LEGO Serious Play is a powerful method for harnessing the full range of expertise and perspectives on your team to solve complex problems. It helps your people to embrace complexity, communicate powerfully, and better exercise their creativity. The best part? You do it through play, over a giant pile of LEGO.

You’ve got a school full of smart people. You already know that. The solutions to your challenges are in the room. You can use the LEGO Serious Play method to get those ideas out of individual heads, and onto the table where they can be tested, improved upon, and played with. The LEGO bricks are the medium for creative expression, a common language across backgrounds and perspectives. Participants build their ideas and express them by telling stories so they’re more fully heard and understood. The LEGO Serious Play process then helps to bring those ideas and stories together into creative ways forward.

Approaching big, important ideas playfully creates a shortcut to activating your team’s flow state, and draws everyone to approach those ideas far more holistically kinaesthetically and visually as well as verbally. Every participant gets to approach the ideas from a cognitive starting point that resonates for them, be drawn to consider them from multiple perspectives, then bring them to conversation in a way that levels the playing field of personality, experience, tenure, and standing group dynamics.

Voices are heard. Perspectives are understood. Ideas find their right place.

LEGO Serious Play was developed inside the LEGO Group around the turn of the 21st Century as a process to give depth, form, and flexibility to strategic planning, and since 2010 has been available under an open-source, community-based model. This has allowed a broad field of practice to emerge, and given it a place in a huge range of contexts.

In this immersive pre-conference workshop, participants will experience the LSP method in full detail from initial provocation to actionable outcomes, and will be guided to open source materials so they can experiment further on their own. A one-day workshop isn’t enough to provide full training and certification in the process, but it will give you enough experience and grounding to approach the open-source documentation and integrate it into your own facilitation design.

Outcomes:

• Participants will experience a full LEGO Serious Play workshop, from initial provocation to actionable outcomes.
• Participants will gain an understanding of the LEGO Serious Play methodology and its principles.
• Participants will gain insight in how to incorporate Lego Serious Play into their own professional practice as a tool for facilitating creative thinking and communication.
• Participants will learn the baseline fundamentals of running a LEGO Serious Play conversation, including how to align objectives with techniques, managing the materials and setting participants up for success in the process.

How LEGO Serious Play Can Be Used:

With Educators/Professionals

• Team development – Communicate powerfully, get everyone on the same page, and build rapport through purposeful play.
• Strategic planning – See the big picture in the detail it deserves, and build a powerful way forward.
• Vision & identity – Capture and crystallise who you are as a team, as an organisation, and as a dynamic entity over time.
• Community engagement – Sideline the group-specific jargon and bring stakeholders and groups together to speak a common language about what’s important to your school community.
• System dynamics – Capture what’s important, build connections, then see the patterns to unlock change in a complex system.
• Change management – Build consensus about change without missing any of the nuance of your team’s relationship with it.
• Recruitment – Forget canned Q&A. Have authentic conversations with applicants that cut straight to their values & soft skills.

With Students

• To engage students in a topic or lesson and encourage them to explore and express their ideas and thoughts through building and storytelling.
• To facilitate self-reflection and communication around transitions, direction, change, and decision-making.
• Epistemology-wrangling in cross-curricular, interdisciplinary spaces.
• To support project-based learning, helping students to grapple with nuance and communicate the parts of a project without any straight answers.
• To improve communication and collaboration abilities among students.
• To facilitate group discussions and decision-making in a classroom setting, by using LEGO models as a visual representation of ideas and perspectives.