opposite to what I had studied and worked on before. Also finding a program that embraced novelty was crucial – reflecting a forward looking point of view, having adjusted its learnings in the wake of the financial crisis rather than teaching redundant information, recognising the growing importance of emerging markets and reflecting that in the curriculum and so on. Not all MBA programs are created equal, and the best thing is to challenge your own biases. Pick one, where the majority of students are not the same nationality as you, don’t come from the same industry as you, and where the primary geographical area of study isn’t the one you come from.

And challenge yourself. Work on the really hard stuff, do the things you never thought you could. I didn’t have a clue about levered Betas before starting the program, but amazingly one of the smartest people on the planet on corporate finance and financial analysis, is also one of the most generous in sharing his knowledge and ideas so you can find a ton of it here (granted, he might need a designer to make the thing easier to navigate and visually more appealing :-) ). And this professor of mine also blogs prolifically, so that’s probably the next best thing to Aswath Damodaran live.

Interestingly, as your frame of reference expands the true excitement for me came when starting to apply everything I have learned creatively both in my daily work and on the TRIUM term project, where the challenge is either to start a new business, do a turnaround or start a social enterprise. Designing a company around a business idea from the ground up and from scratch is just the most exciting thing ever. And yes, don’t cut corners – even if you won’t have to do it ever again. If nothing else, you will just have expanded your mental thinking muscle a little more than you thought was possible. And lastly, network. Preferably with people as dissimilar to you as possible.

Where will it all leave me at the end of the day? Some have warned me that after such an undertaking one can expect a touch of ‘MBA blues’ – in that the continuous challenge and stimulus becomes addictive in its own right. This is a valid point, as new topics, assignments and essay questions are served up with (annoying – when you are busy working on your day job) regularity – the upside is that the content is always top notch and well curated. Doing all that learning as efficiently on your own without the EMBA ‘machine’ powering away in the background is daunting. But not impossible. When you expose yourself to a challenge you barely think you can accomplish – you realise that the greatest limits to your own achievement is actually in your head. In the little statements you tell yourself about what you are capable of (or not). And whether we realise it or not, our own professional specialisms help permeate these perceptions of what different professions are supposed to be (or not be) able to do. The faster you drop that bias, the faster your progress in learning.

The art of mastering your craft

There is something magical about doing something for its own sake, and taking pride in doing it really well. Some weeks ago I was doing a talk to design students and we ended up discussing how difficult this can be, when many tools designers and creatives rely on, are developing at such breakneck speed. For all those for instance, who poured their heart into becoming gurus of Flash, how annoying must it be, that this platform died overnight, with the announcement of Adobe that they will no longer pursue it. A frustrating situation to be in, and makes me think that there are tools and craft that is timeless, and there are tools that have in-built obsolesence. The trick is to master some of both, and never be too dependent on those that are likely to change quickly. This video, shared with me by Jon Tremlett, author of the Soulcraftcandy blog, illustrates well the art of mastering a timeless craft, and the pleasure it brings.

3 things I wish I knew as a student and 8 things I have learned since!

Last week I had the pleasure to return to my alma mater, Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design, for a talk on my career since I graduated 10 years ago. The college has recently moved to a splendid new building in Kings’ Cross, London, and the joy was all mine to see friends, tutors and old faces again, while offering my thoughts to the students now studying product-, industrial design, and innovation management.

While I could bore everyone to tears about all the LEGO models and product lines I have worked on over my career at the LEGO Group, a far more interesting thing to share is the second half of my presentation, which is all about the things I wish I knew when I was a student and my attempt to capture all the things I have learned since. My presentation was mostly a series of stories and anecdotes, captured by the sentences on these slides, and if I manage to – I will try to write some of them on this blog in the coming weeks.

In the meantime – I hope you enjoy them and again, comments are really what blogs are all about so if you feel inspired, drop me a note below.

View more presentations from cweckstrom.

If in doubt, make something!

Quite a few interesting things have happened recently that make me think there is more to this than meets the eye. Hear me out. On one hand we are and have been excited by all things social media, online, new ways of interfacing with media (think Iphone and Ipad) and so on. It is exciting, yet at the same time we are also getting smarter about the limitations of digital, and appreciating afresh what it really means to make something with your own hands (think the rise of hacking (e.g changing something to do something different beyond its original purpose – physical or virtual, Maker faires and Instructables). Talking about what we have made online is also fun, because we can make the most out of the connectivity, while also making the most of the real world around us. Somehow too many solutions and activities have forced us to make a choice between these two worlds, and what is exciting to see is how these are being mashed up together. A few bits of inspiration

Soulcraftcandy.com After years of procrastination, my other half Jon, nicknamed Q (after Q in James Bond movies who can make anything, Jon can too, except exploding telephone boxes are not allowed in the house :) ) finally took the plunge and has started sharing some of his sketches and amazing creations over on his blog. He is a guy that doesn’t just do stuff, he thinks a lot about the process of making things too, and now shares it with posterity. Some deep thinking and great cartoons to boot – and far more regular at posting than me so check it out.

Making is Connecting – my good friend David Gauntlett has pulled yet another rabbit out of the hat with his new book, which puts the topics I touched on above into a historical and cultural perspective, while providing an excellent analysis of what it really means to make something and share it with others, for our sense of self, purpose and the meaning we create in our lives. Hugely inspirational reading!

Handmade – this was one of those great surprises that arrived just before Christmas and the outcome of a happy coincidence that reminded me just how funny life can be. Some time ago David Gauntlett got in touch with me and told be about this Tessy Britton and her travelling pantry idea and that she was wondering whether I could help her out with some LEGO bricks, because they would just be the best thing to help people in communities articulate their ideas about how to do more together. I thought this sounded exciting so without further ado I pulled some of my own rabbits out of a hat and Tessy got some bricks. Then things were quiet for a long time and next thing I hear is from David that Tessy’s put together a book about all the things she discovered when doing the travelling pantry.

Out of the Ordinary – so this is when things get spooky and just shows how connected we really are without realising it. So lovely Sarah, other half of Mark Earls, another dear friend, chief brainbox, and father of  the herd thinking that has helped the rest of us put words around what really is happening when we find ourselves mimicking the behaviours of unknown strangers ( I digress), contacted Jon and said he definitely had to get in touch with these guys behind Out of the Ordinary. Low and behold, the paths lead back to David and Tessy.. it is a small world, but alas, a creative one!

So my conclusion, dear friends, is that if in doubt – make something, and better still: find a way to share it with others and the world may just be your oyster! At least you will not run out of interesting like minds to be excited and inspired by, and in those dark hours when you think no one cares, you might just be surprised. I certainly will never forget the instance when I, caught up in too much self-critique, decided to delete one of my posts. (story reposted here and perhaps a very early bit of thinking about how we need to match what we go through in our minds with something physical otherwise our progress just doesn’t feel as ‘real’ as it should).

And it really is the most surprising things that people will miss, so don’t be a bore – share it and you will see.