tl;dr – This is a workshop that shows you how you can use LEGO Serious Play as a Systems Thinking tool to help us make sense of (and better decisions in) a world that is more complex and unpredictable than our institutions are designed to handle.

Our schools are not immune to the brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible state of today’s world, and centering the best of our humanity is our best response to it.

The time to light up our latent abilities as systems thinkers is well and truly upon us, the days of understanding the world in neat, linear pockets of cause and effect are long gone.

We’re not trained to think like that, and our institutions are built to reward and cultivate compartmentalisation and linearity. Every challenge we face in our schools, from student outcomes to recruitment, to sources of funding, to wellbeing and mental health, to community engagement are all connected, but we lack a way to make those relationships accessible and approachable.

(I’ve been around this circuit for a while, you know where I’m going with this)

Play can help.

In particular, LEGO Serious Play offers us a world-renowned method to bring ideas to the surface that don’t often see daylight (which means they’ve been invisible to the AI systems we’re increasingly trusting to inform us), to hear from everybody at the table, and to do it in a way that brings out our best thinking and communication.

When we bring everyone’s voice in to conversation using a methodology that is also visual and spatial, it helps us to see the connections, the flows, and the gaps that often hide in plain sight.

Once we can see it, we can understand it.

Once we understand it, we can build better responses.

You’ll walk away from this session with two things.

First, a tangible experience: you’ll use the LEGO Serious Play method to build and map complex systems in real-time.

Second (and most importantly): you’ll take away some insights on how you might bring a playful approach to complex issues back at school – big or small (they’re the same thing, just zoomed in or out differently.)

(You’ll also have a lot of fun.)