There is something delightful about watching a room full of senior executives fall silent as they begin to build. Jackets come off and phones are turned face down. Someone frowns at a pile of bricks, then starts again. Within minutes, the conversation has slowed as thinking takes over.
We’re not in a board room but in the Harvard Business School classroom. LEGO has been part of executive education for long enough that its presence no longer needs defending. What still deserves attention is why it works and why, at a moment when business leaders are dealing with unprecedented complexity, it may be more relevant than ever.
Leadership as something you construct
Much of business education assumes that insight comes first and behaviour follows. Understand the model, absorb the framework, and then apply that thinking once you are back at work. Bringing a pile of colourful plastic bricks into the picture turns the thinking around.
When executives are asked to build out of LEGO a representation of their organisation, their strategy or their biggest obstacle, they can be curious, adventurous and dare I say it, playful. This is a chance to explore countless different options, see what works, take things apart, all within the safety of a classroom.
Leadership challenges are rarely technical problems waiting for the correct answer. They are messy, human and full of competing interpretations and possibilities.
For David Brown, Director of Executive Education at Imperial College in London, equipping future leaders and managers to function in a rapidly changing world is fundamental to what business education can provide.
“Every industry is going through change,” he says, “some much more than others. And it’s not just a question of new technology it’s about changes in business models, in processes, even in cultures. Some of the most traditional industries, such as FMCG, logistics and hospitality, are undergoing the biggest transformations, but they are often sectors short of the type of people that will fully embrace the possibilities of change.”
Curiosity, imagination, and judgement
What really matters according to Brown is the balance of enabling them to understand what’s going on, to ask the right questions, to understand the answers they get back and then to lead the resulting transformation.
“I think there are two key skills sets. The first is the ability to understand and then harness the potential of new technologies. And perhaps most importantly, to grasp that the greatest potential comes not just from a single technological development, but by combinations of them.
As a consequence, Imperial Executive Education emphasise the need to help people develop questioning and analytical skills, but also curiosity, imagination, and playfulness. “The second area is around judgement, he explains. “Because, at least so far, while computers may be great at crunching huge amounts of data to come up with answers, they don’t have the ability to work out whether a solution is fair or ethical or even if it actually makes sense.”
Playfulness isn’t a word you commonly associate with management, but for Brown innovation stems from creativity. “If we want real progress we need to build room for experimentation. We need to allow people to try things out. To get back to the way children learn so many fundamental lessons – through play.
Just look at all the fascinating things a small child can come up with if you give them a Lego set. So we ask whether we might be able to do a similar thing with executives, giving them an environment which borrows from childhood play, where they can experiment, learn through mistakes and even have fun.”
David Brown gives the example of a large corporate client which was trying to drive new innovation, but which kept being beaten to the punch by their competitors. “They thought they were giving their people the freedom to come up with great new ideas until we pointed out the signs they had up on so many walls which said in nice big letters, ‘Right first time, every time’. That sort of approach might be great in a stable manufacturing environment dedicated to quality, but it kills innovation stone dead.”
Seen this way, LEGO is not a break from serious thinking but a different route into it.
Why using your hands change the conversation
There is a practical reason LEGO shifts the quality of dialogue in leadership teams. Building engages parts of the brain that abstract discussion does not. It slows people down just enough to make reflection possible and creates a focal point that is shared by the team.
If the connection between brick structures looks to be fragile that invites questions and discussion. An isolated LEGO character on the edge of the build raises issues that might otherwise have bene overlooked.
This is why LEGO has found a home in the Management Innovation programme at Harvard Business School. In its work with LEGO® Serious Play®., Harvard describes how physical models help participants surface mental models that would otherwise remain implicit. The bricks do not replace strategy; they reveal how people are actually thinking about it.
In a fascinating account of the hands-on session, faculty chair of Managing Innovation, Stefan Thomke, shares: “People have come up to me and said they’ve never seen anything like this. It’s so much fun. You have to see that grown adults sit there in a classroom with Legos and they build customer experiences.”
