With more than 90 years of presence in the toy industry - and its iconic construction bricks for children - the company of Danish origin does not miss the opportunity to update itself in terms of organizational innovation. This time with Design Sprint. 

Following the spirit that its name emulates - “playing well” -, the toy company found, in a moment of stagnation, the ideal opportunity to organize a revolution that would end traditional production and management models. The management leadership knew very well that to allow new horizons a change had to be created from the roots, and not something merely superficial. They only wanted one thing: to put aside the boredom of the habit to give rise to a new stage - with the help of Design Sprint - where fun and proactivity became the work culture.

This was how a general pause was suddenly ordered, in all departments of the company, for two months, in order to educate and apply a new methodology that promised not only to meet the new objective, but also to cause a deep and massive impact that would cross the entire organization.

In this case, LEGO chose to consider the methodology designed by Google and which was later shared with other industries, becoming highly used by many teams: Design Sprint. 

From a conceptual level, the Design Sprint is a proven process for designing and creating prototypes, measuring the impact of an idea in a period of 3 to 5 days. It serves to solve specific challenges by creating new products or refining existing ones.

The particularity of this tool lies in the opportunity it offers to focus exclusively on the ideas (the what), instead of deciphering the actions necessary to carry them out (the how). Although it has a fixed configuration of steps, the result can be as flexible and varied as the team carrying it out needs it to be.

LEGO + DESIGN SPRINT

And one day it had to happen. The management area of ​​the Danish company realized an obvious need: a radical change in the way of working. Without too much preamble, the decision was made to completely stop both the production line and the internal departments so that the effect would be truly extreme and striking. An organizational transformation on a scale that would undoubtedly leave traces and some distance traveled for many companies that are still unaware of business innovation.

From April to June 2017, a large part of LEGO's internal agency put aside their day jobs and embarked on the famed Design Sprint.

There were two months of arduous training for facilitators and collaborators, where the primary mission was clear: that each and every one of the Lego members be experts in Design Sprint. The particularity? They would work with physical objects, not just virtual ones.

The innovative aspect of this call had to do with the determination of the roles and resources during the escalation process throughout the company, lasting two months.

In this sense, the creation of a “control tower” was called, where a team of five creative directors who helped detect the challenges to be solved, were tasked with writing short sprint summaries and showed up to help facilitate the individual sprints.

One of the first stages that took place was the meeting of the management leadership. In it, copies of the "Sprint" book were distributed along with the daily schedule, which would be executed every Monday for the next two remaining months. In terms of collaborative work, a general rule was raised: prepare for the next exercise while the team is working.

The redesign of the design sprint flow involved establishing only 5 days of work. The main idea was to design a method that was quick to learn - by the collaborators - and easy to apply in terms of solving problems. In these cases, going to the trouble of designing and customizing a new process was something that could not be done. Following these guidelines, the main objective was to produce the same results, over and over again, over a short period of time.

The Design Sprint revolution

This was about generating a low-investment framework that could be applied without too much preparation and experience. Likewise, we sought to obtain a 360° turn to achieve much faster and more visible results, through the practice of Design Sprint.

This is how people ended up accepting the challenge, since they saw that everything fit together correctly. Being that it was a short experiment that came like a captivating lightning bolt that fulfilled its purposes, achieving immediate results. Another of the premises that we sought to fulfill was to involve all collaborators and create a critical mass that invades the company as a whole. This had a massive impact that caught everyone's attention.

The control tower

In these cases, it is very possible that one of the intervals in the Design Sprint model does not require excessive preparation, but coordinating dozens of them requires a lot of planning. This is where the idea of creating ways to speed up the sprints was thought: creating a kind of “air traffic control tower”, with a group of creative directors - they played the role of facilitators in this instance - who, in addition to teaching the steps to follow to their teams, had the task of becoming sentinels of the sprints. 

Motivational talks were given to the facilitators in the mornings, along with a brief evening regrouping, to carry out the appropriate retrospectives every Thursday. During the early stages, this action allowed managers to break down their work days, but as the weeks progressed, these meetings revealed daily problems such as lack of resources. 

Results

In the first week of training, LEGO achieved 10 simultaneous sprints and in less than a year they completed more than 150. With this, a lasting change was made, where sprints became a permanent element to work uninterruptedly. With so many people working at the same time, the work environment became much more friendly and lively in the office, forging new and strong connections.

Since the initial 2-month experiment, the company has completed more than 150 design sprints. In between, prototypes were made and dozens of products were delivered. The acceptance of prototypes became real products and practices. Without a doubt, the launch of Design Sprint was a resounding success.