What is it particularly suitable for

Lego® Serious Play® is particularly suitable when it comes to finding holistic solutions in which everyone in the team should be involved, e.g. as an introduction to topics of strategy, team building or working methods.

Why we love it

Building with Lego® opens up a creative approach that is well suited for abstract topics and is also suitable for participants who are not primarily comfortable with creative methods. The building blocks with their solid shape invite to play. At the same time the pressure to deliver something "beautiful" is low (compared to painting or similar). Even if one or the other eyebrow is raised at first, almost everyone can get involved in building. And suddenly also intuitive, emotional aspects come into the model, which were perhaps before not at all in the consciousness.
Ultimately, however, it is not the model that is built that is decisive, but the story that goes with it. In contrast to collecting and writing down important aspects, holistic models or visions are conceived and told here. We know of no other method that leads so entertainingly to bringing to light the view of the complete picture of all participants.

Procedure

1. Familiarize yourself with the set: Each participant receives the same set of Lego® bricks. To warm up, you can also start with a simple task, e.g. "build a car" or "build a tower as high as possible".
2. Explanation of principles: "Thinking with your hands" requires a metaphorical approach. It is not about building concrete objects, but letting the stones stand for something, interpreting them. An example exercise for this could be "build a successful start to the day" - preferably without using figures.
3. The actual method always consists of three steps: Building, telling, reflecting.
4. Build the question: Ten minutes of building time is enough, there should be no thinking beforehand - just trust your hands. Questions can be asked gradually from the halfway point onwards. For example, if the question is "what does our team look like so that we are optimally positioned for our customers for the next five years?", a deepening question could be "also think about how we communicate" or "also think about how we sit together/what kind of premises we need" or similar.
5. Storytelling: After the building phase, each person explains their model to the whole group, two to three minutes are enough. Crucial: The person who built the model determines the meaning of the stones. It is not about what others see in the model! (And if one aspect is left out, so be it).
6. Reflecting should be shorter than telling. In the beginning, difficulties in building can be caught here. Later it is about the questions "what did I hear? What was essential for me?" but not everyone has to answer them. It should provide a brief opportunity to highlight what was particularly appealing or thought-provoking about others' narratives (important: not about the model, because other people's models are not interpreted).
7. Optional: Each participant may determine the most important aspect of her model (it is best to write this on Post-its and photograph it with the model for later documentation). From this, the whole group builds a joint model by taking the most important individual part of each participant from her model and creating a new joint model from it.
8. After the building process has been completed, it can be determined which aspects may need to be discussed further or how work is to be continued. For this purpose, all participants now have a common basis in which they are equally represented.

Insider tips or "this is what we think is important".

1. Copying is allowed
2. Build upgradually , do not plan
3. You determine the meaning of the stones: build metaphorically instead of concretely in three steps: Build, Tell, Reflect.
4. Beauty doesn't matter, it's the story that counts
5. Interpretation of foreign models is not allowed
6. Discussions will only take place after construction has been completed

Attitude

The method may be fun and easy, but it should not be dismissed as gimmicky. Model building thrives on trusting your own hands and not thinking is the key. The physiological connection between hand and brain has an effect here. If you just start building, you leave the linguistic imaginative space and thus get to partially conscious or not formulated contents, which are then only reflected upon during the telling. This means a parallel emotional process of connecting with the "new", even if not all details have been discussed yet.

By the way: For a better readability we change the gender form per method.