Combining LEGO With Liberating Structures?

I frequently visit Billund (Denmark 🇩🇰) to facilitate workshops at the LEGO Group. We have been fortunate to work closely with them for years, as they use our product, Columinity, with 100+ teams, and our partnership seems to continue for a while longer.

While I recently enjoyed a lovely sunny evening walk, I started thinking about combining two things I’m passionate about: LEGO and Liberating Structures.

Interestingly, despite working with LEGO (the company), I never use LEGO itself in my workshops, even though I use it heavily at home. I do use Liberating Structures almost daily. 🤷‍♂️

On second thought, the combination could be quite powerful! 💪

Some ideas in the context of working with a team…

🎈Drawing Together: Ask your team members to visualize the road ahead of their team. Don’t use the symbols of Drawing Together; instead, use LEGO. You can follow the same steps for this LS. The together part becomes even more fun!

🎈Nine Whys: Use LEGO to visualize a team’s purpose. Invite everyone to do this individually. Conduct interviews to interpret their creations. Optionally, turn it into one large LEGO building.

🎈1–2–4-ALL: Build team values. Individually, everyone picks one value they consider important for their team, and they build it with LEGO. In pairs, they share ideas and develop them further in groups of four, maybe even combining them. Share the overall result with all values with the entire team.

🎈1–2–4-ALL: Build your ideal colleague. Saskia Vermeer-Ooms has often used 1–2–4-all and LEGO as a team values session. In this LinkedIn article, she detailed how team members had to build their ideal colleagues.

🎈Conversation Cafe: Individually, everyone uses LEGO to visualize a challenge they face in their work. Use the flow of Conversation Cafe to discuss all challenges in more detail and to identify improvements.

🎈Social Network Webbing: take a large stack of LEGO figures and use them to visualize your support network. The more different types of figures you have, the more fun it becomes!

The more I think about it, the more enthusiastic I become! 😃

Of course, you don’t have to use it during each session, but it can be a fun and valuable alternative. I can’t see anyone NOT liking it!

What opportunities do you see for combining LEGO with Liberating Structures?

Please note…

To the many people pointing me to the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) concept: yes, I’m familiar with it. I even attended a training almost a decade ago.

I didn’t specifically include this in the post because I didn’t want to give the impression that you need to be an LSP facilitator to combine it with Liberating Structures.

If you have a bunch of LEGO bricks at home. Cool! Bring it to your team space and start a small LEGO-with-LS experiment!

The few experiences I’ve had with LSP (as I said, almost a decade ago) didn’t leave me highly enthusiastic. It felt too serious and too constraining. Despite being a huge LEGO fan, it didn’t trigger me to explore it in more detail. I’m not bashing LSP; I only share my feelings after my first experiences.

Thanks, Fortune Buchholtz, for pointing me to the public LEGO SERIOUS PLAY Github page. Something to explore!

And big thanks to Sarah-Derriks-De Wit and Frank Kobus for sending me their new (Dutch) book, “The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY Method For Agile Professionals.” I’ll read it in the upcoming period.