LEGO Serious Play
The facilitator poses a question, everyone builds an answer with LEGO bricks, each person explains the meaning of their model, and the group reflects on what they heard. The cycle repeats with harder questions, often moving from individual models to a shared model and then to a landscape of connected models. Everyone builds and everyone speaks, so the most senior voice does not set the frame.
Use at a strategy or team offsite when you need a team to make its assumptions about identity, purpose or the future concrete and talk about them on equal footing.
Solves: Strategy conversations stay abstract and polite, and the same two or three people do all the talking.
- 1
Step 1: Skills building. Everyone builds a few warm-up models (a tower, a metaphor) to learn that bricks can carry meaning (20-30 min).
- 2
Step 2: Pose the first real question, such as 'Build a model of your role at its best' (2 min).
- 3
Step 3: Everyone builds in silence within a short time limit (5-10 min).
- 4
Step 4: Each person shares the story of their model while others ask questions about the model, not the person (15-25 min).
- 5
Step 5: Reflect as a group on patterns and differences across the models (10 min).
- 6
Step 6: Repeat with harder questions, then combine individual models into one shared model the whole team agrees represents them (60-180 min).
- Use a trained facilitator for anything beyond a taster. The questions and the shared-model step need practice.
- Hold the rule that questions go to the model ('what does this part mean?'), not to the person.
- Photograph every model with its builder's one-line meaning before people dismantle anything.
- Half-day taster: skills building plus two individual rounds.
- Full method: individual, shared and landscape models across one or two days.