For many people, meetings suck, they’re repetitive, the same people speak over and over again, and rarely do new ideas ever come up. What if you can change that dynamic? Imagine a meeting where that same group of people is engaged using their talents and producing quality insights that drive real business outcomes. Well, that’s what the LEGO ® Serious Play ® Method can do, and so much more.

Yes, I said LEGO. In his new book, The LSP Method, expert facilitator Michael Fearne lays out the practical steps for you to harness this world-renowned method and run your own Legos Serious Play sessions. Covering everything from key activities to customize sessions, this hands-on guide shows how the simple method can revolutionize your work and even change the way you think. In today’s episode, Michael shares with us how the LSP Method works, how it can be a vehicle for new and important conversations, and how play can change how we think about business and life. Enjoy.

Miles Rote: Hey everyone, my name is Miles Rote and I’m excited to be here today with Michael Fearne, author of The LSP Method: How to Engage People and Spark Insights Using the LEGO ® Serious Play ® Method. Michael, I’m excited you’re here. Welcome to the Author Hour podcast.

Michael Fearne: Thanks Miles, excited to be talking to you.

Miles Rote: Yeah, this is going to be a lot of fun. Before we jump in to even what the LSP Method is, tell us a little bit about you and what inspired you to write this book?

Michael Fearne: Well, it all sort of starts back in childhood really, as it always does, when I was just reading stories, I loved stories, like a lot of people. I used to really enjoy reading books and I don’t know if you know, but there are these books called, “Choose Your Own Adventure.” And it was about you being the star of the show, you would read a part of the book and then you would go, now go to this page, do this, go to this page, do this. I just loved being part of that story and I think that’s what flowed through to where I am today.

I started diving into story and started diving into groups and went to university and studied psychology and people and was just fascinated by it.

It ended up as a facilitator, as a person that helps others. Their conversations and through stories and groups, I ended up at this particular method I use and that’s what led to the book. It’s been a long journey when you look back, you never cast it forward, but you always look back and think, wow, that’s how I got here. It started all back in childhood.

The LEGO Serious Play Method

Miles Rote: I love that, I think you’re so right, I think so many of the things that we’re passionate about or do today in some ways is tied to our childhood. I love the Choose Your Own Adventure aspect of it though, and I guess it surprises me as we talk about this.

First, let’s dive into what it is we’re talking about, LEGO Serious Play. It almost sounds counter-intuitive, putting LEGO and serious together, and serious and play together.

Tell us about what LEGO Serious Play means and how it can be like a choose your own adventure ride.

Michael Fearne: Yeah. I just love the title, LEGO Serious Play because it does, as you said, encapsulate so many things that seem sort of paradoxical. As everyone knows, LEGO is a child’s toy and it’s normally used by children to play. Some adults get into it but the way this particular sort of method is used is more in the adult world, in the business world. Essentially what it does is it uses LEGO, the child’s toy, to help people have better conversations in both a serious and a playful way, it combines both of those so people can have better conversations. It’s primarily used in the business world, although it’s dying to be used in the education world as well. Essentially, it’s just using a tool like LEGO to help you have a better conversation.

We tap into that childlike play but in the end, we come out with a serious outcome.

Miles Rote: Yeah, I think I have to be careful when I’m talking about LEGO because I remember reading that LEGO is always singular, right? There is no plural of LEGO, is that right?

Michael Fearne: That’s right, yeah. Particularly in America, they like to say LEGOs but the Danish are very particular about their grammar and so it’s definitely LEGO, the plural is LEGO also, it’s definitely LEGO Serious Play.

I guess how it fits into that, Choose Your Own Adventure is its technique and a method about telling stories and it’s about engaging people and sparking insights but ultimately, it’s using the LEGO to tell a story.

With all those stories, whether it’s a story about the past and where we’ve been, it might be a story about what’s happening at the moment and some challenges or something that’s happening for you or your team at the moment. Then there are also stories about the future, which I love and I do a lot of work with, about that visioning and where people want to go. So, that’s where the choose your own adventure vibe comes into it, it’s about people understanding their own story, where they’ve come from but also writing their own story about where they want to go as individuals and as teams.

