Using Lego Serious Play to Reflect on your Learning Experience

Lego Serious Play and MTa’s experiential learning kits work really well together to bring your training to life. We’ve already looked at how you can use both in the same training program to help teams visualise and really experience situations they need to deal with at work.

This time, we’re looking at how you can use LSP to help your learners share what they’ve learned during an MTa training activity. 

Every one of MTa’s activities comes packed full of rich experiences, and the real learning comes when participants reflect on what they’ve learned. 

At that reflection stage, there is an opportunity to go back to LSP to build a model of how the team actually performed in the exercise, right down to showing which members of the team were in the midst of the activity and which were on the sidelines; who were the leaders and whether people were jostling for leadership. 

Take an activity like Rectangle from the MTa Team Kit. Here a team has to work together to complete a complex task that involves clarifying objectives, planning, assigning roles, dealing with uncertainty, and tests verbal communication skills to the limit. It’s a great exercise for demonstrating the gaps that exist in team-working. 

To be effective the team must work together, and successfully navigate the stages of team formation: forming, storming, norming and performing. It’s a demanding activity that will put even the best team through its paces. But how can they make sense of the experience and use it to take their performance to the next level? 

Show and Tell

You could use LSP to help your trainees share how they felt when doing the exercise. They could build a model of the activity to explain what happened. Often during this activity, groups fragment, “in” groups and “out” groups may form and some people are left on the sidelines. The blindfolds mean that people have only a limited idea of what others are doing, and that is generally to those immediately next to them. 

Using LSP, each participant would be able to make their own model to show what it felt like to them. Perhaps they would build physical barriers between themselves and other participants to represent the blindfolds? They could build steps around the wall to show how they overcame the barrier of the blindfold. 

Maybe they would place themselves away from the rest of the group, on the outside? Perhaps they could build an opaque box to represent the mystery of what is going on in the “in” group?

We’re not trying to suggest what people should do. Everyone would approach this differently and come up with LSP models that we couldn’t imagine. Just as things can go very differently every time you run an MTa activity, everyone’s interpretation of the activity is going to be different. 

The models would show you what happens when people get involved and it starts to get messy. But you can’t get there unless you unleash the activities that let people interact and start pulling things apart. 

By pairing MTa and LSP in this way you have the tools you need to create the unique learning experience and a unique way of reflecting on it. 

By Jamie Thompson, Managing Director of MTa Learning

MTa are experts in the field of experiential learning since 1982. We provide kits of experiential learning activities which are carefully designed. Our activities are fun, engaging and memorable – but effective too.

We also deliver MTa Facilitator Masterclasses for those Learning & Development professionals who want to ensure they capitalise on their investment in experiential learning.Leading organisations around the world trust MTa with their Learning and Development requirements.  If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch.