This ‘serious play expert’ says LEGO is the key to productive business meetings

By Sarah Kimmorley, first appeared on Business Insider

Michael Fearne is an expert LEGO® Serious Play®. Yes, you read that correctly.

Fearne has spent three years running and facilitating workshops where people use LEGO® to open conversations, work through problems and come up with new ideas. He says that in a workplace with a mix of introverts, extroverts, visual and kinaesthetic people, listeners, talkers and more, traditional meetings don’t always enable everyone to be heard.

By changing the format to “serious play” organisations can engage everyone in a new, fun way. Essentially, people are first asked an open-ended “question” to stir up ideas about a certain topic. They then “build” LEGO® models that represent ideas, concepts and experiences, and “share” what it is and why with the group, who in turn share their thoughts and ideas.

“It breaks down the business facade,” says Fearne. “Everyone says, ‘I didn’t know I was going to say that’ or ‘I can’t believe I revealed that’. “People can’t help themselves when they are playing, and have LEGO® in front of them. “LEGO® is a tool that… gives access to the creative side of people.”

The strategy is now used across many sectors of business from management to HR, educators and startups. And while it may seem like something that not everyone would engage with, Fearne says in all the time he has been doing it, he has only had one person that “wasn’t quite into it.”

*The author travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Pause 2017.