Miles Rote: Right, I love that. You read Choose Your Own Adventure as a kid and you’re inspired by that, you take psychology in college and this whole story dynamic is really interesting to you.

What is it especially about LEGO Serious Play that really captivated you and brought you into that world when there are so many other things that have similar results?

Michael Fearne: Yeah, it does and when serious play is interesting, it does tap into a lot of different other techniques. But to your point Miles, I remember there was this one moment where I had been a facilitator, I’d gone out after studying psychology and I had become a facilitator at some of these big companies and was learning my craft. I eventually went out as an independent. I wasn’t enjoying that sort of conservative space that sometimes happens in big organizations, so I left and started my own business and became an independent facilitator.

I remember there was this one moment where I was looking around for an activity to do, as you do as a facilitator, and I came across a book about LEGO Serious Play and it was actually the early stages, and wasn’t called LEGO Serious Play, it was just some sort of early experiments with it.

It started to fire off all these fireworks in my mind about all the things that I loved around psychology, around group dynamics, and around story. That’s what really got me into it and then I started to test it and use it in my work. It has taken over my work now too, that’s all I do, I use it with clients, and I teach to people and write a book about it.

I think for me, the reason why I like this LEGO method is that it taps into things like play, so it’s very playful which you’re back in that childlike state, it uses your hands and so you’re building and bringing those bricks together which taps into different parts of your mind and you get into what I call flow states.

There’s all this underlying science that just builds up to make this method. I think it is some sort of super method because it brings in a lot of these things that other methods are doing but it packages it up in this beautiful way and I’m just amazed when I run sessions. It’s almost like I sit back, and I watch the method go and I see what it does to people. As a facilitator, it’s just amazing to sit back and see it do its thing, it’s such a reliable method for me.

I love going in and just knowing that the people are going to have these insights, they’re going to have these sorts of breakthroughs as individuals and teams. I think that’s what it does, it just brings a lot of this really interesting stuff, different science and techniques, it brings them together.

It’s tough just talking about it because it’s so much easier to show it. You put some LEGO in front of people, and you get them to do it and suddenly, and it gives people that moment of, “Wow, that’s not what I expected,” and does pretty amazing things.

Facilitating Conversation

Miles Rote: Yeah, maybe you could paint the picture for us a little bit of what it looks like when you are facilitating one of these. Is it typically businesses or organizations and do you put the LEGO out in front of them? What does the whole scene look like?

I just wanted to underline what you said that I think is really cool to think about how LEGO as you’re building it, you’re using so many different parts of your brain that maybe you haven’t used in a long time, especially when it comes to work. With work, I’m sure that oftentimes, we can get caught up in the regular ways of thinking about our work, right? Or the regular ways of doing things and then we have LEGO in front of us and we’re thinking, perhaps if that worked, maybe not, but we’re forced to think in a completely different way and use our brain and our hands in totally different ways that I’m sure as you mentioned, that can really just bring whole new revelations and ways of thinking about things.

Michael Fearne: Yeah, that’s a big part of it is it’s different thinking, it’s almost like there’s a flow to why LEGO Serious Play works. Also, it starts with 100% engagement.

To your point about use cases, yeah, it started in business and I use it a lot in business because that’s my background, but I’ve been teaching a lot of people in universities, academics, teachers, and coaches. So, it’s spreading out from the business world to other areas, it’s even signed to be used in therapy and other places as well.

The use-cases are sort of broadening out but what you said about it, different thinking, it engages people, they think differently, they have a different conversation, and then that produces different results. Really, a lot of the time, that’s what you’re looking for in business. We get stuck in that typical meeting mode.

The classic, which I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with, is you’re going to a meeting, it’s dominated by the use of the powerful, people have positional power like a leader, someone who is a manager or someone who is more senior. It is dominated by them, the extroverts, they always love meetings because they get to shine.

