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SPEAKER 1: Next in our gaming demo series are Lewis Pinault
and Mark Hansen from a company that is known and beloved to
people around the world, but in particular, from this company
which is of course, LEGO.
This is the moment you are allowed to take out from
underneath your chairs, open-- or actually,
put them on your laps.
I'd wait for instruction what to do with them, but you're
allowed to bring them up from underneath the chairs.
Lewis Pinault is LEGO's Senior Director and General
Manager for the Serious Play for Business.
Mark Hansen is the Senior Director of Lego
Digital Play Studio.
They're going to take us through a Serious Play
exercise and tell us about Lego Universe.
Welcome Lewis Pinault and Mark Hansen.
[APPLAUSE]
LEWIS PINAULT: Thank you everyone.
It's OK.
You can start doing things if you want.
What I might suggest, you're going to need to do this in
about three minutes, this is very hard.
This is the hardest part of the session.
Are you ready?
You need to open the plastic bags on top and you need to
take out the yellow, the orange, and the red bricks.
And I will not tell you why, but they're the only bricks
that you're allowed to play with in the exercise that's
coming up, and you need to use all the yellow,
orange, and red bricks.
And yes, the little yellow brick with the eye is also
a yellow brick, and it's important to the exercise.
Now while you're rummaging about let's just do a
proper introduction.
So our session-- yes, that's not one of the conductors.
Great.
Is called New Play in Business.
And that's what this session is really about.
It's about play and new kinds of play for kids of all ages--
all of you here in the 21st century.
And my apologies in advance, you'll see a bit of LEGO.
You know, maybe it's too much in the presentation.
It's just because LEGO is kind of like Kleenex.
So it's just a word for the bricks.
It's not a big commercial here.
We're going to talk about this stuff.
So very, very quickly let's just talk about where LEGO
has been in the years that you've been.
The classic question for us at LEGO is what is this thing?
What is the thing you've got?
Is it a toy?
Is it just a toy?
Or might it also be a powerful tool?
And since I raise the question, we probably won't have time to
really do question/answer, but if you've got some comments you
can-- if you can handle the bricks and you're texting
devices at the same time, send us a couple of comments
along the way.
This is a coordination test.
And if you need to ask things like, can I get a millennium
falcon on a deal from the company store, come ask us
after, this is maybe not what we do here.
And what we've discovered is that it's of course both, but
it's increasingly become a powerful tool for many things.
It's a tool for acts of imagination and creativity.
It is a tool which is handy for doing things like
rapid prototyping.
It's a tool that is handy for-- well, for hands.
It is users out in the world, who don't work for LEGO who
have discovered its powerful properties and are using
it for many, many things.
What we have attuned ourselves to, in this last decade as
Google was being born, is that there is a user
community out there.
We began making things and publishing those things.
This is one of our first generation robotics products.
We then got a little wiser, and we found some select, trusted
people out there that we could co-build with and design, kind
of in secret, and special codes, but it was actually
pretty neat because we actually got a much richer, denser
products out of doing that.
Then we discovered that we could enlist a wider range
of users who were extremely creative, and we could
bring them on board and publish their products.
So this is a kit which would make 76 different train designs
out of one box, and those 76 trains were designed, not by
anybody at LEGO but by the user community that we would bring.
So then we got a little smarter and said hey, if there's that
much energy out there in the world, and they're developing
the stuff, why don't we give them some guides and tools and
license permissions to go out and publish for
themselves as well?
Until finally we're in this act of really working together and
supporting new businesses and partners and joint ventures
and an ability to really bring new people online.
One of the things-- you might recognize a couple of players
there-- that we recognized is that there are executives doing
problem-solving, doing team building who are hands on in
the bricks and bringing us into something else.
There are benefits that we put some study into
in the last 10 years.
There's something about the neuro psychology of the
hand mind interaction.
When we use our hands and when we model with our hands, when
you tell a story over what you model, you are-- because so
much of the brain is dedicated to the manipulation of the
hands, stuff happens.
There's more neuronal activity.
There's better effusion of blood to critical
areas of the brain.
It is a deep opportunity for us to engage and
think in a different way.
So we started to package stuff.
What you have in your hand is a LEGO Serious Play kit.
And in that we walk people through a series of exercises,
and the boxes get bigger and bigger, where we ask people to
build, to build themselves-- their roles in their
organizations, their identity, their personal identity.
