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Useful applications

The Build & Share method and its parent concept LEGO® Serious Play® is being used in organizations and groups worldwide by facilitators with various backgrounds. The organizations and groups are often looking for innovative ways to increase the engagement, confidence and insight of their executives, managers and employees.

The method is in use for a broad range of purposes, including but not limited to:

  • Creation of share goals, visions and aspirations
  • Alignment of values
  • Exploration of character strengths and virtue
  • Mastery goals and collective self-efficacy
  • Innovation and concept development
  • Unleashing creative thinking and transforming ideas into concrete concepts.
  • Prospecting, scenario & future studies

Experience shows great relevance in embedding the Build & Share method into workshops and change processes related to organizational development, leadership development, team building, strategy and goal setting, personal development in group settings.

If you are seeking to reveal more impactful insights, improve decision making, find hidden opportunities, stimulate entrepreneurship, improve project leadership, surface hidden issues, clarify values, roles and identities, integrate new teams and new members, resolve conflicts, integrate diverse cultures or discuss the un-discussable – then Build & Share may be your method of choice.

Build & Share in education and outside business

Even though Build & Share primarily is oriented towards adults in organizational settings the method is very useful for groups outside the professional world. The method is very applicable in settings such as:

  • Groups that deal with and explore how positive psychology might help them overcome personal and collective issues
  • Educational settings where the group explores various well-being issues
  • Group based counseling
  • Camps for young people where themes such as dreams, meaning and character strengths are explored.

Generally speaking the method is domain independent and we are constantly surprised by the creativity of the applications we hear about.

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Narratives that strengthen us

We believe that narrative approaches not only enriches the field of positive psychology but also helps us grow as individuals and groups. It does so by emphasizing and exploring the stories we create and tell about what works well in our lives.

Narrative practices have developed useful ways to have conversations with ourselves and with others, to explore our values, skills, commitments and dream. Narrative methods help us make sense of who we are and to bring us closer to how we prefer to be. It therefore seems apparent that together these two fields of knowledge, positive psychology and narrative practices, can help us to find ways to strengthen our preferred identities, and to explore the strongest and most resilient versions of ourselves and the most benefecial version of the groups we interact in.

Know me – know my story

Narrative identity is the story a person constructs to organize and make sense of his or her life as a whole. It includes the person’s reconstruction of the past and his or her vision or dream about the future. Narrative psychology emphasizes the importance of stories in our lives because human beings organize their life experiences as stories and we seek to find meaning in our life through the stories.

A story is series of events that are linked together through time, and these interconnected events have meaning for the person (Mor­gan, 2000). As Margarita Tarragona (2008) argues in her book “Positive Identities”, the stories we tell about our lives are not simply accounts of our experiences, they also generate experiences: how we fell, what we think, what possibilities and obstacles we see for ourselves. The same events can be storied in a variety of ways and these different ways will make a difference in how life is experienced. One of the central premises of narrative practice is that the ways in which we narrate our experiences have a big impact on how we feel and think, on how we see ourselves and our relationships, and how we relate with other people.

According to the narrative approach understanding our identity demands that we understand our life stories. As expressed by professor in psychology, Dan P. McAdams:

“If you want to know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And if I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my own life, then I, too, must come to know my own story. I must come to see in all its particulars the narrative of the self – the personal myth – that I have tacitly, even unconsciously, composed over the course of my life. It is a story I continue to revise, and tell to myself (and sometimes to other) as I go on living.” (McAdams, 1996)

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Imagine, create and remember

A key component in LEGO® SERIOUS® PLAY® for Positive Psychology is that it facilitates the benefits from the narrative approach using storytelling and metaphors. We define our reality in terms of metaphors and the stories we tell about ourselves. In LEGO® SERIOUS® PLAY® for Positive Psychology the stories contribute to the construction, reproduction, or transformation of our reality and identity.

Through the use of LEGO® SERIOUS® PLAY® for Positive Psychology the participants build metaphorical models that visualize and make meaning of abstract concepts that can otherwise be quite difficult to comprehend. The metaphors give a more complex creation of understanding and can make something more meaningful by equating it with something else. At the same time the use of metaphors and the way participants visualize things in a Build & Share workshop makes it much easier for participants to remember.

Research has shown that the brain better handles and stores information through images and in that way use visual sources to create new ideas and make more meaning of complex things. A LEGO® SERIOUS® PLAY® for Positive Psychology process takes advantage of the human ability to imagine things and create something radically new. This is a key capacity when we want to be more innovative, create knowledge and develop ourselves and the group we interact in. In that context LEGO® SERIOUS® PLAY® for Positive Psychology aims to enable all three kinds of key properties of the human imagination: to describe, to create, and to challenge.

Imagination

The human’s descriptive imagination is about seeing the world as it is. It enables us to identify patterns, to make sense of it and to see new possibilities and opportunities. When adding structure to information by building metaphors with LEGO® bricks we are effectively using descriptive imagination to focus on repeating patterns and to see things in a new way. The creative imagination allows us to see what isn’t there, which means we can develop and create new things and patterns. In Build & Share we use this imagination to generate new possibilities from the combination, recombination or transformation of the things or concepts we have built. The challenging imagination encourages us to negate, defame, contradict and even destroy the sense of progress that comes from descriptions and creativity. That enables us to look at things in a new way and be even more creative and innovative.

This creative, metaphorical and visual approach in LEGO® SERIOUS® PLAY® for Positive Psychology makes a much richer and more memorable learning experience, which especially is an advantage when dealing with the complex and abstract concepts within the field of positive psychology.