It might seem like a very weird concept but let me explain why the most effective people and businesses are made of Lego.
We find ourselves in a world where things are constantly changing. Businesses need to adapt if they are to thrive, or even survive. The same applies to people. Often, that change will involve a radical change in the way things are done. A rebuilding, if you will. All too often the really big change comes not from existing players in the market but out of a clear blue sky.
The thing with Lego is that with a bit of imagination and some skill you can build anything. More importantly, once you have built something, you can take the building blocks and, with the same resources, completely change what you have built into something else. Using the skills you acquired to build the current thing you can build the next one better.
The best businesses and people realise that this is the way forward. You may have a great business or career but it won’t last. What you need to do is take the resources you have, and maybe add a few more in order to change into something new.
In the case of a business, it will have assets such as skilled workers, maybe a factory or an office, equipment etc. A well run business will be continuously looking for new and better uses for those assets. Retraining people, reallocating equipment and thinking about how the office or factory space can be changed for the better is what running a modern business is all about. In the same way that a child (or adult) will take apart the toy they have just made and build another, hopefully bigger and better one using the same bricks then business leaders must do the same. Far more effective to build another thing out of Lego than throw away all the Lego and try to build the next thing from Meccano. Far more effective to retrain existing people on a constant basis than let their skills become redundant and then have to get rid of them and recruit new people with the next set of skills, only to have to change them again in a short period of time.
The same is true of people. The older you get the more skills you have that are irrelevant. We don’t need lots of skills, we need the right skills There’s No Skill Shortage, Just A Shortage Of The Right Skills. Many skills that were vital and highly valued when I trained forty years ago are no longer required. People who aren’t effective take the view that they have spent so much time and / or money acquiring a specific skill or getting a particular job that they must continue down that route no matter what. Effective people realise that everything we have done in the past is a sunk cost Why Are Sunk Costs Important? and what is gone is gone. Whatever we have built in the past, we can use the bricks to build something new and better career wise, business wise or even in our personal lives.
There is, however a problem with modern Lego which beautifully sums up our education system. When I was a child all you could buy were the bricks and then you had to use your imagination and developing skills to build whatever you wanted. All you were taught was how to use the bricks, not what to build. Now you buy Lego kits to build specific things. We are teaching children to follow instructions in a kit to build one thing. When they want to change it, they need a new kit. Education is the same. We teach people how to do things whereas we should be teaching skills to enable people to build, do and change things.
Effectiveness is about constantly rearranging the bricks to build something better, not following instructions.
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