What do you do when you’ve got a team full of smart people, the solutions to your challenges are in the room, but the conventional ways of accessing that brilliance aren’t working the way you want them to?
This is a job for LEGO Serious Play, to help you get that collective genius out of their heads, and on to the table where it can start to become something bigger.
Build Better Ideas
The LEGO Serious Play method is a powerful way to bring people together to think at their best, communicate well, and turn the best versions of their ideas into innovative action. Its deep empirical roots in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and play-based learning tells us that people build a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the world by building their influence and sense of possibility upon it with their hands.
LEGO Serious Play activates every participant’s latent creativity (yes, even that person’s, and yes, even yours), and creates the conditions for effective dialogue for everyone at the table, at every level of the organisation.
How Can We Use It?
LEGO Serious Play is an incredibly flexible process that can be applied to a huge range of challenges. It excels in the face of a complex topic with no single “right answer,” and when you want absolutely everyone’s input, even over conventional barriers to communication.
Here’s a few broad examples, but you’ve probably got a more interesting one.
What Happens in a Session?
I know, I know, it’s a big pile of LEGO, it must be for team building, right?
I mean, you’re not wrong. But that’s the by-product, not the intention. LEGO Serious Play is an intensely collaborative experience. No matter what the topic of conversation, your people will come away having experienced a deeper way of sharing and communicating with each other, they’ll have had that big bonding experience of co-creating something they’re deeply invested in, and they’ll have had fun together.
(and yes, that topic can absolutely be who they are and how they work as a team.)
But it doesn’t begin and end there. This process really hits its straps when there’s a big, important topic to play with.
Every LEGO Serious Play session looks different, but they all bubble down to a common formula:
LEGO Serious Play is Hands-On and All-In.
It works best when everyone involved in the topic at hand is on hand, thinking with their hands. It is incredibly powerful facing a complex topic of conversation with more than one “right answer” that needs everyone’s minds in the mix. Each workshop is custom designed to take your conversation where it needs to go to meet the outcomes you want to achieve.
Method to the Madness
LEGO Serious Play is a facilitated method for meetings and workshops that demand creative problem solving and powerful, authentic communication. The facilitator asks a series of open-ended questions designed to invite as many perspectives on the topic as there are people at the table. Using the LEGO bricks on the table as a common physical language of metaphors, participants build a model to capture their ideas and contributions.
The conversation that follows is led by those models’ stories, before embarking on a collective experience of finding shared understanding, and balancing ideas that need to coexist. It is a uniquely powerful way to access knowledge sharing, problem solving, and decision making.
As every participant is invited to approach the same topics from a verbal, visual, and kinaesthetic perspective, they access deeper and broader thinking before the pressure to share arises, not only giving every participant a voice, it gives them a strong one.
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
RICHARD LINGARD (not Plato!)
from “A Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University Concerning His Behaviour and Conversation in the World”
published 1670
Meet Your Facilitator
Joel Birch
Joel Birch is a learning designer, facilitator, and conscientious objector to ever fully growing up.
As a Certified Facilitator of LEGO Serious Play, Joel uses the power of play, stories, and solving problems by thinking with our hands to help individuals and teams to craft deep understanding, rich communication, and creative solutions. Why just work on a challenge when you could play with it instead?
Building on a successful career enabling and developing the creativity of children and their teachers in schools in Perth and overseas, he now works across a wide range of industries, with groups ranging from youth to senior leadership.
