MTa + Lego Serious Play: Workshop Ideas for Team Building, Training and More

Lego Serious Play. It’s a great name, isn’t it? Engaging and intriguing, while alluding to something powerful and worthwhile.

If you’re familiar with Lego Serious Play – LSP for short – you’ll know it’s exactly that. Through the simple pairing of familiar Lego bricks and a sophisticated participant-centric learning philosophy, LSP prompts dialogue, encourages reflection, and develops problem solving skills amongst groups in business, education, and beyond. 

And if you’re not familiar with Lego Serious Play, it’s time to change that. As big fans of the methodology, we’ve written this blog post to share our insights around it and to help facilitators effectively incorporate LSP into their training sessions.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

  • What the Lego Serious Play method is
  • How LSP it works
  • Lego Serious Play benefits for facilitators and participants
  • Applications of Lego Serious Play
  • Bringing LSP to life with experiential learning
  • MTa + Lego Serious Play workshop ideas
  • Lego Serious Play alternatives

What is Lego Serious Play?

Lego Serious Play is a workshop method where participants use Lego bricks to build models that represent their ideas and insights. 

In their introduction to LSP, Lego outline three main components to the Serious Play method:

  • The Principles: “the philosophy upon which everything else is built”
  • The Materials: “sets of specially selected Lego bricks and pieces”
  • The Applications: “detailed roadmaps of different workshops”

By using the Materials to enact the Principles, Lego Serious Play facilitators can employ the methodology in a range of settings to achieve a range of valuable outcomes.

LSP evolved from a search by Lego executives looking for a tool to unlock innovation within their company. It has since been adopted and adored by organisations as prominent and diverse as Oxford University, Google, NASA, FedEx, Stanford Business School and even the UN. Everyone seems to love it.

It’s also available under a Creative Commons License, allowing the Principles, Materials, and Applications to be developed and refined by an international community of users.

How Lego Serious Play Works

In short, Lego Serious Play utilises the building process to help groups share ideas, engage in constructive discussion, and reach meaningful solutions to real problems.

LSP uses a three step process to help participants to develop and express emerging knowledge:

  • Challenge: the facilitator sets a building challenge to open up reflection and dialogue related to the purpose of the workshop
  • Building: participants build their response to the challenge with Lego bricks. They use a reflective process to assign meaning and narrative to their models.
  • Sharing: participants share the stories and meanings assigned to their model. This is done one at a time so that each person has the opportunity to speak.

This process is repeated multiple times during a workshop, with progressively more difficult challenges set by the facilitator to catalyse reflection and dialogue aligned to the overall problem(s) the workshop aims to explore.

The Lego Serious Play method is built on the following logic and assumptions.

  • Making something with your hands unlocks different perspectives, and widens the scope of discussion.
  • Sharing models with the group before discussion puts a physical representation of everyone’s ideas in the mix, rather than one or two dominant personalities setting the agenda.
  • This ensures that everyone has a say and everyone has an opportunity to listen. As a result, each person’s experience may differ substantially from usual discussions.
  • There is no one correct answer: the goal is to bring multiple perspectives into the open, and to consider them all.

Deeper insight and richer discussion emerge from this process. More ownership of analysis and decisions made, leading to greater buy-in from participants.

What Lego Serious Play Is Not

Lego Serious Play rejects the idea that external experts are required to identify problems and propose solutions. Instead, it creates an inclusive, participatory environment that empowers a group to envision solutions.

It also rejects the assumption that complex, esoteric tools and methodologies are needed to achieve results: instead, something familiar, inviting, and versatile becomes a vehicle for deep meaning.

Lego Serious Play: Benefits for Facilitators and Participants

The LSP methodology has a suite of benefits to make it attractive to facilitators and participants alike. 

Brand Recognition

As fellow creators of experiential learning tools we know there’s no better feeling than people getting excited when your tools make an appearance. And take it from us: it’s hard to get to that point.

Lego Serious Play boasts almost unparalleled brand recognition. Who doesn’t remember playing with Lego at least a couple of times in their childhood? Memories that are usually linked to fun, carefree play with no goals or deadlines: feelings that might be very unfamiliar in the contexts where it’s used!

This makes LSP exciting. People are intrigued to see it, and are immediately more receptive to getting involved than they might be with other less familiar materials.

For facilitators this lowers the resistance to learning and involvement: two very common challenges that can be tricky to overcome.

Very Visual and Tactile

Lego blocks are 3D things participants can touch and manipulate. They’re brightly coloured, and come in a range of exciting and intriguing shapes that can be put together in almost endless combinations. This makes LSP a great tool to encourage creativity or to use for visualisation of potential future scenarios. 

Effectively Harnesses Play

Lego Serious Play is fun. It’s hands-on, immersive, and memorable. But just playing with Lego isn’t enough to make learning happen.

