LEARN THE LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® METHOD
The Purpose of Education
In his famous TED Talk on schools and creativity, the late-great Ken Robinson articulately shared what he saw as a significant paradigm shift in formal education’s overriding purpose; from the industrial era’s need to prepare ‘today’s youth for the factory jobs of tomorrow’, to catering for the dynamic and ever changing demands of our emergent creative economy. Given that we are not entirely sure what the jobs of tomorrow will look like, standardisation seems an increasingly shaky framework upon which to build an education system to prepare learners for future success. Personalisation of learning is one of the emergent dominant forces in education.
In this drive to ensure that all learners’ individual needs are fulfilled, modern education systems are required to focus on much more than just academic rigour and success, acknowledging the need to educate ‘the whole child’. As well as ensuring that a student’s social, spiritual and emotional needs are catered for, this holistic approach means that there is now much greater focus on developing learner’s 21st Century Skills; ‘the knowledge, life skills, career skills, habits, and traits that are critically important to student success in today's world' (Bellanca, 2010).
In the wake of COVID-19, volatile geo-political developments and the polarising influence of social media, education systems around the world increasingly find themselves with a moral obligation to make the development of these 21st century skills a strategic priority. This super power suite of traits and skills are not only in huge demand when it comes to employers’ wants and needs they are also essential if future generations are to rise to the complex systemic challenges of climate change, sustainable development and peace building.
Through my experiences, I have observed how LEGO Serious Play can play an important role in supporting this essential drive towards an increasingly holistic education system, providing learners with the opportunities and experiences needed to develop and hone their 21st century skill set.
LEGO Serious Play and 21st Century Learning
Here I explore the merits of LEGO Serious Play as a tool to develop a selection of these key 21st Century Skills - The Four C's; Creativity, Citizenship, Communication and Critical thinking.
Creativity
It is easy on face value to understand how LEGO Serious Play fosters creativity. Building models that use bricks as metaphors requires the learner to engage in a range of what are often considered ‘creative behaviours’; problem solving, risk taking, and lateral thinking.
I regularly observe these behaviours ‘in action’ during LEGO Serious Play workshops. Perhaps the best examples emerge from the ‘Bricks as Metaphor’ Skills Build activity; where learners use bricks as representations of ideas. It is often inspiring to witness 11 year olds articulately and ingeniously, communicating complex concepts - from the meaning of life to diversity - using just a few assembled LEGO bricks. What is arguably even more impressive is how the same learners - as they engage in future iterations of this same activity - become ever more adept at thinking laterally in this way to convey meaning; and are then able to transfer this skill to a new and novel context as they take on their individual and subsequent shared builds.
However, fully defining creativity - and therefore fostering it - can be challenging (Simonton, 2018). What constitutes ‘creative’ actions, behaviours and outcomes is often subjective, and sometimes divisive. To understand how LEGO Serious Play can fully foster learners’ creativity, it is useful to first outline what we perceive creativity to be. Jerome Bruner (1960) - a champion of Constructivist theory - believed that ‘the essence of creativity is figuring out how to use what we already know in order to go beyond what you already think’.
This notion of creativity as a skill that can be developed - rather than a series of ‘lightbulb’ moments - is echoed in the work of other prominent eductionalists; Amabile (1983) and Ken Robinson (2015) to mention just two. In recognising that creativity is not fundamentally innate, we can appreciate how, through the adoption of a growth mindset, learners can build their capacity for creative-thinking and behaviours.
LEGO Serious Play can be considered an ideal match for Bruner’s constructivist ideas on creativity - hardly surprising given its grounding in the philosophy. Through the process of building models, learners use their existing knowledge as a foundation upon which to construct new knowledge; often in response to challenging stimuli. This construction of new knowledge is what is often referred to as ‘little-c’ creativity.
