The LEGO® Serious Play® Superpower: Shaping the Future and Transforming Teams

LEGO® Serious Play® is not just a method, but a transformative force that helps teams shape the future and proactively achieve it. Over 20 years of experience in applying this method have shown us that it consistently inspires participants by making their ideas and thoughts alive, tangible and usable. This enthusiasm is reflected in the unique benefit that we need in our uncertain times: the ability to use LEGO® Serious Play® to think far beyond the current status quo and create a new, promising vision for the future.

Playful Transformation and Team Dynamics

The LEGO® Serious Play® method briefly explained

Transformation is everywhere. We have to change so many things and constantly adapt to the changing conditions: ourselves as a team, our way of leading, our organizational culture, our offering or our positioning in the market. LEGO® Serious Play® is the ideal method for this, supporting transformation and innovation and turning those affected into co-creators. It enables teams to develop innovative visions and strategies for the future and to keep them in their minds as a helpful guide.

The process: The unique creative process

LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) is now well known, but people don’t always know what it really means. It’s more than just “playing” with LEGO®. LSP is an excellent way to jointly prototyping ideas, mental models, target images and strategies for teams and organizations. LEGO® is more of a building material than a toy.

A LEGO® Serious Play® process begins with an entertaining warm-up to warm up the participants for the topic and the method. Then everyone individually develops a target image for the project. On this basis, the entire team develops a common vision and embeds it in its context. The entire ecosystem is built from stakeholders and other external actors to trends. In this step, the group achieves a holistic understanding of the project, its interactions and external dependencies.

Based on this new knowledge, a “real-time strategy” is developed. To do this, participants play through possible future scenarios on the model and simulate their effects in order to derive insights, measures and guiding principles for successful future actions and decisions.

In short: With a LEGO® Serious Play® process, you design the target image of the desired project and learn what will make it successful in the future and how you can proactively bring about this success now.

Transforming teams and promoting innovation

Positively changing team dynamics

The key to the success of LEGO® Serious Play® lies in its unique creative process. Participants think with their hands and enter into a co-creative flow that enables them to exchange and develop complex ideas, thoughts and visions. This not only promotes individual creativity, but also mutual understanding and appreciative discussion within the team.

Because ideas and thoughts are brought to life through models, participants can remember what is said better. They discuss things based on what has been built, can locate points directly, pick them up and think about them further or build on them. Working haptically on the model not only makes it easier to follow the flow of thoughts, but also promotes fun and engagement in creating together.

This not only helps participants to better understand what is at stake and what is important, but also helps them to get to know each other better because they listen to each other and build on each other’s ideas in an appreciative way.

The key role of the LEGO® Serious Play® Facilitator

The role of the facilitator is crucial for the success of the process. This person guides the process through inspiring questions and tasks, but in such a way that the participants retain responsibility and autonomy for the content. The facilitator helps to get the potential out of people’s heads in order to bring thoughts and ideas into the LEGO® Serious Play® models and the process without interfering with the content. This enables each individual to make full use of the creative freedom and then think further together.

Developing shared visions and goals with LEGO® Serious Play®

LEGO® Serious Play® is characterized by the benefit of making uncertain futures tangible and thus promoting imagination and strategic thinking. The method uses the connection between head and hands to stimulate new neural connections and create a high level of experience of topics. This not only leads to high-quality discussions and a deep mutual understanding, but also prepares participants to recognize early signals of a changing future and act accordingly.

This makes trends such as “New Work” tangible, so that participants can design and live the topic for their organization and their needs. We even work with our customers on abstract challenges such as a future “networked European security policy”. We also work a lot with teams on their shared understanding of how they imagine their future, what it should look like in the future and what they are prepared to do to achieve it.

LEGO® Serious Play® is the ideal method for shaping the future with teams in a short space of time, as it combines creativity, collective understanding and strategic foresight in a unique, experiential process. If you are now excited and are looking for LEGO® Serious Play® workshops or training, please come and see us .