Lego gives your transformation a leg

• What is the actual problem, not the symptom?
• Where do friction losses arise between areas?
• Who actually doesn’t follow along, and why?

There is structurally no space for these questions in status meetings and voting loops. In addition, it is often simply inconvenient to identify the actual causes.

Instead, the loudest often dominate – and hierarchies influence what is said. This leads to prioritization conflicts remaining unspoken and complex relationships being simplified until they appear manageable. The resulting ineffective changes make employees tired in the long term, as a current study by the TU Dresden shows. According to this, around a third of the 2,800 German study participants suffer from “change fatigue”.

How Lego Serious Play helps

A Lego serious play seminar can work wonders in such situations. But first things first: Lego Serious Play is a method that emerged at the end of the 1990s – when the Lego Group itself was in an existential crisis. Back then, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen (CEO of the Lego Group from 1979 to 2004) and researchers from IMD Lausanne were looking for a strategy process for real uncertainty. The result was a process based on the hand-brain principle: physical building activates both hemispheres of the brain at the same time and opens up knowledge that verbal communication alone cannot achieve.

What fascinates me about its creation to this day: During this crisis, Lego did exactly what I demand of organizations in transformation. They have transferred their core competence – stones, building, models – into a completely new context. Completely without industry thinking and self-imposed hurdles (“We won’t do that”). The group simply asked itself how its core competence could be used profitably at this point.

Accordingly, Lego Serious Play as a method does not start with talking, but with thinking. Participants build individual models for challenges, goals, blockages or visions of the future. And they give these models meaning – through stories that explain what a stone represents, what a connection means, where a gap has arisen. The result is not another slide deck, but an image that represents the way people think. If this becomes a group model, the team decides together what will be included in the target image: It is checked whether the overall image feels consistent for everyone. And there is open discussion about what doesn’t fit and what bothers you. This significantly reduces the potential for conflict because the model is being talked about – not people.

I have rarely experienced transformations failing due to a lack of competence. More often, it comes to ruin because smart people systematically work past each other – because everyone only sees the part that their area shows them. When these excerpts stand as models on a table and are connected, something emerges that would never have emerged in the discussion: a shared image of reality. This enables teams to identify where dependencies lie and which symptoms indicate deeper causes. The speed of implementation increases because we are finally working on the right problem.