explore · Strategy, Team Building, Communication · 60–480 min · 4-12 people per facilitator · medium energy

LEGO Serious Play

The facilitator poses a question, everyone builds an answer with LEGO bricks, each person explains the meaning of their model, and the group reflects on what they heard. The cycle repeats with harder questions, often moving from individual models to a shared model and then to a landscape of connected models. Everyone builds and everyone speaks, so the most senior voice does not set the frame.

When to use LEGO Serious Play

Use at a strategy or team offsite when you need a team to make its assumptions about identity, purpose or the future concrete and talk about them on equal footing.

What it solves

Strategy conversations stay abstract and polite, and the same two or three people do all the talking.

How to run LEGO Serious Play, step by step

  1. Skills building. Everyone builds a few warm-up models (a tower, a metaphor) to learn that bricks can carry meaning (20-30 min).
  2. Pose the first real question, such as 'Build a model of your role at its best' (2 min).
  3. Everyone builds in silence within a short time limit (5-10 min).
  4. Each person shares the story of their model while others ask questions about the model, not the person (15-25 min).
  5. Reflect as a group on patterns and differences across the models (10 min).
  6. Repeat with harder questions, then combine individual models into one shared model the whole team agrees represents them (60-180 min).

Materials needed

  • LEGO SERIOUS PLAY kits or a large mixed brick supply
  • Tables with space for each builder
  • Camera to record models

Facilitator tips

  • Use a trained facilitator for anything beyond a taster. The questions and the shared-model step need practice.
  • Hold the rule that questions go to the model ('what does this part mean?'), not to the person.
  • Photograph every model with its builder's one-line meaning before people dismantle anything.

Common pitfalls

  • It turns into a building contest and people focus on what looks good instead of what it means.
  • The facilitator runs only individual builds and never gets to the shared model, so nothing joins up.

Variations

  • Half-day taster: skills building plus two individual rounds.
  • Full method: individual, shared and landscape models across one or two days.

Running it online or hybrid

Needs bricks in every location. Remote participants build at home and show their model to the camera.

What it produces

Physical models with stories attached, and often a shared model of the team's identity or strategy that can be photographed and kept.

Origin

Developed within the LEGO Group in the late 1990s, with Robert Rasmussen as principal architect of the methodology and Per Kristiansen shaping the facilitator certification. — source

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