'Big C' Creativity: major productions of scientific, technological, social, or artistic importance. Examples include Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; the invention of the iPhone; Da Vinci's Mona Lisa
'Little c' creativity: an individual's personal creation of new knowledge, useful ideas or solutions within their own context and zone of influence. Examples include solving a Maths problem or building a LEGO model of a sibling
In this respect, creativity - and consequently the construction of new knowledge - is at the heart of all learning. The models generated through LEGO Serious Play serve as a tangible representation of this creative process; allowing learners to see in a very accessible way how their new learning and ideas have grown from their pre-existing knowledge structures; or what they already knew.
The big question that remains is, ‘how do we know that this creative process is actually useful’? In an educational context, for learning to be useful, it should be meaningful and valued. Developmental Psychologist Howard Gardner (1988) believes that new knowledge and ideas generated through creative thinking and behaviours can be considered useful when validated by the ‘field’; the community within which they are generated. In LEGO Serious Play, these communities exist as the build groups and classes that are inherently built into the process. What’s more, the necessity to share model stories at various stages means that all learners’ ideas are regularly communicated to their immediate peers. From here, through reflection questions and subsequent shared and meta builds, ideas are challenged and validated - or not - through their inclusion in, or exemption from, subsequent group build activities.
In this way, LEGO Serious Play can serve as a powerful tool to boost creative capacity in learners and indeed, whole cohorts; providing opportunities to engage in creative behaviours, coupled with a framework that provides balances and checks that ensure creative thinking is focussed and relevant.
Citizenship
To be a good citizen is to positively contribute to society. To be educated about citizenship, learners must understand the concept of community - in both the micro and macro contexts - and recognise how their own actions and behaviours can influence their community’s dynamic.
People working together on a LEGO Serious Play Shared Build form a mini community. The process demands that each individual contribute to and interact with each other. In our experience, these community interactions - informed by LEGO Serious Play’s guiding principles - provide an outstanding opportunity for learners to develop their sense of what constitutes a good citizen.
Above all else in this regard, LEGO Serious Play promotes tolerance.
My previous school - UWCSEA - is a large international school in South East Asia; a proverbial cultural melting pot. With a diverse student, staff and community population, the school mission makes explicit its aim to ‘use education as a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace’. A fundamental foundation for peace is tolerance for the opinions, beliefs and values of those who do not necessarily share the same opinions, beliefs and values as you.
Having observed how students and staff within our school community behaved whilst engaged in LEGO Serious Play workshops, it is easy to advocate for the extent to which tolerance is inherently built into this process.
The focus on active listening and the need to recap and summarise the ideas of others ensures that participants must truly listen, hear and understand the stories that their peers choose to share. In schools, this default to mutual respect is not always the case in all learning environments, with students often eager to share their own ideas whilst not fully appreciating those of their peers. LEGO Serious Play challenges this default to myopia. As one student put it in her workshop feedback:
“I felt that it made us listen more carefully and through paraphrasing, allowed us to understand each other's thoughts and concepts better”
In my experience, the shared model build is where the process’s capacity for fostering tolerance truly comes to the fore. In one workshop, when it came to constructing a shared response to the build question, not a single student chose one of their own ideas to contribute to the final model; instead preferring to select elements of their peers’ individual builds.
The significance of this is that our students evidenced that they not only heard and appreciated the diversity of ideas that emerged, they validated these different ideas by choosing to contribute these to the group response over their own.
This willingness to explicitly value the ideas of one’s peers over one’s own is an outstanding analogy and blueprint for tolerance and citizenship.
Communication
‘Communication is appropriately interacting with others to convey meaning and gain understanding for multiple purposes, settings, and audiences’
It is fair to say that communication is a multi faceted skill. Communicating in writing for example, is very different to communicating through the spoken word, with both possessing their pros and cons, and being variably appropriate for different situations.
