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Lego Serious Play – event facilitation

Deeper cognitive thinking, faster and intelligent decision making and better meetings are vital for the growth of a business and the well being of all employees at a firm. To be able to break the mold of unproductivity and poor strategy meetings, it is vital for human resources to invest in their employees and provide a training based leadership coaching that works on the principles of psychology.

The Lego Serious Play method allows you to bring higher participation and engagement in your employees so that actionable insights are obtained and used for faster and better decision making. Be it organisations, teams, or individuals, the Lego Serious Play method facilitates thinking and enables professionals in the business setup to communicate and solve problems better.

Developed in 2001 after 10 years of research, the idea of Lego Serious Method is simple – use Lego bricks for business and critical thinking purposes. Special brick sets are developed by the official Lego company for this training and coaching method allowing facilitators and learners to use Lego bricks in training themselves to collaborate better in the workplace and make better and quick business decisions.

Fundamental beliefs upon which the Lego Serious Play method is based upon

Employees often look to leadership for problem solving, especially on significant projects. However, the catch here is that leadership doesn’t always know what to do and for the successful completion of a project, a task or the right decision making requires all employees involved to tap into their knowledge and intelligence and bring forth the best courses of action. Humans are naturally driven by the need to feel engaged, participate in group tasks, contribute towards work and taking its ownership, and be part of something big. The issue that arises many times is that the voices of many go unheard causing leadership to overlook potentially the best solutions.

The Lego Serious Play method is based upon the fact that the leadership doesn’t have all answers and that a psychology based critical and cognitive thinking training can enable employees to tap into their potential, contribute by engaging and speaking, and facilitating agile and intelligent decision making. This helps with better completion of projects and also allows employees to take ownership of tasks thus making them leaders in their own special way.

When an entire room of cognitively charged professionals collaborate positively and work on a problem, they are able to clear all corner cases. Blind spots that are usually not predicted before are taken care of when using the Lego Serious Play method allowing you to make sure that you do not come face to face with a hurdle later on in the project. Decision making and collaborative ownership is a psychological concept and when you involve a psychology based training in helping you improve, the outcomes can be phenomenal.

Facilitate an environment of critical thinking and intelligent decision making

The principles of the Lego Serious Play method are not derived out of a new science. It is based upon age-old principles and scientific methods that have been around for many years now. This method is based upon widespread in depth research in the following fields.

  • Business and training
  • Organisational development
  • Psychology
  • Hand knowledge

Key principles of constructivism, neuroscience, flow, play and imagination are picked from each of these fields allowing you to train your mind to collaborate better and make better decisions. Often in the workplace, we think we are providing good inputs and are highly engaged but our minds are usually off because we have reached a saturation point beyond which thinking cognitively for the day is simply not possible. Any more time spent in collaboration or work is simply false engagement.

Therefore, it is crucial that you train your mind to not let it fall prey to false engagement. It is not just a time and resource waste but also causes productivity to dip critically low. This is where the Lego Serious Play method allows you to keep your brains on without depriving it of all its energy. The intense ‘leaning in’ atmosphere surrounding this method allows you to not just become hands-on in the workplace but also minds-on.

As mentioned before, the Lego Serious Play method is appropriate for any professional looking to perform better in the workplace. To be specific, the method and training works best for professionals in the following roles.

  • Facilitators
  • Team leaders
  • Project leaders
  • Trainers
  • Educators
  • Learning and development specialists
  • Consultants
  • Coaches
  • Educators
  • Researchers
  • In-house trainers

Experience first, reflect later

Numerous decisions in life are postponed or acted upon poorly because we keep weighing up what their positive and negative consequences will be. It is crucial to train our brains using a psychology based coaching to experience the event first and reflect upon it later. While it is important to imagine what could happen and what are the most likely positive and negative outcomes of a decision, it is also important to experience the issue to be able to accurately gauge the depth of it. The Lego Serious Play method works by establishing multiple objectives.

  • Learn the real-time strategies associated with the Lego Serious Play training and coaching for both teams and enterprises.
  • Insights into how these strategies really affect the flow of work fundamentally.
  • Differentiate between artificial engagement and real engagement involving collaborative work and brainstorming on actionable data.
  • Understand the power of the Lego Serious Play method in a real life situation in the workplace.

There are several general and specific concepts to which the Lego Serious Play method can be applied. A few of the specific concepts include the following.

  • Building future scenarios
  • Appreciative inquiry
  • Talent management
  • Project management
  • Risk projection and mitigation

Use Lego Serious Play in a business environment to make meetings more fruitful

A very simple key step to doing better business is conducting better meetings. They need to be high on collaboration and engagement and low on wishful thinking. Psychology based training and coaching such as the Lego Serious Play allows not just the leadership but also their employees to look at problems using a critical and cognitive mindset thus allowing them to tap into their potential and bring out the best decisions and outcomes that they can.

If you are interested in utilising the Lego Serious Play training for your employees or wish for more details on the method, contact us today!

About the author

Richard Reid

Renowned coaching and psychological consultant – psychology expert, coach, media spokesperson, keynote psychology speaker, and author.
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