We merge identities into collective identities.
We use that as the centerpiece of competitive landscapes.
We introduce agents and competitors, and changes
in regulations, and threats of mergers.
We then connect all the pieces together in the landscape and
then we start acting out scenarios in it, and talk
about stuff happening.
It's emergence.
It's from the system of complexity.
Suddenly the hidden pattern in order can come out.
You can touch it and you can feel it.
And we're doing this now with some of the largest aerospace
companies, energy, petrochemical companies, banks,
retailers-- building their stores to the future, board
level, what have you.
But now we're at this point where we need to sort
of let it happen.
What we haven't done in these last 10 years is let users take
control of it for themselves, and bring us to the next level.
Would you please-- I'm now going to skip ahead.
Have you got your bricks?
You got the right bricks?
OK, you've got 30 seconds, please build a duck.
build a duck.
Build a duck.
Can I go back for a second?
Thank you.
Anybody got a duck yet?
Can we see a couple?
Can I pick up a couple?
There's one.
Got another one.
A duck, a duck, anybody's duck?
Ready to share?
Peter, come on.
Very good.
OK, would you look around at other people's ducks and just
tell me if you've got any identical ducks.
Any ducks that are the same out there?
Or similar?
Or becoming one?
You can keep working on the ducks.
That's OK.
You've got something impressive.
Look at that.
Awesome.
I wish I could zoom in on it.
So I mean, in 30 seconds we begin to learn some stuff.
Simple pieces can generate tremendous levels
of complexity.
I can pretty much guarantee you-- we've done this
in audiences of 2,000.
We've very rarely had 2 ducks come out of the
same set of bricks.
And we often do this with just 5 or 6 bricks.
So everybody has their duck.
But it's something about the preconceptions we hold in
ourselves, the preconception of what a duck is.
And we think we have a commonly held belief of what a duck is,
but actually the line between those two things is a bit
longer than we think.
And the fun thing is that most things that you build-- I would
bet-- would be recognized as a duck, which is really fun.
And isn't it great that even with the same bricks we're
likely to construct something that really has
unique identities?
Now imagine these kinds of exercises connected in a
different kind of system.
We're starting to try to reach out to audiences like you, but
connected digitally across timezones, with companies of a
100,000 employees who can live and work in collaborate
together in the bricks in a different way.
We'll show you a short video of how we think that might be
starting to happen, and it begins, as always with LEGO,
with kids, and the values that we're learning from them.
Video please.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
In a world where electronics and technology is gaining and
we have a plastic product, the interesting part there is how
do we connect the physical with the new virtual
digital era of time?
Fans of LEGO already immersed in the digital era, began to
use their own software to build their creations.
LEGO responded by developing a proprietary software that would
allow fans to more fully customize their LEGO designs.
That's a great way for us also to empower consumers to do
their own things and we need to have software that not only
allows you to put together a few things, but actually
to do it modually.
And that was really quite unique of saying, wow, could we
really make a product line that would be completely designed by
consumers to be able to put onto the shelf?
We decided to bring Digital Designer forward and we allowed
consumers to build their own virtual creations.
We created a platform using LEGO Digital Designer where you
can actually build whatever LEGO design you want from a
certain pallet of LEGO elements, design the packaging
that you think would be really cool.
And then, enabling the consumers to order their own
very unique design through a on-demand supply chain.
We had over 200,000 downloads, and not just from one place in
the world, but from many different regions from
around the world.
We had more than 130,000 models uploaded in our gallery.
That's a huge amount of content being developed
by consumers or fans.
So here we are, three years later after the success of LEGO
Factory, in the middle of development of LEGO Universe
where 3D building in a virtual environment is really key.
It's about bringing kids together to build anything
they want, anything that's in their imagination.
But to bring alive collaborative building.
Building instructions on demand, and for the
physical space connecting the virtual space.
Being able to do hinging of doors and putting life
into the environment.
And this is very important to us and I really feel that
it's going to be a success.
And we can see that with the kids that we're doing business
with today through LEGO Factory, through building with
LEGO Digital Designer they're testing within LEGO Universe
that it just brings a whole nother level of LEGo
play to the market.
Well this is our second big LUP Event.
The first one was about their ideas and what
was their vision?
