What Would Your Duck Look Like?

The March 2011 PDMA
Philadelphia Chapter Meeting on Rebuilding LEGO was held on the 45th floor of the Comcast Center. Ninety attendees were each given a small pack of six LEGO pieces and asked to make a duck - no peeking at your neighbor!  An amazing thing happened - almost no two ducks were constructed alike!

The speaker, David Robertson, the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology at the Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland and also on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School in Philadelphia, commented that each time he does this exercise, the same thing happens, with only 6 pieces, innovation flourishes.

He used this exercise to illustrate one of the key points in the story of LEGO’s narrow escape from bankruptcy and their fantastic comeback. LEGO found that sticking to its roots, basic LEGO blocks and figures that can be used to make anything imagination can dream up, had much more lasting appeal for consumers than LEGO components for assembly into predesigned objects.

Robertson’s insight from this aspect of the LEGO near-death experience was two-fold: provide the space to create and the guidance to deliver.