Building a Digital Transformation One LEGO® at a Time

The government and non-profit sector is going through rapid digital transformation. This new reality has led to an increasing need for companies to stay innovative while simultaneously protecting their traditional best practices. Our client, one of the oldest knowledge management and information institutions in Europe, therefore needed to go digital.

The big challenge was to involve the entire organization in the process. With employees from different work backgrounds and departments, it was critical to identify the right approach to digital without excluding any employee.

To execute the digital transformation, a revamp of the mission statement was viewed as the right way to initiate such a drastic organizational change. A new mission statement meant a new set of values for everyone within the organization and an opportunity to involve all employees in moving to the next phase of the digital journey.

Our team helped the client draft the mission statement. We took steps to make the process simple, starting with a centralized support system and involved a sample of 100 employees.

A major challenge was to carry out this creative project entirely online. We also had many people involved with very basic digital skills, and others who found the process difficult to understand, which presented additional challenges.

We split the participants into three different working groups. The managers dealt with the content of the mission statement, including strategic questions such as:

• Where do we stand?
• Should we rethink our values?

To make the experience creative but simple, we integrated LEGO® Serious Play® at various points, against a backdrop of making the formulated mission statement “one’s own”: by asking the following questions:

• Does the mission statement affect me or my actions?
• Does the mission statement mean something to me in my everyday life?
• Is the mission statement bringing us closer to being more digital with our processes?

LEGO® Serious Play® helped us work quickly around these strategic but personalized questions. It also helped us tap into and awaken the joy of building together.

As the last step, a unanimous acceptance of the mission statement took place online.

After a year and a half of our support, the organization felt stronger after this experience, and the employees had a new mission statement that felt personalized.

The new mission statement also became a positive tool for communicating the organization’s position to the outside world and helped it make the leap towards digital.