Creative Problem-Solving with LEGO Serious Play

Some problems seem impossible to fix.

That decision you need to make but it’s impossible to choose: left or right?

That career change you are contemplating but somehow it looks like a mountain too high to climb.

Your team’s dynamic is off and you just don’t know how to fix the team.

Some problems need a creative push to be solved, for solutions to be found. These are the problems you can solve with a LEGO Serious Play workshop facilitator and creative coach. But let’s start at the beginning.

What is LEGO Serious Play?

LEGO Serious Play was developed by Lego in the late 1990s to solve some of the hard problems they faced around marketing and growing the LEGO brand. Made open-source since 2010, LEGO Serious Play can now be enjoyed and used freely as a tool for finding answers to the hard question and solutions to the biggest problems.

LEGO Serious Play is built on the inclusive and participatory nature of building with LEGO bricks. Similar to coaching, LEGO Serious Play is centred around the idea that no expert is needed to provide an answer - the answer is already in the room. LEGO Serious Play can be used in 1:1 work and workshops for small or big groups - that’s what makes it a very versatile and flexible approach.

The 3 Rules of LEGO Serious Play

While there are no limits to what challenges or questions are being answered with LEGO, nor how many people participate in the process, there are 3 core rules to the game. These are designed to encourage inclusion, give everyone a voice and to enable shared learning.

Rule 1: Everybody builds

Everybody builds! In a team setting this means all hands on deck: from the team leader to the newbie on the team. Depending on the complexity of the problem, the LEGO workshop facilitator either asks every participant to build a model individually, or the team is invited to build a model together.

In a 1:1 coaching setting, the LEGO coach might even participate and builds their own model to facilitate the development of reflective coaching questions and support the client in the meaning-making process.

Rule 2: You own your model

Once the building process is complete, participants explain and share the meaning with the group or the coach. In this phase, it is crucial that each participant owns his or her model. That means only the participant can give meaning to the model that they built. Others can ask questions, but the ownership of meaning lies solely with the builder.

Rule 3: All discussions focus on the model

One factor that makes LEGO Serious Play such a successful method of brainstorming is the externalisation of the problem at hand. Building it into a model that can be looked at, analysed and expanded on, opens the way to rich metaphors. For many people, this makes it easier for them to talk about their problems, worries and fears. The LEGO workshop facilitator ensures that all discussions focus on the model only, not on the owner.

Positive Psychology & LEGO Serious Play

Building LEGO models is like finding new solutions one brick at a time. Building LEGO encourages thinking with your hands, something that has gone out of fashion in our head-first, analytically designed workplaces.

How does LEGO Serious Play work?

Building LEGO activates a process called thinkering: thinking and tinkering. It’s the creation and meaning making of concepts in your mind while tinkering, or physically engaging, with your hands. Often, participants build models to answer a question and only later, when they express and explain what they have built the meaning making becomes conscious. This process goes back to Psychologist Jean Piaget, who developed the concept of “learning by making”, using our hands to create models of knowledge and understanding.

Building a LEGO model activates areas in the mind dedicated to motor functioning. When you build what you think you therefore draw on more power in your brain, tapping into areas that hold additional information and allows you to create new ideas and solutions that have been ‘hidden’ from you before.

Creative Coaching with LEGO

LEGO Serious Play is a great tool to be used in 1:1 career coaching, life coaching or leadership coaching. Building a model to visualise what is important in your career can help open up pathways that you had not considered before. A model that represents you at your best in terms of wellbeing and flourishing can inform how you design your life and what priorities to set in terms of work-life balance and self-compassion. And for leadership coaching, building a model that represents your role as a leader opens up new lines of inquiry to help you find your authentic leadership style.

Workshop Facilitation with LEGO Serious Play

Teams in the tech industry have to deal with a lot of change and uncertainty and sometimes they can use that little bit of extra support in finding their mojo as a team to better work together. A LEGO workshop inspires creativity, a lot of fun and gives a voice to everyone - making this a naturally inclusive activity, tapping into the wisdom of the team as a whole.

Creative LEGO workshops can be facilitated in person - and also remotely as an online workshop. Each of the participants will be sent a small LEGO pack prior to the workshop in the comfort of their own home offices.

Are you ready to build?

Build your happier future - one brick at a time. Come work with me and let’s bring more play into work:

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