Lego fever has been radiating through our office for the last month since Jonathan returned from his Lego® Strategic Play™ (LSP) training. The lego cars and plastic daisies that seem to be taking over my desk space are no longer a new phenomenon.
However, it appears that the fever is now spreading throughout London, with the construction of a giant, two tonne, 600,00 brick, lego advent calendar to be placed in Convent Garden next month. With festive seasons becoming ever too synonymous with the latest must have gadgets, the simplicity of lego is a welcome breath of fresh air. Despite its early beginnings back in 1947, there is still a strong love for the little yellow men that now outnumber real people 67:1.
Last Tuesday saw Time Out magazine feature an article on the Bright Bricks current project, and Duncan Titmarsh’s creation style, highlighted the simplicity and thus beauty of lego that makes it the perfect stimulus for helping employees to communicate with each other better. Titmarsh, surprisingly still uses the same method in his buildings that he did when he first picked up a piece of lego. He merely makes it up as he goes along without any instructions, diagrams or formal plans and it is that complete freedom that is perfect for engaging individuals. In a business, where employees are often restricted by experience, job titles or procedure, provide lego and suddenly we are all children again and the only thing that can limit us is our own imagination. This was incredibly powerful in our Make Happy Lego workshop, whereby introducing lego levelled the playing field and allowed every member of the team to engage and ultimately contribute their ideas.
Therefore, in a bid to spread lego fever further, here are a few lego facts I plan to shock my friends with tonight.
– Laid end to end, the number of Lego bricks sold in a year would reach more than five times round the world
– The world’s children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with Lego bricks
– There are 915,103,765 possible ways to combine six eight-stud Lego bricks of the same colour.
(http://cache.lego.com)