When facilitated well though, LSP uses an intelligent process to ensure that fun play leads to learning. By gradually increasing the difficulty of challenges, LSP allows facilitators to leverage the Flow psychological state, revealing more sophisticated insights as sessions progress.

Unlocks Different Perspectives

“Build a creature out of Lego bricks,” is a challenge that a Lego Serious Play facilitator might set. 

Then, when participants are done: “you now have four minutes to turn this creature into a representation of the best or worst boss you can possibly imagine.”

This simple twist on their model moves a participant’s thinking from a literal plane (build a creature) to the metaphorical plane. The changes made to the model are imbued with meaning, and the resulting insights will most likely be different to what a participant would’ve come up with if asked to write “what traits does the best or worst boss have?”

Inclusive

During an LSP session, participants build individually but simultaneously. Then once their models are complete they go round the group and share, one at a time, the story of their model and what it represents.

This process, combined with the points of etiquette below, give everyone a chance to speak and to share their ideas – especially powerful for people who might usually stay quiet or struggle to express themselves.

The points of etiquette:

  • Participants can ask questions about each others’ models and stories, but they cannot express opinions or make interpretations.
  • The facilitator can ask about the model and the story, but not about the person who made it.

These points of etiquette allow LSP to fit all kinds of communication styles, while shielding individuals from confrontation, criticism, or having their ideas challenged or overshadowed completely: all of which are common barriers to participation that can be challenging to overcome.

Can Deliver Lasting Learning

Used properly, LSP can lead to insights that last beyond the training session and into the workplace. Although as you’ll read later, there are boundaries to what the methodology can achieve. This is where pairing it up with other learning materials – like our experiential learning kits – unlocks even more powerful learning.

Wide Range of Applications

Perhaps the greatest strength of LSP is the range of applications it can be used for. Rather than list them here though, we’ll use this as a graceful segue to the next section.

Lego Serious Play: Applications

In their introduction to Serious Play, Lego outline the following applications:

  • Team building, where a group of people work together but do not necessarily know each other very well – we actually don’t agree that LSP is useful for team building, but click here to find out how LSP can be combined with MTa to unlock powerful insights.
  • Working out the best solution to a shared problem
  • Strategy development, where all relevant individuals get the opportunity to contribute their vision of the aims and challenges, and consolidate these with the ideas of others 
  • Creating a shared mindset about something
  • Understanding each other’s points of view on a deeper level
  • Having effective and constructive discussions where everybody is heard
  • Unleashing creative thinking

It’s also relevant in the current contexts:

Understanding Complex Issues 

In our opinion, Lego Serious Play’s greatest strength is building understanding of complex issues. Creating a visual representation with our hands unlocks perspectives that can be hard to articulate just with words, and having a chance to share your ideas and question the models and stories of others facilitates greater understanding.

Allowing Groups to Explore Process

Saif Saif Rahman, Head of Training at Nesma and Partners in Abu Dhabi, uses LSP with small groups to help design employee onboarding and experience programmes. He says it’s good for allowing people to explore a process, and that it gives participants the freedom to ideate and be creative.

Getting Young People To Explore and Articulate Their Thoughts

Lego Serious Play can help children to explore complex emotions, and to articulate their thoughts. Take a challenge being faced by the child of one of the MTa team, for example: by creating models that represented how they all felt on their first day at school, the family were able to reveal common emotions—like excitement mixed with anxiety—that might have been difficult to express otherwise. The process not only helped the child better understand their own feelings, but also gave the family a unique way to communicate and connect through shared experiences.

Bringing Lego Serious Play to Life With Experiential Learning

As we’ve seen, Lego Serious Play can be a powerful tool for people to express complex ideas in a simple way. But you can only go so far with the methodology, and if you’ve hit a roadblock or reached saturation point you may be looking for Lego Serious Play alternatives.  

Some signs that you may have reached the boundaries of what LSP can achieve:

  • Everyone has built a model and there’s been some good discussion, but due to the LSP etiquette there have been few opportunities for people to actually interact with each other.
  • You want to explore what happens when interaction gets a bit messy, potentially even spilling over into confrontation.
  • You’ve discussed how people feel a team is performing or how they would like it to perform, but you need to see how the team actually is performing and to explore what happens if you make changes. 
  • LSP has helped a team to create a shared vision, but back in the workplace things just carry on as normal… Everyone is waiting for someone else to make the first move in enacting the vision.

This is where our experiential learning kits come in. Think of LSP as letting you show the world what you want to do, and MTa letting you go and do it. Put them together and you have opportunities for some very rich learning. 

“We had a three-day workshop for a client in Abu Dhabi. We used LSP on the first day and then MTa on day two. With LSP it was about getting people to articulate their opinions, and then we used MTa for developing crucial behavioural skills, that would enable them to be successful, like analytical thinking and problem-solving”

  • Mat East, Managing Director at Sparks International

MTa + Lego Serious Play: Workshop Ideas

Lego Serious Play and MTa’s experiential learning kits work really well together to bring your training to life. Here are some workshop ideas to tap into the combined strengths of both.

