Dr Carly O'Neill-Barrett

My first encounter with Lego Serious Play was through two wonderful university colleagues who I worked with on a curriculum design project around assessment. We wanted to include student voice in this project and they introduced me to the concept of LEGO Serious Play.

The idea immediately appealed, but seeing the method in action surpassed all my already high expectations. I have been working with students at several universities for more than a decade, and have been involved with different research projects, and I had never seen anything quite like this. Students were able to organise their thoughts, build models to tell their personal experiences and confidently share their stories with a level of depth and detail.

The stories were fed into the design project, where 50 people from across the university were invited to engage with a range of data we collected over months, and the images of the Lego Serious play session stood out in a positive way. These were the clearest and most powerful stories. Seeing the impact the method, I signed up for training to become a certified facilitator, and I have been facilitating sessions across the university since.