Usually, analytical people in business are factoring figures and giving all of the results to the people who dominate. Then obviously, with meetings and a lot of the way we interact like we’re doing now, it’s a lot of verbal and it’s a lot of order tree. Those sorts of people really dominate those meetings and those classes and those workshops.

What LEGO Serious Play does is it taps into a whole bunch of other different modalities so instead of just the powerful, you get everyone. Because there’s a method we use within LEGO Serious Play where everyone gets a turn to have their say, everyone, that power sort of levels off.

The introverts get a say as well, so it’s a nice safer space for the introverts to share their knowledge and their talent, it’s more creative so you get the creative people, bringing a lot more of their talents, and then lastly, it taps into both the visual and the kinesthetic.

It allows those people who prefer to work in those modalities to bring more of their talent and that’s what a big part of it is. It’s tapping into the talent that’s sitting next to you. I think that the formats that we use, whether it’s business, whether it’s education with classes, the format just let us down, they are like industrial age type formats and this sort of method really changes that so that you can think differently, and bring everything that you’ve got.

The creative introvert over there contributes just as much as the powerful extrovert over there. That’s a big part of it because what happens then is you get more ideas flowing, more conversations flowing, and that’s what creativity and innovation is about. It’s about the connection between ideas.

Normally, those would shut down but with a method like this, you allow it to shine and you allow the connections to happen. That’s sort of how it runs in business and education as well. But another point you said Miles was asking what does it look like? I just want to take you through what happens when you walk into the room.

You make sure to have the LEGO in front of the people. It’s prepared beforehand and you have some special LEGO and there are particular kits you can use.

You put that in front of people on the table, they come in, it’s very much about warming people up to this method because it’s like a new language. They use the LEGO as a new language and what’s interesting is the group are building a new language together. So, the LEGO is almost like this blank slate.

Then you do some warmup activities and there’s a very set sort of 20 minutes, 25 minutes at the start when you’re first learning it that you’re learning in their particular way. Then you build the language together and then you ask questions, once they’ve started building these warm-up activities, you then ask the questions that you want to ask.

Now, the great thing about it, it’s a tool that has essentially no content. It’s not this thing, it’s not that thing, it’s whatever question you want to ask. Originally, it was questions that were asked around strategy, that was sort of the original use case. But now, you can ask any question you want and then people build their answers in LEGO using metaphor of story and things like that. It’s whatever question you want to ask and that’s the dynamic that I love.

I come with questions and the group comes with answers and the LEGO just facilitates that. So that’s what it looks like, a bunch of LEGO it’s fun and it’s serious, it’s fun like everyone gets into it, even if you’ve never played with LEGO before. But then there’s that serious side and that’s what I love seeing, I love sort of footing around the outside of these groups, guiding them but seeing it quickly change from a laugh to a really serious conversation as people’s façade comes down and they’re just having more real human conversations about their business.

The Story Within Us

Miles Rote: Right, what a cool way to enter into a serious conversation through play, it’s almost like a back door that I’m sure most employees don’t typically engage in serious conversations starting out through play.

Michael Fearne: No, it’s like the play world, and the work world got separated and we all play as kids. I’ve got a four-year-old and I just love watching her, the way she interacts with the world is through play, that’s the way that you learn about the world.

Then school starts to separate it out a little bit and then by the time you get to the work world, work is Monday to Friday, you know, eight to five or normal standard hours and play is in the evenings if you’re not too tired, and on the weekend if you have some energy. What this does is it sort of smashes those worlds back together, because we all have it.

We all have played, we all have stories within us. It’s like this very ancient instinctual skill that we’ve developed in childhood that we park and don’t use. So, bringing that back in to then have a serious outcome, it’s what I’m interested in, it’s like the back door into more interesting thinking and more interesting conversation.

Miles Rote: You’ve been doing this for almost 15 years and in some capacity as far as my understanding goes, what has been one of the coolest things that you’ve seen or most unique thing that you’ve seen when you have a team or a person or a group of people doing LEGO Serious Play and then having something evolve that you weren’t expecting?