If you had an empty pallet, what would LEGO Universe be?
And we really fed off of that and they built a lot of amazing
stuff that we still have around here that still motivates
the team even today.
Now the games progressed enough and now it's about them
actually making their worlds in the game.
LUPs are LEGO Universe Partners and they work with us on
developing the game, and developing tools to actually
put content into the game.
And so they are very passionate about it, and they just
bring another viewpoint from what LEGO company brings.
You know many of them are lead engineers at all
these major aeronautical engineering companies.
You know, during the day they have a very serious, difficult
job, and they take that same engineering approach to how
they build things, and it's amazing.
Am I impressed with what they're doing?
There's no question.
They're amazing people.
They've had access to our tool set for what?
A day?
You know, they first learned how to use it in a three and a
half hour class yesterday, and they've got terrain,
they've got texture, and they've got water.
They've got enemies.
They've got everything in the world they could
possibly imagine.
I mean, we've got guys trained on this stuff for over a year
now and these guys pick it up like nothing.
It's really impressive.
Now we're at the point where we're finally getting hold of
the tools to build the games proper as opposed to just
models to be used in the game, which is where
we've been so far.
Imagine a kid from Thailand and one from Singapore, and one
from Denmark, and one from Brazil, and one from Canada all
building with bricks on the exact same house or
bridge or tower.
It's fantastic.
All LEGO Play Themes are somewhere in LEGO Universe to
be discovered and explored.
I mean, you're going to see pirates, you're going to see
ninjas, you're going to see robots.
You're going to see underwater stuff, you're going
to see city things.
Busy, chaotic, bustling-- you know, cities full of many
things running to and fro on their little missions.
And then dark, dangerous, Indiana Jones style jungles.
This place, this game world is going to be a rallying point
for LEGO enthusiasts of every age and every nationality.
The world itself, the bricks that you use, the buildings
that you make, the people that you interact with, the friends
that you can get, I mean, it's just endless.
Everything is possible.
I hope so.
Now today you've gotten a taste of exactly where LEGO is going
and what they're doing in the digital space.
And over the couple of years that we've been working on
this project we have seen that the kids laugh.
We've seen the kids participate.
We've seen the kids see the possibilities about what they
can do with these tools and where they can possibly go.
Now we have to be able to meet their expectation, and I truly
and firmly believe we can meet their expectation
and exceed it.
It's about bringing that LEGO play alive and having
new 21st century play in the marketplace.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[APPLAUSE]
MARK HANSEN: Thanks.
Now I'll just reiterate.
That is not a LEGO advertisement.
Because just as Lewis just demonstrated, a duck can be a
billion different combinations.
And now we're focusing on a virtual platform to connect
kids from all around the world.
And if we can take this plastic brick, right here, which our
owner is very, very, very passionate about, and we're
going to turn it to be virtual-- so we got a team, we
got a lot of people working on this.
But what does it mean?
How do we put creativity in the hands of kids, to be very safe?
That's one thing.
But just think, these kids, when they start working
together collaboratively, building creatively,
sharing their ideas.
More than just chatting, more than just putting pictures up.
It's about being creative world, and sharing what
their world looks like, and actually beginning to talk.
And today we're just talking about issues that we're going
to have to face in 30 years.
While it's the kids that are going to have to solve them.
And I really feel that when we get on a plane and we're
traveling here-- I mean, I'm pretty much on a plane 200
days out of the year.
And when people come up and say, wow, you work for LEGO.
You know, I did that.
I worked for it.
I love playing with LEGO and that's why I
started my company.
Or well, I did this, and I just found out in the back somebody
built a printer out of LEGO, which is pretty impressive.
And there's many, many, many things that happen
with this brick.
It is a common language, and we're trying to bring it to get
people to actually collaborate and work in great play.
Play brings great ideas to solve great problems.
So this is really what we go forward with to have--
the dream here is to get millions and millions of
people who love LEGO.
It's not just the child, but hopefully you guys will
begin to create and play.
It's really what I have to say, and I can see my time
is out so I better run away.
LEWIS PINAULT: That's great.
We're just going to say thank you.
And please take the kits with you.
You'll see there are feedback forms.
Maybe instead of the feedback form, in addition to it, build
a model of your Zeitgeist experience and just stick it
together with the feedback form.
Thanks so much.