The methodology brings the principles of innovation to life in a tactile, collaborative way, fitting seamlessly into a curriculum that challenges participants to think differently.
“What we do with these Legos is we actually draw some of the fundamental principles about the design of these magical customer experiences, Thomke elllaborates. “It really gets under their skin and they tell me they’ll never forget it.”
The activity, based on learning theory and psychology, is a facilitated process in which participants are led through a series of questions, building exercises, and reflections to foster creativity and deepen learning. Each participant builds models with carefully selected LEGO elements, listens, and shares their creations with other participants. Each model becomes a shared metaphor – a way to visualize complexity, identify root causes, and design more thoughtful, human-centered solutions.
Crucially, this levels the room. Verbal fluency and hierarchical confidence matter less when everyone is asked to explain a model they have built. Quiet participants often find their voice through metaphor, while dominant voices are tempered by the need to listen.
The discipline beneath the play
One of the most persistent misconceptions about LEGO in leadership settings is that it is loose or unstructured. In practice, the opposite is true. Well-designed LEGO Serious Play sessions are carefully facilitated, with clear questions, time boundaries and reflection phases. The playfulness lies in the medium, not in the absence of rigour.
This is where the thinking of Cecilia Weckström is especially instructive. After more than 25 years working at LEGO, currently as the Director, DCE Transformation Initiatives she has consistently resisted the temptation to romanticise creativity. In her newsletter, The Tenon, she insists that creativity is not a rare talent, but a capability that emerges when people feel safe enough to explore ideas that are not yet finished.
Some things last. They spread. They get better through use. People teach each other. Five years later, it isn’t a “programme” anymore, it’s just how work gets done.
The difference is whether you build something that depends on you, or something that works without you.
Cecilia Weckström, The Tenon
She has written that play creates a space where people dare to share thoughts they would normally keep to themselves. That observation goes to the heart of why LEGO works with senior leaders. Many executives are trained, often unconsciously, to speak only when their thinking is polished. LEGO legitimises the unfinished idea, with a half-built model that says that exploration is still underway.
Making the invisible visible
Leadership teams often struggle not because they lack intelligence or commitment, but because they are misaligned in ways they cannot easily see. They use the same language while imagining different futures. LEGO exposes those gaps gently but unmistakably.
Ask a team to build its current business model, and subtle tensions emerge. One leader emphasises resilience, another speed, a third control. These differences might remain hidden in a verbal discussion, but they become obvious when represented by blue, red, yellow and orange brick structures placed side by side on a table.
The power of the method lies in this visibility. Once assumptions are illustrated in this way they can be examined, challenged and revised. The conversation moves from defending positions to building something together.
From bricks to better habits
The most interesting impact of LEGO in leadership development often appears after the session ends. Leaders report that they listen differently, ask more exploratory questions, and become more comfortable admitting uncertainty.
Stefan Thomke at Harvard Business School correlates this with his own experience in the classroom asking executives what made their most memorable customer experiences. “They weren’t using terms like ‘functional value, efficiency, and cost-value analysis.’ The language they were using instead drew on the emotions of the experience. “Made me feel special. Showed empathy. Really cared. Personalized the process. Trusted me. Owned the problem. Surprised us. Made things simple.”
LEGO doesn’t provides all the answers, but is can it change habits. It models a way of working together that values curiosity over certainty and shared understanding over individual brilliance.
In complex environments, those habits matter. The ability to say “we’re not aligned yet” or “let’s explore this before deciding” is increasingly a sign of effective leadership, not indecision.
Why this matters now
Organisations are grappling with challenges that resist linear thinking. Executives have to content with digital transformation, sustainability transitions, cultural change, and geopolitical volatility.
Talking about such challenges is necessary, but often insufficient. Building them, even in a simplified, metaphorical formwith LEGO bricks can help leaders grasp relationships that are otherwise abstract, and turn discussion into exploration.
Leadership is often about creating the conditions for better thinking and ideas to emerge. Sometimes, the most effective way to do that is not another spreadsheet or slide deck, but a table, a question, and a box of bricks.
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