LEGO Serious Play at Work: Why Hands-On Building Creates Better Teams Than Traditional Team Building
You've done the escape room. You've done the happy hour. You've maybe even done the Topgolf outing.
And two weeks later, your team was exactly the same.
Not because those experiences were bad. Because they were designed to be fun, not to actually change anything. There's a difference, and most organizations never stop to notice it.
What if team building could surface something real? What if the people on your team who never seem to speak up in meetings had something worth saying, and the problem wasn't them?
JoLynn Ledgerwood has been asking those questions for over 25 years. The answer she keeps coming back to involves a handful of plastic bricks.
(00:00) The Woman Who Heard "Build a Duck" and Changed Careers
JoLynn Ledgerwood is a learning and development specialist with over 25 years of experience across industries including hospitality, consumer goods, IT, and cybersecurity. She has worked with organizations including PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, Toyota Motors, and Brinker International.
She is also one of approximately 100 certified LEGO Serious Play facilitators in the United States.
That number is striking when you learn there are over 15,000 facilitators across Europe. JoLynn didn't set out to become one of them. A friend from Germany showed up with a small kit of six bricks and told her to build a duck. That was the beginning.
What she found on the other side of a rigorous five-day certification process wasn't a gimmick. It was a methodology with a serious body of research behind it, a genuine level playing field for every person in the room, and results she hadn't seen from any other facilitation approach in her career.
(01:48) Your Hands Know Things Your Mouth Won't Say
Building with your hands activates 80% more brainpower than passive learning.
That's not a fun fact to put on a slide. It's the entire reason LEGO Serious Play works.
When people build, their subconscious shows up in the model. A brick placed here. Two figures facing each other there. A structure that reaches up when someone was asked to build what they bring to the team. JoLynn asks very specific questions during sessions:
Does this brick mean something in particular to you?
I noticed you did this. What was behind it?
From your side of the table, what do you see in someone else's build?
The builds become a physical object people can point to, react to, and ask about in ways they might never manage with words alone. Teams that have worked together for five or ten years regularly hear things in these sessions they never knew about their colleagues.
(09:23) The Tower That Exposes Everything in Three Minutes
The very first build in every LEGO Serious Play session is the same: build a tower.
No other instructions.
What happens next tells JoLynn almost everything she needs to know. Some people race to build the tallest one possible. Others are methodical, deliberate, particular about how the bricks connect. Some have never touched a LEGO brick and approach it like a test they weren't warned about.
When time is called, someone always mentions theirs was the fastest. Someone always assumes the point was height.
And that's the moment. JoLynn points out she never said go fast. Never said use all your bricks. Never said tallest wins. Those were rules people invented for themselves.
How many of those exist in your organization right now? Unspoken standards that shape how much people share, how safe they feel to try something that might not land, what they believe is expected of them before anyone said a word.
The tower surfaces all of it in the first three minutes.
(10:21) The Loudest Person in the Room Gets One Vote
Most team building formats give a structural advantage to people who are already comfortable taking up space. LEGO Serious Play doesn't.
Here's how the format creates genuine equity:
Everyone builds simultaneously. No talking during the build, only music playing in the background. Your thinking happens on your own, without the influence of the most confident voice next to you.
Everyone shares. Because everyone has a physical object in front of them, there's no deferring, no passing, no waiting to see what someone else says first.
Every perspective is equal. Your build is your contribution. It's on the table. It can't be talked over.
JoLynn describes the result clearly: the person who usually dominates every meeting and the person who has never once offered an unsolicited opinion are both building, both sharing, both heard.
(14:36) Bricks Don't Care About Your Job Title
At a recent high school girls basketball session, the coaches sat at the tables with the players and built alongside them.
The girls were surprised. The coaches were surprised by what the girls built.
That dynamic translates directly to the workplace. When a VP is sitting next to an individual contributor, both working through the same prompt with the same bricks, the hierarchy doesn't disappear. But it quiets down enough for something more honest to happen.
This only works, though, if the leader is actually in it.
"It takes a courageous leader because once your team throws these things out there as ideas, it needs to be something that you're willing to ask questions about and be all in. If the leader says, now that's a horrible idea, we've lost all momentum possible." — JoLynn Ledgerwood
A leader who dismisses what comes up in the room doesn't just lose the momentum of that session. They confirm something about what it means to be honest here, and that message is hard to walk back.
So What Are You Actually Trying to Build?
Team building events get planned for a lot of reasons. Morale. Onboarding. A rough quarter. An offsite that needs an activity.
Most of them don't change anything because they were never designed to.
The question worth asking before the next one is simple: what do you actually want to know about your team that you don't know right now? What conversation has been missing? Who hasn't been heard?
There's a lot more in the full conversation, including how LEGO Serious Play applies to strategic planning, product launches, and identifying perceived roadblocks before they derail a project. JoLynn also gets into what certification looks like for anyone wanting to bring this into their own practice.
Connect with JoLynn Ledgerwood: Elevateyourtalent.co | LinkedIn | Elevate Your Talent Blog
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