Lego Serious Play workshops are run by a facilitator who provides the introduction, skills building exercises and challenges for all participants. When participants are split in groups each table also needs a facilitator in charge of facilitating the discussions among their table, ensuring that the findings are recorded and asking the right questions to encourage reflection among the participants. Facilitators are trained to enforce the three rules of the game: (1) think with your hands: build first, think after. Participants should grab Lego blocks as soon as the challenge is presented, rather than waiting to think of the answer first, allowing their hands to do the thinking. (2) everybody builds their own model. When working on the individual models stage, as done in this workshop, each participant builds their own model. With more time you may also plan a common, integrated model where participants work together on the same model. (3) Reflect on what you’ve built: having built their models, it’s time to share. When participants are explaining their models and the stories behind, facilitators encourage reflection by asking meaningful questions (for example, was there a reason behind choosing a green brick for this? What does this flag signify? Etc.)

See the facilitation slides used during the workshop here and the instructions for table facilitators here.

Debriefing a workshop is an important step in the process, gathering and synthesizing all insights that arose during the workshop. With a clear debrief report the learnings from the workshop can be taken up in the next steps in the process, and implemented in the design of the climate service itself. The conclusions of this workshop highlighted the importance of information such as urban versus non-urban simulations, soil condition, localized information and information about the magnitude or frequency of extreme events, among others. Ideas for climate services included the spatial location of main problems, training technicians & citizens in the use of CS, aggregated scenario building tool responding to adopted practices, warnings and risk maps, among others. Considerations were also made towards the design principles: the ways in which such information should be presented and what to keep in mind in the design of the climate service. Such design principles included, for example: considering integration at planning level, considering policy and transparency, improving the information sharing between institutions, presence of a central authority and the varying levels of knowledge, skills, beliefs and worries of different stakeholders. For more details on the workshop findings see the workshop debrief report here.