2-day or the 4-day?

A guide to choosing the right SeriousWork training

“Which course should I do, the 2 day foundation or the 4 day advanced?”

This is of the questions we are often asked, by people deciding which LEGO® Serious Play® training to take. It’s a good question, and deserves a detailed answer.

The short answer is the right choice depends on what you want to do with the method.

The longer answer is worth reading, because the difference between the two is more significant than a matter of days.

What the 2-day Foundation course gives you

The 2-day Foundation course teaches Build Levels 1 and 2 of the LEGO® Serious Play® method.

Build Level 1 is individual model building, where each person builds their own model in response to a question, then shares it. Build Level 2 is shared model building, where groups combine their thinking into a collective representation of something they hold in common, whether that’s a team vision, a shared challenge, or a picture of how they work together. 

LEGO® Serious Play® Shared Model

These two levels are powerful. They work for team meetings, team coaching conversations, facilitated workshops, and any situation where you want people to think more carefully, share more honestly, and listen more attentively. Facilitators who complete the Foundation course leave with practical skills they can use immediately in their existing work.

If you’re a facilitator, manager, leader, coach or someone who wants to bring a fundamentally different quality of conversation to their practice, the 2-day will serve you well.

What the 4-day Advanced course gives you

The first 2 days of the 4 day training are identical to the 2 day foundation.

Then the 4-day Advanced course builds on the Foundation and adds Build Level 3: system modelling. This is where LEGO® Serious Play® becomes something categorically more powerful.

System models allow groups to build three-dimensional representations of the forces, dynamics, and interconnections that shape a complex situation. Not just what people think or want, but the agents in the system, the cultural forces, the competing priorities, the invisible pressures, the beliefs embedded in how decisions get made, and how they relate to each other. 

LEGO® Serious Play® System Model

In my own practice, I return to Build Level 3 again and again, particularly with senior groups and small leadership teams. The sophistication it enables isn’t incremental. It’s a different kind of work.

The 4-day also includes the Re-Vision© technique, developed through my practice and documented in my book The Systems Synergy. Re-Vision© is the process by which a group refines their shared vision after examining the system that must deliver it.

A Shared Model – After Re-Vision

The result is always a vision that is richer, more realistic, and more strategically grounded than the one they started with. Build Level 2 shared models are valuable, but without Re-Vision©, they remain significantly underpowered. The group sees what they want, but not yet what the system will require of them.

The Critical Skill: Workshop Design

Here’s the thing about facilitation that most people underestimate when they begin. The skill that determines whether a workshop succeeds or fails is not what happens in the room. It’s the thinking that happens before anyone arrives.

Workshop design, the discipline of building a session that is genuinely fit for purpose, that asks the right questions in the right sequence, that creates the conditions for real insight rather than surface conversation, is harder and more important than facilitation technique. It’s also the part that takes the longest to develop.

In the 2-day Foundation course, we cover session design. But with the time available, we spend about two hours with this focus. That’s enough to introduce the principles. It isn’t enough to develop the capability for complex system level workshops.

In the 4-day Advanced course, we have more time for workshop design. On the afternoon of day three, participants work on a personal and real design challenge and spend the evening working on it. In our experience, people typically invest between four and eight hours on this task. They submit a detailed workshop plan, which I read carefully before day four begins. On day four, each participant receives individual feedback on their plan, and we work through the homework together as a group.

Participants leave not only with their own refined workshop plan, but with a copy of every other participant’s plan as well. In a group of eight, that’s seven additional workshop designs to learn from and reference when they begin designing their own sessions in the real world.

That’s the investment the 4-day makes in the skill that matters most.

Which one is right for you?

Choose the 2-day Foundation course if your workshops are likely to be short – and hour to half a day (you won’t have time to build a system model) and you might not be working with senior leaders on strategic matters (these kinds of assignments really need system models). 

You will leave with a practical, immediately usable facilitation skill that will enrich your existing work. It’s a genuine foundation, and the great starting point for anyone new to the method.

Choose the 4-day Advanced course if you want to work at the level of complexity where organisations face their hardest strategic challenges. If you facilitate senior leadership teams, design sophisticated systems thinking workshops, or build a serious professional practice around the method, the 4-day is the more right investment.

Since publishing The Systems Synergy, I’ve become more confident in saying that SeriousWork’s approach to Build Level 3 facilitation represents some of the most developed thinking and practice in this area anywhere in the world. That isn’t a casual claim. It’s grounded in over a decade of practice, documented in the cases in the book, and validated by the facilitators who have gone on to do this work with their own clients.

If you’re unsure which course is right for your situation, you’re welcome to reach out before booking. Book a call with Sean (best for Asian timezones) or Liam (best for UK, Europe or American timezones) That conversation is part of the service.

See you in class!