The essence of Lego serious play

Using Lego Serious Play facilitates communication within the team, facilitates strategic decision-making, and develops collaboration skills and competencies. As a result, participants can make creative suggestions to solve a particular problem and communicate their ideas more easily.

Lego Serious Play could be applied the best by

• business owners
• corporate senior and middle managers
• departments of companies
• crisis- and project-management teams

Lego originally developed this method for large companies and then moved to the SME sector from here, because with its relative simplicity and playfulness outstanding results could be achieved. It is quite effective regardless of the size of the company, the type or age of the industry or the organization, the result nevertheless excellent.

Lego serious play at Ergomania

In Ergomania’s experience, it’s worth using Lego serious play when an organization or team wants to increase its efficiency, strengthen their relationships, and bring hidden abilities to the surface.

Lego Serious Play enables a better and more complete understanding through practical and theoretical, but most importantly through playful and fun learning. Lego serious play is used regularly at Ergomania, mainly in the following situations:

• There is no obvious answer to a problem or question
• Stakeholders need to be 100% involved in a decision preparation
• When analyzing complex problems and situations or finding a solution
• We want to involve new product or function ideas and approaches e.g. we need to complete a Business Model Canvas or a Value proposition Canvas
• When the goal is to increase the efficiency and cooperation within the team

The main methods of Lego serious play

Whether for a house, car, or spaceship, Lego provides a pre-selected set of items here as well. Working with these real Lego bricks, a skilled facilitator guides participants through the questions while everyone builds different Lego models.

The models created in this way are then used to engage in a dialogue about the problem to be solved, the idea to be developed, and with their help, knowledge sharing and decision-making become more efficient.

Lego Serious Play requires active participation from all participants, but at the same time they all get the floor during the workshop. Practically we use a unique language that spans cultures, and is able to involve all participants in the process without their mother tongue or position within the organization.

During the workshop, the first step is for everyone to create their own model from the given bricks, then to present the model to the rest of the group. The next step is the construction of a common model, and at the end we reach joint proposal for the problem to be solved is.

What do our clients gain from Lego serious play?

Lego Serious Play is beneficial for Ergomania’s clients in all different sorts of ways:

• They can discover the internal and external relationships of their company, institution or team, their attitudes towards each other and towards their competitors, common strengths, hidden abilities, possible hidden risks.
• The dynamics of our clients’ group, organization and company can be examined.
• We can model and examine the assumed crisis situations, test communication situations and filter out experiences.

What is the role of our clients in making Lego serious play?

It is important for our clients to provide participants, who will then be active actors. Effective use of Lego Serious Play requires the active participation of all attending.

In addition, we need to pass on the preliminary business expectations that allow the facilitator to prepare for the workshop. We provide the Lego sets.

The result of successful Lego serious play making

By using Lego serious play, our clients get a complete suggestion to solve the problem they want to explore.