One huge positive of communicating through models in LEGO Serious Play, is that it provides a buffer space between learners and the ideas they are sharing. We have observed that, by allowing the model - rather than the individual - to take centre stage in this manner, participants are less guarded about sharing their thoughts, reflections and ideas; even when these might prove controversial. This has proved particularly powerful for activities where students have been exploring socially sensitive issues; something that can be incredibly challenging for status aware youngsters to do; especially when this process is facilitated by very “uncool” authority figures such as their teachers.
For example, in a workshop where Middle School students explored their relationship with Social Media - very much a ‘powder keg’ issue - learners used their models to frame their own ideas as the views of both themselves and their peers, without worrying that their ideas would directly reflect their individual opinions. This offered the school leadership team a more authentic less filtered reflection of how our student body really felt about social media.
This ‘veil of anonymity’ that LEGO Serious Play offers participants throughout the process is a significant positive case for its’ use within schools as a tool to aid and support more effective and transparent communication.
Critical Thinking
The reflection phase of the LEGO Serious Play method is the most important; especially when analysing it through the lens of education. It affords learners the opportunity to review information, identify patterns and appreciate others’ perspectives; or, to think critically.
Critical thinking is a high order thinking skill. When thinking critically, learners make informed decisions, as opposed to rash ones (Ennis, 1991); they question what they learn, ‘thinking beyond the print’ to explore alternatives and possibilities; they connect the dots, appreciating concepts such as the transfer of knowledge and interdisciplinary learning.
This makes critical thinking an essential prerequisite for lifelong learning; equipping individuals with the necessary mindset and thinking skills to be autonomous, self directed and ultimately, to learn independently. Already identified as important within industry, these attributes are likely to be increasingly valued as individuals will be expected to pivot, retrain and relearn during what is likely to be not just one, but multiple ‘careers’ over the course of their working lives.
Even at its most base level, LEGO Serious Play supports the development of this skill simply by explicitly ring fencing time within the process for meaningful and intentional reflection. For individual builds, reflection questions provide a framework for critical thinking; encouraging participants to be objective and to look for patterns and differences within the various model stories shared. For shared builds, these questions can help learners to identify what might be missing from their collaborative efforts, or even engage in discussions about ‘to what extent’ they personally agree with their built outcomes.
In typical learning environments, in the rush to race through the content, it can often be these opportunities for meaningful reflection that are cut from an otherwise busy lesson. In LEGO Serious Play, the process simply does not work without the inclusion of such reflection steps and therefore, opportunities for learners to build their capacity to think critically always exist. As one learner put it in their post session feedback:
“The process made it really easy to visualise and think systematically about which components interconnected with one another. This helped me understand the content better.”
The reflection questions themselves - carefully crafted by the teacher-facilitator - are often tailored to their learners' needs and ability levels. Whilst they might be prescriptive for younger learners, we have enjoyed success in stripping away these frameworks for more mature learners; increasingly encouraging them to be more independently reflective.
What’s more, 'getting creative' with how to facilitate reflection can yield even more exciting results. We have explored a range of different reflection strategies - from the introduction of stimuli cards through to the incorporation of classic design thinking tools like affinity mapping. We will go on to explain how a number of these techniques have been applied to build learners' collective capacity for critical thinking later in this book.
Collaboration
LEGO Serious Play is democratic - 'everybody builds, everybody shares’. This equitable engagement has two significant positive impacts on all learners.
Firstly, it provides every individual with an equitable platform to share their story and reflections linked to the concept being explored. For a whole host of reasons - established social hierarchies, different languages, cultural norms and learning needs, as well as the behavioural chasm between introvert and extrovert personalities to mention just a few - this equity can be very difficult to achieve in ‘typical’ learning environments. LEGO Serious Play flattens these hierarchies, making it easier for all learners to have a voice with which to socialise their thinking.
Secondly, this method means that all learners benefit from actively listening to the perspectives of their peers. Group dynamics are less of a factor in determining whose ideas are given more credibility or ‘air time’.