Michael Fearne: It’s interesting, a lot of people ask that question around what’s the most interesting thing that you’ve seen happen. I do remember some very vivid stories around this but the thing that I like about it is, it’s almost that there are too many to mention. I remember there was one guy who asked, what’s been invented from this method, like a bit of a cynic, which I love the cynic. There  are a lot of cynics that come in the room, which we’ll talk about, but he said, “What’s been invented with the LEGO Serious Play Method?” I said, “Well, it’s not about inventing the iPhone with it or the next big consumer product.”

I like to think of it as all these little moments, these little insights, these little changes within each individual, it’s sort of like a groundswell of 1% changes that make the difference that builds up. Rather than a top-down, let’s invent this, it’s okay if this person in this group sort of changes their thinking just a little bit, and this person changes their thinking a little bit, and suddenly you have this groundswell of change.

For me, there are so many moments of those little things that people say, “I didn’t think of it that way,” or “I didn’t know that you thought of it like that,” or, “That’s interesting, that connects with my idea.”

Often, I’ll talk about some bigger things that had happened, but often, it’s this little spark and then they let it sink in, and often, my role I feel like is to come in and stir the pot and to get people thinking a little bit differently. Then the change happens over the next days, weeks, and months as you are setting people on a different course–the course that they choose. But you have sparked it and stirred it.

That’s the first thing it sits in these little sorts of moments and that’s what I love. But some of the bigger things I remember, there was one group, and it was actually at a big tech company, it was a group of their executive assistants, and they are actually, almost a cross-functional team, there were all those executive assistants for all those different divisions within this big tech company and they did not get together.

They came together and they focused on this one particular issue that we’re all struggling with. They were the interface between the organization and their leaders. They could see what was happening with the teams and would bring it to the attention of the leaders, but the leaders would say, “Well, that’s not our priority.”

What these executive assistants did was they came up with a metaphor for how they were going to address this problem. They used LEGO to come up with this amazing metaphor which was called guerrilla gardening. It came from that there was this monkey little figure that is part of the DUPLO LEGO set, and they were god figures. They had a long chat and then it came together as this approach that they called guerrilla gardening. They would go out and they would do all of these small little projects, all these small little things, with all the teams. They could see they needed help and their role was to grow that seed.

It is almost like bypassing the latest person who is saying, “Well this is not an issue.” They could see it and their role was to feed these little projects or these little sorts of sparks and seeds. And so, for them, it was a way to tackle a problem. Then they went and they used that metaphor and they used that approach to address the companywide issue and to me, that was a perfect example of what happens with legacy.

We change the thinking, maybe it is a new metaphor, maybe it is a new understanding of a problem and a different path you can take. Then that unlocks a whole bunch of new tasks and new ways to do something. So, that was a really interesting one.

There’ve been many others from sometimes doing strategy work where it gets down to your strategy and there are new markets and new avenues all opened up.

All the way to team identity, which I do a lot of, which is talking with a team about their vision and I love that. I love people dreaming of a future and moving towards it. I’ve had many, many sorts of sessions where they often come back and they say, “I didn’t know that you thought like that.” I think those are some of the key things. Those are some of the stories.

There was this one lady who was telling her story because one of the parts of the method is you share the story of your model. She was doing that and she was fiddling with a bit of LEGO off to the side as she was telling her story. One of the techniques within LEGO Serious Play is to ask questions, such as, “Tell me more about this part of the model, what does this mean?” You dive a bit deeper and I said, “Well, what is that thing you are fiddling with off to the side?” She said, “Oh I wasn’t sure whether I was going to put this on.”

It was a little witch’s hat, a little sort of safety thing, and she said, “I wasn’t sure if I was going to put this in and this is what it represents,” and she started talking about her career and a different path that she didn’t go down when she was younger, that she has been sort of doing on the side.

She went into a whole other story apart from her main model with the little brick on the side and by the end of the conversation, she was saying that she realized she needed to be doing this. So, it was almost like she didn’t know what she was doing with the fiddling and then the story brought that out.

