I understand there is a shortage of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® kits at the moment. If you need a Landscape and Identity kit but can't get one... you can make your own! This list of bricks costs about the same and will give you a good selection of bricks in place of the Landscape kit:

General Bricks

When you first un-bag these bricks - I'd suggest you assemble the windows, tyres, mini-figures, doors, hinges, turntables etc. before mixing the bricks into brick soup (see below).

Mini Figures Bricks

Duplo Bricks

Friends Bricks

Technic Bricks

Baseplates

In place of Windows kits

You can make "brick soup"... here is the recipe!

Each of these kits gives you about 1kg of bricks, they are a bit little bit light on mini-figures, if that's important search for 'bulk mini-figures' on eBay and buy say 100 additional mini-figures.

When you unpack the bricks for the first time, assemble the window, turntables, wheels etc, then combine into one big pile. Use kitchen scales to weigh out anywhere between 100g and 200g of bricks per person. For table groups of 6-8 people put a pile of mixed bricks, say 1.2kg (like the photo above).

In many workshops participants struggle to connect LEGO bricks to Duplo bricks. They do connect. The big studs on a Duplo brick need one or more regular 4x2 stud LEGO brick (two orange bricks in the picture) to 'convert' the top of the Duplo brick into the smaller stud pitch of LEGO bricks. The bottom of Duplo bricks are such that they will connect to LEGO base plates (grey in the photo).

These hacks are intended for new facilitators of the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method, so you can help participants make the connections they want. On longer duration workshops you might include these hacks in a skills build to ensure participants have the skills to make many different kinds of connection or build.

Sometimes builders want to express shared ideas, people connecting, thinking the same, being aligned etc.

The flexible axle found in the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Starter Kit and the much bigger Landscape and Identity Kit can be used in many ways, this simple hack is a good way to use this brick.

Whilst training LEGO in LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® in Switzerland we were delighted to introduce them to a new way of connecting bricks with one of our LEGOHacks. It was a little unexpected on our part, but a great moment to share learning and build the participants repertoire.

What was it we shared?

It was our Join Thin-End plates hack

Connect a plate to a studded block by mounting it in between the studs.

Vincent Doyle (course participant) said: "I've worked at Lego for two years and I never knew you could connect bricks in that way!"

Our favourite uses include impromptu walls, diving boards or even a sail. What might you use it for?

Sometimes builds need the brick stud direction to be reversed, if you ever need to do this (or help someone else) then you can use our '$100 Stud to Stud hack'. Simply use any 2x1 tile (a brick with no studs, like the $100 brick) as a way to connect studs to studs.

Here is another way to achieve the same thing using LEGO Round Tile 1 x 1 - these are often found in the LEGO Classic Boxes.

There are other ways to achieve the same thing... watch out for future hacks or sign up for more hacks in future newsletters here.