Try your hand at some Serious Play: Sign up by 5 July for this problem-solving workshop

LEGO Serious Play is a globally recognised facilitation method that helps people to think, communicate and problem solve in groups, and is used by some of the largest organisations in the world.

It works by participants using LEGO bricks to build their answer to important questions. This process of building their answer gives everyone involved a chance to think, and think differently, accessing things that they didn’t know that they knew. The bricks then help people communicate that thinking in a tangible way that others can understand and remember, with principles that give everyone equal opportunity to communicate.

This methodology creates engagement and parity, overcoming the factors of personality and hierarchy that normally influence meetings. The bricks also create psychological safety allowing difficult topics to be addressed. These things together mean that a group can solve complex problems with buy-in from all because the answer has come from them.

In this two-hour workshop for eight members of the FLF Development Network, we will send you your own LEGO bricks in the post so you can experience an online taste of LEGO Serious Play. We will use the bricks to explore some of the challenges that are facing you in your academic career, as well as looking under the bonnet of LEGO Serious Play to explore what makes it work.

This workshop is led by Dr Geraint Wyn Story, who is a qualified practitioner of LEGO Serious Play. Geraint runs his own training company and has a background as a Researcher Development Consultant, a manager in biotech, and a PhD in molecular biology.

The successful use of LEGO Serious Play relies on a small number of principles that will be discussed in the workshop. However, before that, we ask anyone who is interested in this workshop to make sure that you:

• sign up early so we can send the LEGO bricks to you in the post
• avoid cancelling your place because we won’t have time to send bricks to someone else
• can attend for the duration of the workshop
• are able to work from a laptop or desktop computer with a working web camera, microphone and speakers, and with space to build in front of it.

Expect hard fun!