MTa + Lego Serious Play for Reflecting On Other Activities

Great if you want to: help learners reflect on their experience and highlight team dynamics after completing an activity.

How to do it: select and run an MTa activity where success requires effective teamwork, and which can demonstrate the gaps that exist in teams – Rectangle from the MTa Team Kit is a good example – then use Lego Serious Play for reflection:

  • Ask participants to build individual models representing how they feel their team performed 
  • As facilitator, ask questions about how the model represents behaviour of individual members and of the group
  • Open discussion to the group, remembering that only questions about the model and what it represents are allowed

Outcomes you’ll achieve: by integrating LSP into the MTa review process, you’ll bring a unique reflection method that promotes deeper learning. Giving participants the opportunity to visualise and share their insights makes it easier to explore team dynamics and to focus discussion on specific areas.

MTa + Lego Serious Play for Bringing Visions to Fruition

Great if you want to: bring teams together and turn shared visions into actionable steps – after a merger or acquisition, for example.

How to do it: select and run an MTa activity that simulates the challenges of working together as a cohesive group, like Digital Display from the MTa Team Kit. Here, limitations on verbal communication make a seemingly simple activity quite complex!

  • Set a building challenge that asks participants to envision how their team can work effectively to achieve a stated goal
  • Ask questions about the vision the model represents, and about the route to get there
  • Encourage group discussion to focus on the route to achieving the vision, as well as the nature of the vision itself
  • Follow up with another building challenge that prompts participants to update their model to represent actionable steps that can be taken 

Outcomes you’ll achieve: by combining MTa with LSP in this context you’ll encourage group discussion that focuses on ways to achieve a shared vision, as well as clarifying the nature of the vision. You’ll also reduce the likelihood of a situation arising where everyone goes back to work and carries on as normal after a training session.

MTa + Lego Serious Play for Team Building

Great if you want to: understand your team’s current dynamics and explore how to make targeted improvements.

How to do it: follow up a series of LSP building challenges with targeted MTa activities. The challenges should explore your team’s perception of its current performance and dynamics along with ideas about how these could improve.

  • Set a building challenge around the question “What should our team look like?”
  • Observe how group discussion unfolds: do you have a team where people want to reach consensus, or will dominant individuals steadfastly stick to their own ideas and shout everyone else down?
  • Set a follow-up challenge that asks participants to show the gap between the current and desired situation
  • In the next group discussion, ask questions about the specific skills required to close this gap – for example, empathy, communication, etc
  • Find and run MTa activities that spotlight these skills

Outcomes you’ll achieve: by involving participants directly in uncovering the soft skills required to close the gaps they’ve identified between the current and desired situations, you create high levels of involvement and investment when the time comes to practise and build the identified skills.

Some MTa activities that pair well with Lego Serious Play for team building include:

  • Over the Bridge, from the MTa Team Kit: this activity has unclear information, multiple objectives, and tight deadlines – just like real world situations. To succeed, participants need to collaborate: something that becomes trickier as new issues present themselves as the activity unfolds.
  • Rectangle, from the MTa Team Kit: this activity makes space for many team roles, meaning many different behaviours are likely to arise. This is useful for fleshing out a team’s understanding of its performance, and for attaching names to concepts to explore in greater detail later. 
  • The Rig, from MTa Mini: this activity creates levels of challenge high enough to reveal behaviour changes that occur under stress – great for identifying responses and outcomes that hinder effective teamwork. 

Lego Serious Play: Alternatives

Lego Serious Play is a powerful, well-established methodology that works well in tandem with other tools and methodologies. We’ve seen that it pairs incredibly well with experiential learning activities from MTa Learning. But what if you’re looking for an alternative? Here are some options:

    • Playmobil Pro: an innovative methodology that harnesses play for professional and personal development. Similar conceptually to Lego Serious Play. We’ve written here about what Playmobil Pro is and how you can use it.
  • MTa kits: our activities work well with LSP, but they’re equally as powerful and effective by themselves. Each of our kits contains everything you need to deliver engaging experiential training activities ‘out of the box’.

Get serious about Lego Serious Play

The Lego Serious Play methodology is powerful, engaging, tactile and fun. It leverages the power of building and play to unlock deep insights, and to stimulate constructive conversation. And paired with experiential learning kits, it can develop and explore these insights in a way that leads to lasting learning in the workplace and beyond.

To find out how you can get more from Lego Serious Play, get in touch with our team or use the live chat below. We’d love to talk to you about what you’re trying to achieve, and how to achieve it.

Further Reading

Here are some other resources we recommend if you want to learn more about the Lego Serious Play method: