What if the secret to launching a successful transformation is a duck?

For many organizations, transformations are often well-intentioned, meticulously planned and ultimately disappointing. Over the past 10 years, I have identified three cognitive and psychological factors facing organizations when launching enterprise change initiatives:

1. The curse of knowledge: a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with others, assumes that everyone else shares the same background and depth of knowledge.
2. People-led change: a human-centered approach to scalable change across an organization by creating clarity, belief, and ownership amongst the people empowered to deliver it.
3. The IKEA effect: a cognitive bias in which individuals place a disproportionately high value on an object or idea they have had a hand in creating. The name refers to Swedish manufacturer and furniture retailer, IKEA, which sells ‘flatpack’ furniture that customers assemble themselves — and come to love as a result.

I have also found a very simple (and surprising) way to help organizations put these three factors in focus: a duck.

A LEGO duck, to be precise. Disguised as an icebreaker, a diverse group of people, each armed with six LEGO bricks, can build the foundation of a successful transformation in 45 minutes. This facilitated activity, through an experience I designed to help organizations break down communication challenges (the curse of knowledge), helps people develop personal value in the change (the IKEA effect), and invites ideas from all parts of the organization (people-led change) — and have fun while doing so. The experience works best for groups up to 40, but I have done it with groups as large as 1,400.

Start with a duck, end with a bang!

The first thing I ask individuals to do is build the “perfect” duck. Rarely do any two people in a group build identical ducks. This helps demonstrate how widely people’s perspectives of simple topics can vary. It’s also the reason why many transformations fail — people are often not aligned with what the change looks like (i.e., the duck) or agree with the purpose and value of the change (i.e., should we be building a duck?).

Next, is a series of exercises where small groups identify complex challenges to be addressed during the transformation, then work together to physically build models of ideas that might address those challenges. This portion of the activity demonstrates the importance, and value of inviting insights from those who work at different levels of an organization, to share their unique insights (people-led change).

Lastly, there is another memorable, if controversial, element. When all the groups have finished building and presenting their ideas, I select one of their models and smash it to bits. This usually produces flinches; gasps and an occasional expletive hurled my way. This theatrical flourish helps me make two important points:

• People value what they help create…: Smashing the model is a lesson that we should be mindful of what others have built. I point out to the group how upset people get when you smash a toy model that they have worked on for less than 10 minutes — this helps leaders understand how much pride and ownership their people have in solutions they help build (the IKEA effect) and how their actions can have serious impact on their continued engagement and satisfaction in the change effort.
• …but destruction can create opportunity: However, it is important to show those most impacted by any change that, when handled sensitively, breaking down structures creates the opportunity to build something even better moving forward.

A helpful model.

One of my favorite stories about the unexpected impact of LEGO ducks came from an engagement to establish a new, centralized organization made by combining groups from across an enterprise. During the idea building portion of the experience, one group’s combined model revealed lack of focus as a risk to their success. Months later, one of the executives told me that she puts her duck in the middle of a conference table during meetings. When a meeting starts to fall off-track, she points to her duck to remind the group to focus.

The LEGO duck activity isn’t a silver bullet to solve every challenge a business might face during transformation, but it can serve as a helpful model to help others see beyond their current knowledge and break the knowledge curse. It keeps people at the forefront of change and inspires ownership amongst those people empowered to build it, one brick at a time.

Curiously yours, Garett.