by Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen
After decades of growth and innovation—in 2000, the
company was the fifth-largest toy maker in the world—LEGO hit a major
slump. In January 2004, it announced a huge deficit. It was, by its
own accounts, bleeding cash to the tune of $1 million a day. Owner and CEO
Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, grandson of founder Ole Kirk Christiansen, was at the
helm of a strategy to turn the company around. He stepped down and
appointed Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a former McKinsey consultant, as new CEO of the
company.
Somehow, the
company honored with the Best Toy of the Century award twice had completely
lost touch with its core consumers. How did it happen? And how
did LEGO come out of the fog and solve its own mystery?
Look for patterns
A team of researchers immersed themselves in data on
how kids play with Legos through conversations. “We were constantly asking,
‘What is that kid doing over there? Is that the same as what this kid is doing
here?’” one member of the team told us. After an intense period of discussion
about the data, each researcher stepped away and made his or her own decision
about the most important patterns. The researchers brought a whole lifetime of
critical training to the pattern recognition process, but they also brought
themselves. They melded art with science by using their own perspectives to
discern the experiences of the children.
When all of the
researchers came back to the conversation, they shared their choices. “Once
we started deciding on the patterns,” one team member said, “we kept saying to
one another, ‘Is this really supported by the data?’ Then we would go back and
check to be certain.”
“You need to think
about it and talk about it,” said one of the researchers. “We
didn’t say, ‘Okay, first we are going to decide, and second, we are all going
to vote, and third, we are going to move on to the next step.’ The process
was much more nonlinear.”
During a session
with the photo diaries, for example, the researchers noted that the children’s
bedrooms in New Jersey tended to be meticulously designed by the mothers. “They
look like they’re from the pages of Elle Décor,” noted one participant. Another
child’s bedroom in Los Angeles was suspiciously tidy with a stylish
airplane mobile hanging down. “That looks staged,” an anthropologist observed,
and the team discussed what that might mean. These were children who were
driven everywhere in SUVs with carefully managed after-school activities. The
researchers noted that the moms were also “staging” their children’s
development. They were trying to shape children who were creative, fun,
outgoing, humorous, intelligent, and quiet all at the same time. Throughout the
conversation, critical theory from the human sciences provided a framework for
the observations. The researchers discussed how these “staged” childhoods
resembled Foucault’s “panopticon,” where activities were under surveillance and
subject to disciplinary measures. One of the analysts drew a picture with a
large circle and a very tiny circle. “This is the space we used to have for
playing,” he said, pointing to the large circle, “and this ever-diminishing
circle is the space these kids have right now.”
In this same
session, several researchers reported that children were hiding things from
their parents. The observers noted the acronym POS (parent
over shoulder) so prevalent in online gaming. One researcher reported
being invited into a young boy’s room to see his most secret prized
possession. The child pulled a shoebox out from under the bed and announced
that it was filled with magic poisonous mushrooms.
“We asked one kid
to design his ideal room,” another researcher told us. “And
it had all sorts of covert elements: booby traps and CSI [from the Crime Scene
Investigation TV series] secret doorways. Everything was communicating, ‘Stay
out!’” The anthropologists discerned that the box of mushrooms and the
booby-trapped room were both reactions against the staging and surveillance
happening in the children’s lives. After further discussion, the team saw a
pattern emerge more clearly: the children were suffocating.
“These kids were
bubble-wrapped,” one team member recalled. “Every physical space in
their life was curated, managed, or staged by an adult. Whereas children in the
past used to find freedom and an appropriate level of danger on the streets,
playing on sidewalks throughout the neighborhood or roaming free in the
country, these children needed to find their freedom in virtual spaces through
online gaming or in imaginary zones (like the box of magic mushrooms).”
An important
insight came to the group through the discussion of all of these observations. One
role of play for these children was to find pockets of oxygen, away from adult
supervision. The group realized that kids were desperate to sneak some element
of danger into their lives. If the researchers had used a more linear
process—one focused on the properties of the children’s play—the team would
never have thought to put poisonous mushrooms and booby traps in the same
category. But the nonlinear act of connecting the dots revealed that the
underlying phenomenon of both behaviors was the same.
At another point in
the discussion, the researchers reported that kids in both Germany and the
United States had systems of rankings and hierarchies everywhere. One
researcher told the group about a boy’s elaborate game of ranking his fantasy
football players. The boy could rattle off endless statistics about every one
of his imaginary players. Another anthropologist talked about the almost
incessant discussion of videogame scores within a group of boys. He reported
that every day seemed to bring a new assessment of the hierarchy based on the
videogame’s rankings. The research team turned again to the phenomenon: what
did the kids’ attention to rank say about the role of play? The team discovered
that just as animals use play as a means of establishing social order and
hierarchy, so too do children. They are playing to understand who is alpha and
who is beta.
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