Why Coaches Should Consider Adding LEGO® Serious Play® to Their Toolkit - Part 2 of 2

I first encountered LEGO® Serious Play® about ten years ago. What stood out was not the novelty of the materials, but the way the methodology helped people think differently, surface assumptions and talk about complex issues with more openness and clarity.

For coaches, this matters because so much of our work is about helping people access insight, shift perspective and take meaningful action. In one-to-one coaching, that often happens through powerful questions. In group and team coaching, however, the challenge is different: the coach must create the conditions for every voice to contribute, for assumptions to become visible and for a group to move from polite discussion (and sometimes, impolite) to shared understanding.

Interactive methods give coaches a way to slow down automatic thinking while speeding up collective insight. When participants build a model, they are not simply answering a question; they are externalising what they know, sense and experience. This creates a richer coaching field, because the group can explore meaning through both the model and the story behind it.

It can help teams build shared understanding. Rather than relying only on discussion or process maps, teams can create shared models of how work happens, where pressure points sit and what needs attention. The process gives the coach a practical way to help the group compare perspectives and identify areas of agreement or difference.

In organisational team coaching, this is particularly valuable. Teams often carry different interpretations of the same strategy, change initiative or cultural expectation. LEGO® Serious Play® allows those different interpretations to be made visible, compared and integrated. The coach can then help the group notice patterns, tensions, gaps and opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden beneath familiar meeting language.

It can bring important detail into the room. Because the method is active and visual, participants are often able to express things that might otherwise remain vague or unspoken. For coaches, this can create useful material to explore with the group, particularly when working with team dynamics, role clarity, collaboration or change.

It is adaptable across different coaching contexts. LEGO® Serious Play® can support strategy conversations, team alignment, process exploration, role clarity, and cultural reflection. Its value lies in giving people a concrete way to represent complex ideas, rather than assuming everyone is interpreting the conversation in the same way.

For organisations, the benefits go beyond a single engaging workshop. Interactive coaching methods can help teams develop shared language, strengthen trust, clarify how they work together and build commitment to agreed actions. This makes them useful for teambuilding, leadership development, strategy implementation, merger integration, values work and culture change.

Some leaders are understandably cautious when they first hear about using LEGO® in a professional setting. A coach may need to explain that the focus is not on play for its own sake, but on creating a structured process for reflection, dialogue and shared sense-making.

In environments where leaders and teams are navigating complexity, interactive methods can provide coaches with another way to help clients slow down, see the system more clearly and work toward practical next steps. LEGO® Serious Play® is one such method that may be worth adding to a coach’s toolkit.

For coaches, interactive methods like LEGO® Serious Play® can transform group coaching sessions from discussion-based conversations into shared experiences where participants actively build insight, connection and commitment. This makes them especially powerful for organisational teambuilding, improving team effectiveness and supporting cultural transformation, because people move beyond talking about change to seeing, shaping and owning it together.

For coaches, this expands the toolkit in a practical and purposeful way. It offers a method for helping groups move beyond discussion into active sense-making. Used thoughtfully, it can support stronger relationships, clearer decisions and more grounded conversations about organisational change.

If you are interested in exploring how this approach might sit alongside your existing coaching practice, you can attend the Coaches Toolkit Webinar on LEGO Serious Play.

*This article was not sponsored by LEGO®