These are just a couple of examples from teams and individuals but there are so many more from the years I have been doing this. It is very satisfying to see and hear in each moment these small changes happening.

Psychological Safety

Miles Rote: I’m sure, and to go back to what you are saying about having meetings where you just have an extroverted person up there speaking and pointing to a screen in those meetings, whether it is the creatives or the introverts or really anyone, maybe if they had some things to say or some suggestions they might, feel awkward to bring up or they might feel like they can’t bring it up.

Then you take a dynamic like this and as you are mentioning in all of these different sessions and ways to have LEGO Serious Play, you have that same thing perhaps happen where someone comes up with an idea and expresses it almost through play and through LEGO and now those same people, those same bosses or executives are listening in a different way and the person feels able to speak about it in a different way for the first time.

Michael Fearne: Yeah and it is funny, I was chatting with another LEGO Serious Play facilitator the other day and he was saying that it is when you look at the leader that is in the room and they’ve got LEGO around them, they look more childlike. It is a lot easier to bring out issues when they’re just playing with LEGO around. A lot of it is about psychological safety and that is a bit of a buzzword at the moment in dealing with groups.

Google has actually done a lot of work around high performing teams and they found the highest performing teams are the ones that have the most psychological safety. So, LEGO Serious Play are tools because what that does is it allows you to say what is on your mind and get that out knowing that you won’t be judged for that in the meeting. That is a big part of what psychological safety is about. It builds trust and that leads to high performance.

So, that is what LEGO Serious Play does, it provides a little bit of psychological safety. It brings even more and allows the safest space. Part of this is because you externalize your ideas. What we are doing is we are basically getting what is in your mind, ideas, concepts, opinions, experiences and you are putting them out into a LEGO model. That is essentially what the method is about. It is you building these things from your mind.

Externalizing it means you can talk about it yourself easier and also other people can see it. So, it is what we call an object to mediated communication, which means you are talking through an object, and that takes a lot of heat out of any conversation. Because to me, the model can hold the idea sitting there, and so that externalization, that sort of physical form enables a lot of what you are talking about Miles, in terms of the conversation flow.

The sort of leveling of the playing field, democratizing the conversation, there is a lot of ways to frame it. The other thing is about the leaders themselves. The person that chooses to use this method, whether it is a team leader or whether it is someone who has a team who wants to get more out of it, they have to be brave for starters, because they need to say, “Look, I don’t have all the answers. I want the team, us as a team, me as part of the team, to come up with the answers.”

So, he hands a lot of power over to the group. I think it needs to be first you’re a brave manager, but also someone who wants to empower their team. I think if you get that dynamic, then the leader comes in just as one voice amongst the many, and the conversation is shaped by the group. I think that is an important point around this type of method.

Miles Rote: Yeah, I am really stuck on something that you said that I think is so important or could be so important and integral in the way that we talk about so many things in today’s world. What was the term you use, object mediated?

Michael Fearne: Communication.

Miles Rote: Communication, I love that. Now you have already talked about all different types of modalities that LEGO Serious Play can be used with and I want to talk about that more in-depth here in a second, but has this been used, or have you tried this method talking about certain maybe touchy subjects, like race for example?

Michael Fearne: I haven’t, what’s interesting is the work that I do is because of my background and where I came from, I focus on a particular group of teams and team dynamics and innovation and collaboration. That is my seed, but I teach it to people who have used it in a whole bunch of other ways. So, things like race, things like community engagement, it can be used in things like negotiation, and conflict management.

It can be used in all of those things even in therapy where it’s something that is harder to talk about. You can use an object and a lot of the principles that underlie this method actually have been used in therapy for a long time.

So, you do think about therapy, which is a similar thing where you are externalizing your inner world, and it can be used with a lot of those touchy subjects because it creates almost like a third person in the conversation or third thing, which allows a more honest conversation, which is less personal. Because when it is you and me, we’re just talking at each other and with each other, and if you bring in another party into that, the LEGO model, then it does some very subtle things as you look at the model rather than just the person. Often, we talk through the model. So, here is the model, these are the bits, and the model helps you to tell the story.

