Meetings Can Be More Playful

"What on earth is the point of this meeting?"
—I doubt there is anyone who has never thought that.
Materials are projected, someone explains, and someone nods. Comments are limited, and silence grows. Before you know it, the purpose has vanished, and only the formality remains.

However, what if that meeting were conducted using LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®? The scene would look like an entirely different world.

On the table are bricks and human hands. Everyone is silently building.
What echoes in the meeting room is the sound of bricks being sorted and the faint sound of breathing.
Yet, in that silence, thoughts are moving more freely than ever.

In a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® meeting, there are no "minutes" or "moderators." All that exists are questions, bricks, and stories.
The facilitator poses a question: "Please use LEGO to represent the key to leading this project to success."
With just that, everyone starts moving. Position and age do not matter. Executives and new employees alike move their hands at the same table.

What is surprising is that this time, which feels like play, becomes the most productive meeting.
As you move your hands, your thoughts become organized, and your words catch up.
The moment "thinking" and "making" become one, people visualize the "unconscious logic" within themselves.
That is why it is more appropriate to call this method a "place for rediscovering structure" rather than a "meeting."

Faced with a single challenge, everyone builds their own model.
Each set of bricks takes a different form. A tower-like structure, an expansive field, a bridge, a wall, or perhaps wind.

Every one of them holds "that person's perspective."

When standing before the bricks, people take responsibility for their own thoughts for the first time.
The reason they can say, "This is the world as I see it," is because they have the medium of bricks.

When debating with words, someone is right and someone is wrong.
Butin a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® setting, no one is denied.
There is a structure that allows you to say, "That is also a part of this world."
This is because models coexist rather than compete.
Differences create expansion, not destruction.

Once, a manufacturing team introduced this method.
The theme was, "Why can't we come up with new ideas?"
Even when they held meetings, the conclusion was always, "We don't have time," or "Management won't decide."
However, with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, models lined up instead of excuses. One person built a high wall, another assembled a narrow tunnel, and another floated transparent bricks in the air. And as they talked, structural obstacles that no one had noticed emerged.

It wasn't that they "didn't have time."
The "flow of information" was one-way.
The moment they decided to change that, the shape of the meeting changed, and the organization's thinking changed as well.

At the root of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is the philosophy of "the intelligence of play."
Play is not a waste.
Rather, it is the purest form of creation.
Bricks help adults regain the flexibility they have lost.
In play, there are rules, yet imagination is free.
That balance of tension and release maximizes a team's creative power.

And above all, this method is fun.
Laughter emerges, hands move, and hearts loosen.
The meeting changes from an "obligation" to an "exploration."
The sight of adults seriously talking about the future while playing is a little comical, and beautiful.

Come to think of it, when we were children, we all learned about the world while playing.
We built skies with blocks and cities in the sandbox.
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is what allows us to regain that focus and joy once again.

Meetings can be more playful.

To play is to think.
The moment a person picks up a brick, they change from a "person who talks about problems" to a "person who creates the future."

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® turns corporate meeting rooms back into "sites of creation" once more. And it asks us:

"What do you want to create?"

When play becomes serious, work finally regains its meaning.
That was the first "revolution" that LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® taught me.

Next time is the 4th session: "By giving it form, it becomes visible."
—"Visualizing a problem" is not just about making it visible.
It holds the power to redraw the very structure of thought itself.