Lego Serious Play Workshops
Create a more engaging & fun experience for your workshop participants
Are you looking for a different, more interesting way to facilitate an important conversation?
Lego® Serious Play® workshops are a creative, playful, and engaging approach to improving workplace communication, energising teams, and exploring issues and opportunities.
This team building and workplace collaboration method draws on extensive research and scientific principles from the fields of psychology, learning, neuroscience and business with the added bonus of fun.
As an experienced business psychologist and accredited Lego® Serious Play® facilitator, I can work with your business to design and deliver a unique Lego® Serious Play® workshop. Each workshop can be delivered in a COVID safe environment, with the potential to explore a broad range of interesting and thought-provoking topics, depending on your needs.
What are the benefits of using Lego® Serious Play®?
Every team member feels ‘heard’ and valued
Lego® Serious Play® creates space for everyone to share their ideas and perspectives. Each participant builds a response to the question being explored by the group, sharing the unique story of their model while others listen and ask questions.
Where groups work together to create a shared model, the ideas behind each participant’s unique contribution are preserved throughout the conversation, helping them to feel ‘heard’.
This helps to avoid that all-too-common scenario of quieter participants having their voices drowned out, creating opportunities for everyone to have a ‘voice’ in a more equitable way.
Open and honest communication
The safe space created by Lego® Serious Play® often leads to participants feeling more confident in expressing their ideas and opinions.
Participants attach meaning to the physical, tangible object they’ve created (i.e. the Lego model), and then share their thoughts by ‘telling the story’ of what they’ve built.
In this way, the focus is on what they’ve created, rather than on them - making it feel safer to speak up and contribute. The use of metaphors and stories also creates a sense of safety for some participants.
Team and organisational collaboration
Lego® Serious Play® can also support collaboration and cross-functional communication, with this in turn helping to break down down silos. As groups problem solve together, new connections and insights often emerge, with the process creating a shared sense of energy and purpose.
With team members enjoying a more collaborative and strategic environment, these sessions can lead to more dynamic organisational conversations in the future.
When should we use Lego® Serious Play®?
Ultimately, the method can be used in any type of business or industry, and at any level within an organisation. Having said this, there are certain types of issues, problems and questions that Lego® Serious Play® is most suited to. Put simply, the method is most useful in the situations where…
You want to explore a complex topic or question to which there is no single ‘right’ answer or solution
You want everyone’s input - not just the loudest voices in the room or the people who always tend to speak up!
You want to create higher levels of engagement and participation by breaking the usual dynamic of meetings and group conversations
Collaboration & co-creation are important for generating the most diverse and creative ideas and solutions
What can I expect from a Lego® Serious Play® workshop?
While the context and topics may vary, Lego® Serious Play® sessions typically follow a set of key principles.
Warm-up
The session starts with a few warm-up activities aimed at teaching the group the basic skills and principles of the approach. This helps to address the concerns of any participants who feel they aren’t ‘good’ at Lego. The group soon realises that the approach is all about using metaphors and stories – no Lego building skills (whatsoever) are required!
Model building
The facilitator then guides participants through a series of key steps: Question, Build, Share and Capture. These steps explore the key questions or topics targeted during the session. Depending on the goal and context, a combination of individual and shared (i.e. group) builds are completed.
Importantly, every build includes an opportunity for participants to share the meaning and story of their model with the rest of the team, enabling 100% participation. The facilitator’s role is to encourage conversation, identify key insights, and ask clarifying questions to strengthen understanding.
Participants
Ideally, a Lego® Serious Play® workshop includes 6-8 participants and one facilitator. While it is possible to run sessions with larger groups, participants will still work in smaller groups of 6-8 people during the session.
Session length
The minimum length for a session is 2 to 2.5 hours. We bring all materials to the session, including some great big bags of Lego designed specifically for Lego® Serious Play® workshops!
WHY WORK WITH US?
Given our formal qualifications and experience in Organisational Psychology, we bring a depth of understanding in human behaviour to our work with individuals, teams, and organisations. In working with you, we are also able to draw upon our broad experience and knowledge in the areas of leadership development, neuroscience, positive psychology, employee motivation and performance, and behavioural change.