Then you look up and everyone is looking at the model and that subtle shift can be huge when you are talking about those sorts of topics. So yeah, definitely. I don’t do it because that is just the sphere that I work in but yes, it has been used in a lot of those other touchier subjects.

Miles Rote: Are there cynics to this method, both when you are running these or facilitating these workshops, and or just outside of that in general with this kind of practice?

Michael Fearne: Oh yeah, definitely. A big feature of using this method is you have to sort of come to terms with the cynic or the people who don’t want to do it. It is interesting, I have a particular view of the cynic and my view of it is let’s just do it, and see how it is. I’ve had plenty of people walk into one of my sessions, arms crossed, “Why are we doing this? I’ve got real work to do.”

I remember one particular workshop, I was with a really big car company here in Australia, an international brand and they were doing a big transformation. Of course, we had 30 people from the organization, big burly car guys come in and girls with crossed arms like, “Why are we doing this? I need to really work.” I love it because I know that by the end of it, they’ll turn and they’ll say, “Wow, I want to do more,” and that is exactly what happened with this group.

We have a three-hour session with them, which is quite a long one, and by the time they got to the end, the ones that had crossed their arms are saying we want to do more. A big part of that was because they start to realize it is not about the LEGO. People come in thinking it is a fun team building LEGO thing, which is fine and that has its place in the world, but what it is more about the conversation and the cynic starts to realize that they are having real conversations.

The LEGO sort of melts away by the end, or the novelty of it being a child’s toy sort of melts away by the end. With the cynic, I have liked to embrace because one thing I learned that the cynic is, it is someone who is usually pretty passionate or they have been passionate about a topic. They have tried to change things and they’ve been met with resistance, and so it is almost like harnessing the cynic because they are the ones that have the energy around them.

It is just being directed in the wrong way because of the past. So, I go through a very set warm-up, and from that, you’re like 99% or 99.99% of the time you join the cynic. I think in the years I have been doing this, I think I had two people disengage from the process halfway through and this is from thousands and thousands of people.

I’ve had people who have never touched a LEGO before in their life, that come from countries that just didn’t have it and they didn’t do it. I’ve had cynics who just would not want to do it and they love it and want to do more of it. Again, because it’s your thought about the LEGO in the end.

One of the things is you need to get people doing it. I think that is a big part of why I wrote the book so that people can do it and see if it works for them, or if it works for the majority of people. It is about just doing it, and experiencing it, and once you do that you generally want to do more of it.

The Possibilities

Miles Rote: I love that and writing a book is no joke. So, congratulations on finishing. Where do you see the future of this going, of LEGO Serious Play? It sounds like already there are so many different modalities that it can change the way that people think, even if they are cynics, what are the possibilities with this? Where do you see it going?

Michael Fearne: Yeah, it is really interesting to look at the future of LEGO Serious Play. It has actually been around as a method for about 20 years, and so it is nothing new. People were like, “Well hang on, it’s been around 20 years.” The LEGO group developed this in the early 2000s and the reason why it is still under a lot of radars is it is not that well known. Part of it is because it started as a strategy tool and it is slowly working its way out of that to be more of a broad conversation tool.

Back in 2010 LEGO open-sourced it and so that allowed the method to be used by anyone. So, in the last 10 years, it’s been a slow build and there are people, passionate people using it around the world, and it is starting to be used more and more. I think we are about on the cusp of this really exploding. As well as my client workshops, I train people in this around the world and now I am starting to see more and more people realizing that to get these different conversations–the time is now for this method.

It was ahead of its time back in the early 2000s and people are starting to realize we really need this tool in a lot more areas. So, part of the reason why I wrote the book is just to spread the method in the world. At the moment it is very locked away in a training, and you need to go three days and learn how to do it, and there are a lot of things to it. It sounds like a simple tool but there are a lot of subtleties to it.

