About the Author

First and foremost Sean is a professional facilitator. He founded ProMeet an international facilitation business in 2007 where he works with organisations including HSBC, Google, Cisco, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, Denso Automotive, UKTI, the InterAmerican Development Bank and many many more! Sean is also a practice-based learning designer. He founded SeriousWork, now a global training business, and designed the SERIOUSWORK method of training facilitation of LEGO Serious Play. Sean has trained professionals from Google, Microsoft, Cathay Pacific, Spotify, the Royal Air Force, WPP, Sanofi, the NHS, the LEGO Group, the LEGO Foundation, Starbucks and many more! Sean has 30 years experience leading and supporting organisations to innovate, learn and change. He has sat on the other side of the table in senior positions including being a board member at the Royal Society of Arts and the Design Council, as a commissioner on the Mayor for London's Creative Industry Commission and as an Honorary Fellow in Enterprise at Durham University. Sean has made TV programmes with the BBC and has been on radio mostly to talk about design, innovation and creativity. he occasionally lectures and speaks. He's proud to be an International Association if Facilitators (IAF) CertifiedTM Professional Facilitator and an award winner of an IAF "Facilitation Impact Award." He is an experienced practitioner of LEGO Serious Play and was the lead author of the book "SERIOUSWORK, How To Facilitate Meetings & Workshops Using the LEGO Serious Play Method."

Reviews

Our first book, SERIOUSWORK, focused on simple LEGO Serious Play workshops. However, the life of a facilitator is never simple. Every facilitation situation is new. Facilitators need to be mindful about updating their skills, about reflecting their personality and about adapting their presence. Therefore, the journey towards facilitation mastery never stops.Sean has now untangled some of those complexities in this book that you are holding in your hands. There are three things that fascinate me about "Mastering the LEGO Serious Play Method" book.First, the attention to the consistency of workshop design. In an age where bad meetings are pitifully such a commonplace, it is truly refreshing that Sean emphasizes the need to build strong internal logic and linkages between workshop objectives, build questions, reflection questions and workshop outputs. Tying all those four elements closely together is a way of ensuring that the meetings will be productive.Second, I like the section in this book where he explains LEGO Serious Play Build Level 2: Shared Model building. Working on shared model creation is a messy process. Or as facilitation guru Sam Kaner has called it: facilitating through "the groan zone". Part of shared model building is where participants attempt to understand each other to find common ground. Part of it is where they generate new ideas. Given the conflicting goals in this part of the workshop, shared model building is frequently frustrating for the participants and challenging for the facilitator. Sean has suggested several practical ideas on how to make the process more manageable.Third, facilitators are often recruited for results. This may create a role conflict where they become too forceful to get to results. This is a good reminder for most facilitators - to facilitate people rather than to facilitate the process.
Sean has listed several useful tips on how to take it easy and stay "clean" as a facilitator by acting more like a conductor of the orchestra, who is not attempting to play all the instruments.I love the passion for facilitation that Sean shows throughout this book. I am certain that by reviewing his tips from time to time, every seasoned LEGO Serious Play professional can remind themselves on how to truly progress towards mastery of their skill.Marko Rillo - SeriousPlayPro.com founder