1. Think with your Hands:
– How to get started with
Lego Serious Play
Martin Sandberg
2013

2. You can discover more about a person in an
hour of play than in a year of conversation
-Plato
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3. What bricks to use?
• Use the most basic Lego bricks
• They enable thinking in metaphors
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4. When to use Lego Serious Play?
• Team building
• Unleashing creative thinking for accelerated innovation
• Work out a solution to a shared problem
• Create a shared mindset about something
• Constructive discussions where everybody is heard
• Build a shared vision
• Leadership development
• One-on-one coaching and Team coaching
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• Use with your children, family, school, ...
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5. Think with your hands
Just start building. Trust your hands.
Let them pick the bricks they want.
Fiddle about ...
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6. Lego Serious Play – Steps
1. The Challenge - Question
2. Build a model – Metaphor
3. Sharing – Give meaning – Tell your story
4. Questions and reflections
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7. Warm Up – Skills Building
1. Normal, non-metaphorical representation
2. Metaphorical representation
3. Combine models into a shared group model
4. Storytelling
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8. Warm Up Excercises
• Build a duck, 5-10 min
• Build a tower, 10 min
• Build something; assign a description – metaphor, 10
• Build your dream colleague – metaphor, 10 min
• My Monday mornings – story line, 10 min
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9. Duck
• Build a duck using 7 bricks
• Explain how it is a duck
– Are different people’s ducks similar?
• Now remove 3 bricks so that you have 4 left
• Explain how it is still a duck
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10. Highest Tower
Either individually or as teams:
• Build the highest tower you can in 3 min
– It should be able to stand without any support
– You cannot reserve bricks
• Share something about your tower – explain what it
means
– Point out differences in the towers – no right or
wrong way of building
– Explain how you reasoned in the beginning. Who did
what? Did you assign roles? Did you split the work?
– Test for stability – show attachment to something we
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have built when it breaks or is disassembled
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11. Dream Colleague
1. Build a model that represents your Dream Colleague, 3
min
• Share, 1 min per person
• The facilitator asks questions to better understand the
meanings of different parts of the models
2. Take one aspect from each model and make a shared
model with the others in the team and place it on a paper
napkin
• Everybody should agree on all the parts of the shared
model.
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• Everybody on the team explains the shared model
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12. My Monday Mornings
1. Build a story describing your Monday
Mornings, 3-4 mins
• Share your metaphor and storyline
2. Take one part which you think is most
important and put it in the middle and build a
model together with everyone else in the group
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13. Build Something and Re-Interpret It
1. Build whatever you feel like building, 3 min
2. The facilitator assigns a meaning to the model
3. The participant explains how the model represents X, 1 min. E.g. ”My
dream holiday is to scuba dive. My model describes the boat and ...”
Examples of meanings to assign:
• Your dream holiday
• The ideal home
• Your favorite activity
• An ingenious invention
• Your favorite song
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• A relaxing day
• Your neighbor
• The car of the future
• Your favourite TV show or movie 13

14. Listen with your eyes
Look at the model that is being shared
– use your visual sense to grasp and understand even
more of what the other participants are describing
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15. Examples of Challenges