That was locking a lot of people away from the method and I am happy with the book to really open the method up, and get a lot of people using it. In terms of the future, my vision always for LEGO Serious Play has been if you look at every office block, every office, every university, every classroom, you would see a bag of LEGO and people would know how to use the LEGO Serious Play Method.

So that when a topic came up, when an issue came up that they felt LEGO Serious Play was good for, they could get out the LEGO and use it and it would be as ubiquitous as a post-it note or a whiteboard. That you can use it just as a tool to enhance the conversation. That is my vision of LEGO Serious Play and that’s what I am working towards. There are other cooler things as I am starting to experiment with doing LEGO Serious Play in virtual reality.

So, that is the far future of it but the immediate future is making sure that everyone can access the method. I always say that once you do this and you see what it can do, how can you not want to have it in everyone’s hand? It is the conversations that it enables, and then people everywhere should be using it.

I talked a little bit about some of the best-used cases, but it really is about when you want everyone’s engagement, at some meetings you don’t want everyone’s engagement, right? You just want to deliver information, you just want to do something like that, but when you want everyone’s engagement and it is a complex topic and you need to dive into it and explore it, people need to feel ownership of the outcome.

Those are really good topics to use LEGO Serious Play with and my vision is when people have that sort of issue or topic or conversation that they think, “Yeah, LEGO Serious Play, I know how to do that. I want to be able to enhance my conversation with that,” and go from there.

Miles Rote: I love it. This has been such a pleasure, Michael. If people could take away one or two things from your book, what would they be?

Michael Fearne: I think the first thing is around play, thinking about combining those worlds of work and play. For me, the book is very much a how-to book. People will get a lot out of it in terms of how to do this method, but overall I love for people to just think, “Oh, I can bring my play skills and the person sitting next to me their play skills to our work and make it better.”

Both on a human level, feeling better about work, but also on a results level. I think that is probably the biggest outcome that I want people to have is to know there is more within each of us, and whether it is you bringing it out, whether it is you helping to bring it out in your team, or the people you are teaching, or just the people around you.

I have brought this up Miles, but people are using this in families as well. I had one person that I taught in Switzerland, we sat down with his family and used LEGO Serious Play to talk about whether they should move back to the United Kingdom or not. They used it as a way to engage his wife and his children in the conversation.

I think for me it is just realizing that there are other ways to have conversations and the tools that we fall into, the normal meeting, we do that well–probably too well. So that’s what I want people to take away–that there is another way and it’s really fun and actually it gets really good results.

Miles Rote: Right. It’s like we got the serious aspect of it locked down, how can we grow and learn and transform while having fun at the same time and bringing more of that in.

Michael Fearne: Yeah and getting better outcomes. I work in the business world, I want to see results, and this does it really well. So, I think that play is just an untapped potential talent that we all have. That’s what I am hoping for the book as well as a very clear process on how you can use this in your work and in your classes and wherever you want really.

Miles Rote: I am so excited for people to check out the book. Everyone, the book is called, The LSP Method: How to Engage People and Spark Insights Using LEGO ® Serious Play ® Method, and you can find it on Amazon. Michael, besides checking out the book, where can people find you?

Michael Fearne: Yeah, so they can also find me at a web address called lspmethod.com, pretty easy to remember because of the title of the book. So, if you go there, you can email me, [email protected], I love chatting about this stuff. I love empowering people with it.

We are going to be launching a podcast in 2021, which takes you inside LEGO Serious Play stations. There is a lot more. We have a community we have started with people around the world. So, there are a lot of resources as well as the book community. There is just so much, and it is like I said, it is time for it to really blossom and to see it everywhere.

Miles Rote: Incredible. Thank you so much for helping us and enabling us to choose our own adventure through play. I am definitely going to be bringing this to Scribe and bringing the LEGO Serious Play here.

Michael Fearne: Well thanks. I also want to say play well–that is what LEGO, the word actually means. It is Danish for, “play well,” so I just want to go on to play well.

Miles Rote: Okay, with that, everyone play well. Thanks again, Michael