What is it for?

Think of People and Team development, Innovation and Strategy, Coaching and Counseling.

Lego® Serious Play® is a radical, innovative, experiential method for strategic decision-making and problem-solving in complex environments designed to enhance team development, personal transformation and business performance. Its goal is fostering creative thinking by building experiential metaphors of personal/group identities, aspirations and experiences using Lego® bricks as a catalyst.

Why is it so powerful?

Lego® Serious Play® is a lean forward, hands on technique, where everyone plays and enables 100% participation and 100% buy-in, through visual and physical co-creation. It is based on a set of basic principles:

• Everyone has a voice: everyone within a group or an organization can contribute to the discussion and help generate solutions.
• Think with your hands: bypass the biased thinking by “doing” first trusting your hands-brain connection, then reflecting & sharing, in order to enhance understanding and creativity.
• The answer is in the system: leverage complexity through an eco-systemic approach, since no one in the group has the answer to the challenge (neither the facilitator nor the group’s leader).
• There is no ONE right answer: diverge, without boundaries, through different views and perceptions, and then converge to shared values and guiding principles

Key theories & concepts

The Lego® Serious Play® method is underpinned by some key theories and
concepts that make it remarkably powerful:

• The concept of play

• Storytelling and the use of metaphors, which are both key components of play

• Constructivism (Piaget, 1936) and its extended version developed by Papert (1986), constructionism. These theories state that learning is more effective when people construct something tangible in the real world.

• The interconnection between the brain and the hands.

• The flow model (Csíkszentmihályi, 1975) shows how the mental state of a person engaged in a specific activity can change depending on the challenge level and
  skill level. During a LSP workshop participants often reach the optimal level of engagement when they are in a ‘hands on’ process: this is what Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’.

How it works

A Lego® Serious Play® workshop is a structured process where participants are asked to use Lego® bricks to build models representing their thoughts, reflections and ideas.

• Normally a Lego® Serious Play® workshop is at the same time closely regulated and tailor-made. Trust in the process should always coexist with a strong value and purpose driven facilitation.

• That’s why the workshop should be led by a certified and experienced facilitator always, who has the task to design the best possible experience together with the sponsor, and then to guide participants through the activities.