In socialising all learners' knowledge, the group is able to draw from the full spectrum of opinions and ideas in collaborating to develop a shared understanding.
During shared builds, participants are actively encouraged to draw from all ideas put forward, regardless of whose story they initially came from; working as a cooperative to co-create shared understandings, over which the whole group has a distributed sense of collective ownership.
What’s more, planned reflections and reviews allow the group to legitimise individual concerns throughout the process, ensuring that all learning outcomes organically adapt to at least consider a full spectrum of perspectives; affirmative and critical. This democratic approach allows for consensus to be reached by entire groups on the relevance and appropriateness of learning outcomes, even where individual learners may not completely agree with every aspect of it.
The feedback I have received from learners has always highlighted the democratic nature of this process as a significant positive. This notion is best epitomised by the post-session feedback received from one of our students, stating that "they appreciated the opportunities for all individuals to actively participate”.
Summary: LEGO Serious Play and Learning
My experiences have strengthened my belief that there is definitely a place for LEGO Serious Play in education. Where used well, it has a profound and positive impact on learners of all ages, both in and outside of the classroom.
Significantly, I have been impressed with how the process supports the holistic education of the whole learner; building their capacity to be better people alongside their development of skills and conceptual understandings.
Whilst there are undoubtedly justifications for use of LEGO Serious Play beyond those outlined here, this summary captures the primary reasons why I believe it is a valid method that positively impacts learning.
Blog Post by SeriousWork Graduate and ProMet associate Vics Bradley.
I think most facilitators, like me, feed off of the positive energy of others. That’s why I felt so grateful to be back at a buzzing conference. I was ready to be super charged like a Tesla.
Legal Geek did not disappoint. I found myself in London, surrounded by 2000 attendees from the legal sector for a very unique conference experience. Lots of talking, lots of laughing and a casual but productive buzz in the air. For those unfamiliar, Legal Geek is a tech innovation conference for the legal sector.
I was there representing the ProMeet facilitation team to deliver LEGO Serious Play workshops with a focus on sustainability in the legal sector.
These were short workshops of 45mins that really pushed participants to think and act quickly. I often think that shorter workshops are more challenging than the usual half-day of full-day we are accustomed to.
On the train down to London, I had been watching ‘Better Call Saul’ which felt like a nice coincidence. I was expecting some Howard Hamlin and Chuck McGill style characters… I was very wrong.
Around 120 attendees embarked on a 45min introduction to LEGO Serious Play and an exploration into sustainability in the legal sector. The room was packed with what turned out to be some of wildly creative minds. There was a wave of anticipation, excitement and laughter in the air.
Firstly we completed some warm up builds to familiarise the room with using the bricks and to encourage attendees to embrace their curiosity. After that we were ready to jump into our builds. I asked the attendees to;
“The year is 2032 and you’ve just been crowned ‘The World’s Most Sustainable Legal Firm’. Build a shared model to showcase the ideas your firm implemented to win this title.”
This question was designed to fit one of the conference’s themes of sustainability. It encouraged attendees to consider sustainability impact, and what ideas they could implement now, that could lead to sustainable change.
The shared models were quite fascinating and definitely generated some laughs. Here is a summary of some of the stories that were shared;
Make law completely open source, build better legal transparency and dissolve the need for legal firms all together.
Supporting green startups pro-bono until they grow, replant trees to become carbon negative, generate our own water and electricity.
Have our client’s lead on the design of the services they need so that we support them better.
Use less paper, make lawyers self sustaining, have more women in leadership positions and implement systems for better work-life balance.
And a crowd favourite…
“Every time a lawyer recommends litigation they have to plant four trees.”
The best thing about LEGO Serious Play is the amazing array of outcomes it produces. It’s such a brilliant mix of a creativity and process. It’s a joy to facilitate this kinaesthetic learning style. I always leave with a smile, and with my batteries fully charged.
