Donna Denio

Lego Serious Play, a three-dimensional thinking and communication process, helps teams gel. You take a group of individual “people silos” and weave them into a cohesive team.

By Donna Denio from Team Dynamics Boston

Lego Serious Play session

100 PERCENT PARTICIPATION GUARANTEED – The highly structured LSP process design guarantees that every person in the workshop participates equally.
GIVES SHY PEOPLE CONFIDENCE – Having time to think during the building process, a model for reference, and a specific time to speak builds confidence.
FRESH PERSPECTIVE GUARANTEED – The number of options and solutions generated and the fact that each model is an original expression (instead of building on an idea that has already been voiced) guarantees that fresh perspective emerge.
GETS TO CORE BELIEFS AND VALUES – You learn everyone’s REAL fears, areas of disagreement, hopes and dreams (instead of the sanitized, politically correct business-speak or lips-sealed-shut silence we have come to accept).
AUTHENTIC EXPRESSION (NO LIES) – It is difficult to misrepresent or inflate your reality when using LSP to express ideas.
CREATES A COMMON LANGUAGE – Professional training and cultural norms inform each person’s verbal expression so words can mean different things to different people. Some words or phases are only understood by people with similar professional training. The LSP models each person builds creates a common language that can be seen, questioned and understood without challenging the model builder.
CLARIFIES COMPLEXITY – The process supports creating a landscape which makes connections and relationships among and between components clear, concrete, and easy to understand.
GROUP ALIGNMENT GUARANTEED – The highly structured LSP process in combination with skilled facilitation assures that every person’s core ideas, values and concerns are incorporated in the final solutions.
MEMORABLE RESULTS – It has been said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Three-dimensional LSP models, stored in your memory as pictures of recognizable objects (such as a gear, globe or tiger) trigger access to the workshop’s key insights.
SAVES TIME – In post workshop surveys and interviews, participants agree that LSP workshops accelerate trust and consensus building at two-to-three times the speed of other traditional methods for group decision-making or strategy development.

NPR carried a news story on collaboration and collective intelligence. I tracked down the foundational research on the National Science Foundation web site and in a serious academic journal called