Lego

What it is

Groups get thousands of Lego bricks and have to represent, in three dimensions, ideas about the way they work together: the mission, the vision, the values, the workplace they’d want. It starts with short exercises in pairs, then a couple of hours of building, taking apart and rebuilding. At the end all the teams join their pieces into one large structure.

Building the group… out of Lego bricks

An afternoon where the objective is to build something together out of Lego. It’s a creative activity that gives the company, and where it wants to go, a shape you can walk around.

The three C’s, creativity, collaboration and co-construction of ideas, of systems and of the relationships between people, are probably the three words that describe this format best.

What is Lego Team Building for?

The point of the format is to build relationships between the members of a team, and to pay attention to how much communication and collaboration matter in ordinary working life.

Work in pairs and a run of small, unusual, energetic challenges are how every session starts. A few minutes is enough for people to feel completely free to express themselves and to share what they’re thinking without filtering it.

After a few of those exercises comes the centre of the day. The groups are, quite literally, buried in thousands of Lego bricks.

The first task is to represent, using only the bricks, some ideas about their own working group and what they share. A couple of hours go by creating, dismantling, recreating, building and designing with a lot of energy. Improbably enough, what the groups produce ends up being several small works of art. Then all the teams put their builds together into one large structure that stands for the company as they’d want it, and the joins are where the conversation gets interesting. The day after, an idea that had only ever been a slide has a physical shape that people argued over.

Alongside the team building, the format has a training dimension. There’s a variant built entirely on communication: each team gets precise instructions, but they go to one person first, who then has to explain them to everybody else. Remembering, interpreting and passing on a rule while the clock runs is harder than it sounds, and it’s exactly the job a team lead does all week.

It’s an unusual experience, and it turns out to be an effective way of stepping outside the office and discovering a side of your colleagues you hadn’t seen.

Lego Team Building: what does it give you?

The idea underneath is that the thoughts running around in our heads often become concrete only when something actually gets built: a sandcastle, a cake, a Lego house or a company, a piece of software or a poem. The thing that comes out has to be showable, arguable about, examinable, testable and worth admiring.

Some of the main skills this format works on:

• cooperation
• communication
• leadership
• sharing out the tasks
• managing time and resources
• room to express yourself

It isn’t a solemn exercise: the training side is dosed according to what’s needed, and the rest of the day stays light.