Myriam Hadnes runs the Workshops Work Podcast, and in episode 136 she interviewed SeriousWork founder Sean Blair, in her LinkedIn post Myriam said:
"Three (soon to be four) books on the subject, decades of experience facilitating workshops, and experience of training facilitators in it… Sean Blair is a #LEGO #SeriousPlay oracle! I was hoping to uncover some new insights and ideas from our conversation, but I actually found a great deal more.
Sean is such a captivating person - open and reflective - that we ended up discussing the limits of LEGO Serious Play as much as its merits.
We disagreed, we provoked, we learned. It was one of my favourite interviews to date! There’s something for everyone in this episode, so I really hope you take the time to listen. You won’t regret it"
It was great to be interviewed by Myriam, she is a gifted questioner and brilliant interviewer!
Or watch the YouTube video of both parts here.
Timecodes
01:02 When did you start calling yourself a facilitator?
02:11 How have you changed from being a “bossy” facilitator and what have you become instead?
05:05 How do you train other facilitators – especially in the art of dialling up and down their presence in the room?
09:50 What does it take to create a learning space that encourages and values mistakes?
13:54 How does speaking with your own voice play out in facilitation?
18:28 What makes a workshop fail?
20:55 How would you start a workshop for a group in which you know there is conflict and politics?
25:13 What is the power in using LEGO to help us talk about difficult topics?
28:11 Do you use ‘minifigures’ (avatars or representations of people) in your LEGO Serious Play workshops?
32:01 How do you negotiate the risks of a representation being misinterpreted between participants and creating misalignment?
Well this is exciting news, our first book SERIOUSWORK, first published in English in 2016, will soon be available for readers in China.
This translation been the work of Vicky Qu and Xiaotsing Ma who have also bought Cheers Publishing onboard as our publisher in China. We are incredibly grateful to Vicky and Xiaotsing for all their hard work in bringing these ideas to readers in China.
We'll update you on where it can be bought in the days and weeks ahead!
A (wonderful) graduate story by Liam Isaac - Head of Digital Learning at UWC South East Asia.
From the moment I heard about LEGO Serious Play, I knew that it was something that I wanted to learn more about and - thanks to a fantastic online course run by Sean Blair - last February, whilst on a ‘cruise to nowhere’, I was lucky enough to complete the LEGO Serious Play Online Build Level 1 and 2 workshop.
Whilst I instantly knew that this method had the potential to be transformative within our secondary school context, I perhaps underestimated just how significant an impact it could have, along with the range of contexts within which it could prove effective.
In one school term alone, we have used LEGO Serious Play to facilitate shared vision building workshops with educator teams, explore our Middle School students’ relationship with Social Media and challenge learners in class to use this process to enhance their learning of key concepts within different subject areas.
In the coming months, we have plans for how the process can inform our approaches; notably the engagement of our wider-school parent and alumni community as well as formally embedding the process into schemes of work, effectively making LEGO Serious Play a mainstream strategy within the ‘teacher’s toolkit’.
Here are our big takeaways regarding how and why the process has proved successful within our specific school context.
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What Went Well: Reasons Why LEGO Serious Play Has Proved Successful
It is a democratic process
In the context of education, this one is HUGE. As Sean stated during training, in LEGO Serious Play, ‘everybody builds, everybody shares’. This equitable engagement can be very difficult to achieve in a ‘typical’ classroom or meeting environment for a whole host of reasons; established hierarchies, different languages, cultural norms and learning needs, as well as the behavioural chasm between introvert and extrovert personalities to mention just a few.
Regardless of whether participants have been students or staff, the feedback from our sessions have always highlighted the democratic nature of this process as a significant positive. This was perhaps best epitomised by a member of our Outdoor Education team’s administration staff who valued the process as “providing opportunities for all individuals to actively participate”. This was particularly validating as the department’s backroom staff had not always been engaged in the co-creation of department visioning.
