This large, two-campus, K-12 independent school is as busy and ambitious as you’d expect it to be. Sights set high, and full calendar to support that. That’s why it was a big thing to see their entire leadership team clear their schedule for a day to take a deep, reflective look at their strategic efforts. Running to a five-year planning cycle, the school wanted to take stock after four in order to approach that final year with clarity and refined curiosity.

The first part of the day focused on reflection. We looked beyond the achievements of the past few years, digging deeper to the underlying conditions that enabled them, and what the participants learned and took away from that experience. From this, they built a Shared Model to give shape to their shared understanding.

To give this reflective stage of conversation a human face, we borrowed some thinking from the world of service design, and looked at some archetypal learner personas across the school – investigating who benefited greatly, and who might have flown under the radar. This invited some raw, vulnerable examination of their practice, before looking ahead to the future.

The second phase of the session looked to the future – exploring the notion of their school’s very identity into the future, and what it needs to know, to do, to be, and to have, all qualified with a great big capital-W “Why?” Once again, this future vision came together into a Shared Model to represent the future state counterpart to the morning’s efforts.

To add a layer of practicality to the review and vision processes, we put our systems thinking hats on, and explored the externalities and influencing forces that might impact the school’s ability to turn what it’s learned from the last few years into the future state they identified that they need to be. Taking a look at the agents and actors, the habits and existing momentum, and the new emerging influences that will have sufficient impact on the school’s efforts to need some intentional handling, either to harness as an ally, or to manage like an irritant. These models and their stories formed the basis of a Landscape to make sense of how they can take these forces in their stride and harness them where possible.

The refreshing thing about this review was that the group wasn’t looking for actionable outcomes, they were looking for understanding, and the keys to unlock more of it. To conclude our session, we took the entire array across the table, and found points of curiosity to reframe into multiple versions of the same question, using the Bigger Questions process.

Honestly, the day was full of them. The openness to reflection that the group brought with them was a gift, and the warmth and safety of the LEGO Serious Play method itself gave them the space to really lean into it.

One bright moment stood out as a testament to the method’s power to bridge understanding over viewpoints that don’t align perfectly. When giving the group a grounding and introduction to the method, and its power in helping people “get out of their own way,” I’d made a blunt facilitator joke about tradition being little more than peer pressure from the dead. In the build that followed, a lot of their models reflected their faith in the school’s heritage and traditions. After a little sip of water to clear the taste of my foot from my mouth, it led to a really rewarding conversation about balancing that sense of heritage without giving it a free pass to make decisions.