One of the great things about LEGO Serious Play is its flexibility, and its ability to nest itself inside frameworks, processes, and structures. It finds a really comfortable niche in those corners that are too slippery for straight answers to stay put, and it’s really good at making those nuanced, complex answers really relatable.

One such framework was one I modified into a LSP session plan from the work of Dr. Marieta du Plessis from the University of the Western Cape, adapting her model for character strengths-driven positive self-leadership into something we could build, share, and unearth some personal insight from.

This session was designed for participants to build trust in themselves and understanding of each other. Its twofold purpose was to pursue that deeper sense of self-awareness while sharing how to best collaborate with each other, allowing everyone to play to their strengths.

Using the LEGO Serious Play method to work to the Positive Self Leadership framework helped participants to pin down some of the more elusive parts of their thought process by finding the interactions between four elements:

• Strengths of Character
• Abilities & Talents
• Interests & Aspirations
• Strengths from the Surroundings

This session differed from other group workshops in that there was very little focus on the group as a whole. Participants shared their stories in pairs, and used the collective play techniques we might find in a Shared Model to discover the interplay and crossover between those four big ideas that might otherwise go unacknowledged – the difference being that rather than negotiating those details with others, they did it introspectively.

Finally, those four crossovers… cross over to find the really central themes at the heart of the entire array.

Playing this out with Year 10 students and with adults, each group came with different highlights.

The adults were the content and experience team at a hands-on STEM museum, beloved by the community. The biggest highlight in this session (beyond the unmistakable sound of pennies dropping throughout the session) was at the end of the session, bringing everyone’s “What’s at Heart?” model together at one big table, and visualised how their strengths could best support and empower each other. Everyone walked away really feeling seen, and in a lot of cases, seeing themselves in a clearer light.

The Year 10s called for a different success metric. Over the course of the session, the frequency of eye rolls per minute declined significantly.

Less flippantly, a group of ~80 students in a big room for a session of shared emotional vulnerability led by an unfamiliar facilitator presented some barriers (LSP with young people lives on adapting the environment to support them), so I set them to share in pairs and small groups, enabling me to step right back. The real joy was watching some students really take a big deep dive into the core of their own character, some adopt the role of deeply empathic listener, and some skim the surface until they surprised themselves with a huge insight.