It is a safe space for idea sharing
The beauty of communicating through models - in our experience - is that it distances participants from the ideas they are sharing. We have observed that, by allowing the model - rather than the individual - to take centre stage in this manner, participants are less guarded about sharing potentially controversial ideas. This has been particularly powerful for workshops where students have been exploring socially sensitive issues; something that can be incredibly challenging for status-aware teenagers to do; especially when this process is facilitated by very “uncool” authority figures such as their teachers.
For example, in a workshop where Middle School students explored their relationship with Social Media - very much a ‘powder-keg’ issue - participants were able to use their models to frame their own ideas as the views of both themselves and their peers, without worrying that their ideas would directly reflect upon themselves as individuals, offering us, as school leaders, a more authentic less-filtered reflection of how our student-body really felt about social media.
This ‘veil of anonymity’ that LEGO Serious Play offers participants throughout the process is a significant positive case for its’ use within schools.
It promotes tolerance
As a large international school, UWCSEA is the proverbial melting pot. With such a diverse student, staff and community population, our school mission makes explicit our aim to ‘use education as a force to unite people, nations and cultures for peace’. A fundamental foundation for peace is tolerance; tolerance for the opinions, beliefs and values of those who do not necessarily share the same opinions, beliefs and values as you.
Having observed how students and staff within our school community behave during the workshops and sessions that we have facilitated, I have become a huge advocate for the extent to which tolerance is inherently built into the LEGO Serious Play process.
The focus on active listening and the need to recap and summarise the ideas of others ensures that participants must truly listen, hear and understand the stories that their peers choose to share. In our educational context, this is not always the case, with students often eager to share their own ideas whilst not fully appreciating those of their peers. This process challenges this default to myopia. As one student put it in her workshop feedback:
“I felt that it made us listen more carefully and through paraphrasing, allowed us to understand each other's thoughts and concepts better”
In our experience, the shared model build is where the processes capacity for fostering tolerance truly comes to the fore. In one student workshop, when it came to constructing their shared response to the build question, not a single student chose one of their own ‘disaggregated parts’ to contribute to the shared build; instead preferring to select elements of their peers’ individual builds.
The significance of this is that, through the process, our students evidenced that they not only heard and appreciated the diversity of ideas that emerged, they validated these different ideas by choosing to contribute these to the group response over their own.
If this is not an outstanding analogy and blueprint for peace, then I do not know what is!
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Challenges we encountered
These are just some of the reasons why we continue to advocate for the use of LEGO Serious Play within our specific school context, and why we will continue to explore where it can enhance our learning program.
It is also worth acknowledging that, through our exploration, we have experienced challenges when it comes to using this process. In the interests of transparency, here are the major ones that we have faced:
Time: In schools, timetables are constraining at the best of times and, therefore, finding the often extended periods of time required to facilitate powerful and meaningful workshops with students and staff alike has been sometimes difficult
Quality Control: Running workshops with larger student numbers has proved challenging; particularly where facilitator to participant ratios are such that multiple build groups are in play. In particular, it has sometimes proved difficult to impress upon students the significance of recapping where the facilitator has not been ‘at the table’ to explicitly do so.
Focus: Working with children is an amazing experience. They tend to bring considerably less ‘baggage’ to the table than we adults do. The pay off for this enthusiasm is that it can be challenging to maintain focus. As with any learning experience, keeping learners on task, whilst maintaining the levels of creative freedom necessary for the LEGO Serious Play process to be effective has been a balancing act.
Moving forward, we are excited to see the potential positive influence that this process can have upon our school community. Significantly, we would be very excited to share our experiences with other educators to build a professional community and learn from each other's successes and challenges.
Contact Liam via LinkedIn
Note from SeriousWork founder Sean Blair: Liam, thanks so much for sharing your brilliant story, to see such a wide range of uses in such a short time since training is truly impressive. Thank you for attending out online class from Singapore, and working so late into the night to learn these skills you have evidently mastered so well.