End scene from the finale of Season 1 of the TV show West World:
“Stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us and to help us become the people we dreamed of being.
Lies that told a deeper truth.”
I spend my days helping people tell stories. Individual stories, group stories, stories of the past, stories of a hoped for future.
LEGO Serious Play at it’s heart is a storytelling technique.
The stories told in a LEGO Serious Play session are a combination of individual truths and wished for futures. They are a weaving together of truth and fiction as a way to show us a possible future and guide us towards it.
In workshops I’ve seen how this has “helped us to ennoble ourselves”. People get to discuss their views and their future and be heard. Doing that in a peer group situation leads to a better version of oneself coming out.
In workshops I’ve seen how this has “helped to fix what was broken in us”. I’ve had people cry. Not because of what someone has said to them, or done to them. But when they are opening up and discussing what’s important to them and again being heard. A cathartic moment that overwhelms some people and they cry. Helping them in a small way to fix what was broken.
In workshops I’ve seen how it “helps us become the people we dreamed of being”. Through an individual and collective process of laying out a vision for the future in physical form. People can see and dream of that future.
In workshops I’ve seen people tell stories that are “lies that told a deeper truth”. Not lies in the common sense, but fictions, stories, imaginings, things that are not true but yet are more true than individual situations.
These deeper truths transcend those individual situations and people, generalisations that take our experience and distill it down into a story that can show us something of a higher order. That can help to guide us in the future.
We see it all the time when we read stories to children. Ridiculously cool fictions that have a deeper truth embedded in them.
And that’s what I see in a LEGO Serious Play session when someone grabs that elephant and makes a story out of it. Ridiculously cool fictions that have a deeper truth embedded in them.