16. A) Future Success
1. Build a model which shows the road blocks to
your immediate and future success
2. Build a model describing what your future
will look like without the barriers
3. Build a model which shows what you need
from others and yourself to knock down the
barriers to your success
4. Combine your models which will show how
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you will get support from the team/group
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17. B) Team Member
1. Build a model showing who you are on the team
– What do you bring to the team?
– What could you bring to the team?
– Build some of the functions that you carry out on the
job, also include some hidden aspects of you
2. Build an addition to your model that shows how
you think others in your team perceive you
3. Who are you at your best?
– Build an addition to your model showing your
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thoughts about this – what characterizes you when
you are at your best?
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18. C) Team
1. Build an individual model showing how you
perceive your team:
– Show what you believe your team is all about
– What is the spirit of the team?
– The feel of the team?
– The values of the team?
2. Build a shared model that shows what your
team is all about
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– What is the team’s shared perception of the team?
– What is the spirit and the ‘feel’ of the team?
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19. D) Team Aspirations
1. Build a individual model showing what you
aspire to be like as a team in the future
2. Build a shared model
• Each person explains each part of the shared
model
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20. E) Team Goals
• Build a model describing the goals for the
team
• Build a model describing the objectives to
meet the goals (first steps to meet the goals)
• Build a model with the objectives in the form
of a storyline to show when in time they
should be completed
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21. F) How do you see yourself?
• Build a model describing how you see yourself
in your role (team member, Scrum Master,
Product Owner, Manager, ... )
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22. G) Your role
• Build a model describing your role on the
team
• What is easy in your role?
• What is difficult in your role?
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23. H) Strengths and Weaknesses
A. Build a model showing the strengths of your
Product, Team, Organization, ...
B. Build a model describing how you can utilize
the strengths
1. Build a modell showing the weaknesses
2. Build a model describing how you can
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remove or compensate for the weaknesses
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24. J) Appreciation
1. Build a model describing what you
appreciated in the workshop
2. Build a model describing what you would like
to change in a future similar workshop
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25. K) Retrospectives
1. Build a model describing what went well
2. Build a model describing things that we
should start or stop doing
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26. How does Lego Serious Play work?
• Much of our brain’s activity is dedicated to
the manipulation of our hands
• When we model with our hands and tell
stories there is more neuronal activity and
better suffusion of blood to critical areas of
the brain
• 70-80% of our brain’s nerve endings are
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connected to our hands
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27. How does Lego Serious Play work?
• Psychological Flow: Individuals gain most from
a learning process when they are committed
to and enjoy the process
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28. The Facilitator
• Creates Open-ended building challenges
• Gets the group’s dialogue to serve its purpose
• Makes the reflections and dialogue process
easier
• Helps participants express themselves
• Asks clarifying questions
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29. Participants’ Etiquette
• The Lego model is your answer to the building
challenge
• There are no wrong answers
• There is no ONE right answer – everyone has
different views
• What the model looks like is not the most
important thing
• The meaning attached to each model is what
makes it valuable
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• The Lego models are tools and means to an end
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30. Group Size
• Roughly 4-8 people per group
• One workshop group requires one facilitator
• It is generally not possible to facilitate two
groups ‘side by side’ because each group
would need focused attention from the
facilitator, at the same time
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31. Play !
• Put bowls of Lego bricks in your meeting
rooms and see what happens
• Combine Lego Serious Play with other
facilitation techniques
• Play around with the Lego bricks and invent
new challenges
• Get your workshops to a flying start by
starting with Lego Serious Play to get people
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talking and energized
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32. References
• seriousplay.com
• strategicplayroom.ning.com
• seriousplaypro.com
• Open source introduction document:
LSP Introduction
Martin Sandberg, 2013-04-14
• User requirements with Lego: LSP and User
Requirements
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33. Talks you might find interesting
• The future depends on play:
The future depends on play_Seriouslythemovie
• Tim Brown: Tales of creativity and play
ted.com/talks/lang/en/tim_brown_on_creativity
_and_play.h
• Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
ted.com/talks/lang/en/ken_robinson_says_schoo
ls_kill_creativity.html
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• Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!
ted.com/talks/sunni_brown.html
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34. Food for Thought
• How come executives love playing with Lego?
• Why do we associate work with ’serious’ and play with ’not
serious’ ?
• How can you use Lego Serious Play when you have
distributed teams?
• Is Lego Serious Play still ’serious’ when it is used in schools?
• What is a ’lean in’ vs. a ’lean back’ meeting?
• How long can you keep your fingers away from a pile of
Lego bricks (e.g. in a meeting room)?
Martin Sandberg, 2013-04-14
• You can download this presentation here:
slidesha.re/ONgvsj
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