User Experience Fishbowl at the LEGO Group in Copenhagen

Last week, we visited the LEGO Group’s office in Copenhagen. Where the office in Billund is hard to miss, the one in Copenhagen is nicely hidden in the city center. It reminded me of Harry Potter searching for platform nine-and-three-quarters. 😄

One reason for our visit was to gather feedback from real users of our product, Columinity. We can look long and hard into our crystal ball to search for clues about customers’ experiences or ask them instead. With 150 active teams, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find someone using it. 🔎

During our session, we focused on talking with various Agile Coaches using it to support their teams in continuously improving based on scientific insights and evidence-based feedback.

We *almost* started a classic open discussion (the horror 😱)…

Luckily, the idea of running a lightweight version of the Liberating Structure “User Experience Fishbowl” came to mind. This seemed to make sense, given our goal of collecting real users’ experiences. 🤔

The flow was simple:
1. A small group of Agile Coaches positioned themselves in a circle in the center. For about 10 minutes, they started talking about their experiences using Columinity. 
2. At the same time, Denny de Waard, myself, and a few others were listening. Whenever a question came to mind, we threw fish food (representing the question) into the bowl. Christina Mumm had the brilliant idea of using LEGO bricks as “fish food.” 🐠 
3. After 10 minutes, we flipped roles. The users became the listeners, and we (the original listeners) positioned ourselves in the middle and shared what we noticed in the first round. What experiences stood out? What did we like, surprise, and maybe even worry about?
4. For a final time, the users returned to the center of the fishbowl and continuously shared new thoughts and experiences. 
5. After roughly 45 minutes ⏰, we closed the UX Fishbowl.

I considered it a valuable experience. It resulted in lots of feedback we can use to improve the use of our product. It was also an excellent (IMHO) example of how you can use Liberating Structures in a lightweight manner without any preparation.

Now, you probably think:

“Hey, why haven’t you included real-life pictures? Did it actually happen? Or are you just making things up here…”

Fair point. You’ll never know, but it’s a nice story, right? 😃

Additional thoughts by Christina Mumm — Agile Coach Competency Lead at the LEGO Group:

“This is not only modeling the value of Liberating Structures ;) It’s about deliberately creating opportunities for necessary conversations across any divide. In this case, we are choosing to close the gap between internal and external (customer- vendor). Working as one team brings value to everyone much faster. Why would we want to keep a distance? I hope we can inspire others to do the same by walking the talk this way.”

Whether it happened or not, why don’t you try this yourself? 
If you already have used UX Fishbowl, how did it work for you?