Building Burnout Prevention
Featuring LEGO® Serious Play® and Environmental Friction Audits

Burnout is major issue that has only grown over the last 40 years. Both in higher education and non-profit environments, burnout and turnover greatly alters the work experience and impacts those we are here to support. Our workshops and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® sessions are designed to maximize learning about stress, burnout, environments that create stress, and tactics on how to build something better.

Our Building Burnout Prevention sessions are designed to help organizations better understand the issues impacting employee burnout and help explore ways to create a more frustration-free work experience. We will explore the ideal work environment and stress-test various scenarios to identify small, medium, and large changes to improve our workplaces and retain talent.

Every Voice, Hands-On: Sessions are a combination of presentation and hands on workshops. The hands-on elements use LEGO® bricks to build 3D models of various issues and visualize possibilities from new perspectives, but engagement is also through surveys and engaged discussions. Participation from everyone is core to our work. We need to hear every voice: everyone speaks up, everyone builds, and everyone shares their ideas at each stage.

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

Time: 2-4 hours (I can adjust this based on your needs and the depth desired)
Groups: 5-75 (depends on space)
Audience: Education and Non-profits
Region of Service: within a 3-4 hour drive from Cincinnati

Research shows play - with a purpose - in our work creates greater motivation, buy-in, innovation, and productivity. We can help engage your whole team to unlock knowledge, find creativity, and disrupt the normal strategy sessions that are normally filled with white boards, sticky notes, icebreakers, and trait-based assessments that seem to dominate the landscape of education and non-profit arenas. Let us help you have fun with seriously unique outcomes!

Environment Focus, Not Self-Care: While we fully encourage self-care methods, the focus of our presentations are on finding those environmental factors for students and personnel that cause friction or stress and have longer-lasting impacts than self-care alone.

Service Areas: Given the requirements of our workshops, all activities must be within a few hours driving distance of Cincinnati, OH. This includes areas such as: Louisville, Lexington, Indianapolis, Columbus, Toledo, Fort Wayne, Cleveland, and Akron with special consideration for Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh.

We focus on changing the environment through friction audits for students and personnel. While self-care is valuable, the effects are limited to the individual. We work with your teams to identify environmental changes small and large to help create lasting change.

What is it? How does it work?

GROUNDED IN RESEARCH: Serious Play® was developed by an organizational theorist and a business professor (Roos and Victor) as a methodology for engaging in team building, strategy development, communications, and vision, mission, and goal planning while using play. Building on research from Piaget, Vygotsky, Montessori, and others, this method was tested and designed to bring play into our work to enhance learning and creativity.
PLAY WITH PURPOSE: As humans we learn by doing, by using our hands. We learn through play. We learn how to follow rules, to build new skills, to socialize with others, to take risks, and create new ideas. This process is play with a purpose and core to this method.
COMPLEXITY AND INSIGHTS: LEGO® was brought into the equation later and serves as a vehicle through which the play occurs. It allows us to create knowledge outside ourselves through visual models. These models serve as metaphors for complex ideas and allows us to better sense making of dynamic and complicated systems.
DISRUPTIVE: The process is a disruptive model. It gets us away from sticky notes, white boards, and over-used business models based on over-generalized inventories of individual traits.
ENGAGING: Ultimately, it is a highly engaging and democratic process. Everyone is engaged at each step. Everyone builds. Everyone shares their story of their build. Through the use of story telling, everyone builds a model, tells their story about their model, works with the team to build consensus models, and everyone shares their understanding of the consensus model. Everyone engages in every step of the process.

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®

Dr. Dickson is a trained facilitator in the methods of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and has over 20 years in higher education administration. Using this unique model of democratic engagement, storytelling, and three-dimensional metaphors, he can work with your teams on identify strategy development, action planning, teamwork, communication, and more. Dr. Dickson can work with your needs to design workshops for groups of any size and from a couple hours to multi-day retreats.

Disclaimer

The folks at Beech Dickson Consulting have no relationship with the LEGO Group®. All things LEGO®, including the Minifigure, Brick and Knob configurations, and other bricks, blocks and plates, are trademarks of the LEGO Group®, which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this website. All things Serious Play® are trademarks of their respective creators. The LEGO® Serious Play® method and now allow anyone to use it under a creative commons license. The training material on this site uses, modifies, and adapts the LEGO® Serious Play® method from The LEGO Group® Open-Source Guide. LEGO® encourages training in the LEGO® Serious Play® method to ensure integrity and quality, however they do not coordinate or endorse any trainings or providers. Dr. Dickson is a trained facilitator in the methodology of LEGO® Serious Play®.

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