For one fast-paced day, University of West Georgia faculty and staff traded laptops for LEGO bricks and stepped into a world of imagination, collaboration and bold experimentation. 

In an intensive workshop blending design thinking – a technique for creative problem-solving that focuses on understanding user needs, challenging assumptions and creating actionable solutions – with LEGO Serious Play (LSP), a hands-on methodology to help people solve complex problems, enhance communication and foster innovation, participants built stories, shaped ideas and tested new approaches. By the end of the sprint, colleagues walked away with not just colorful models but with fresh strategies. 

UWG’s Stone Center for Family Business, Entrepreneurship and Innovation is no stranger to design thinking workshops, but combining that methodology and LSP facilitation presented a fresh approach. The main goal was to equip participants with foundational design thinking competencies and introductory LSP facilitation skills that they could immediately use to foster entrepreneurial mindsets in students. 

“What we liked about LSP was the ability to build something in the workshop hands-on, which was more experimental than theoretical,” said Raja Bhattacharya, director of the Richards College of Business’s Stone Center. “While understanding concepts and theory are still important, design thinking is more about building and effectively showcasing your problem through a product or design. LEGO allowed us to do that.” 

Bhattacharya wanted participants to develop a good understanding of design thinking and how LEGOs can fit into the process, no matter what their experience levels were.  

Simone Lee, senior lecturer of marketing, has incorporated LSP into her teaching for over a decade and was excited to combine it with design thinking and learning to break down a question or problem into five key areas – empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. Each stage, she explained, builds off another and can give a clearer indication of whether an idea will work. 

“One eye-opening concept was the permission to start small with big ideas,” Lee shared. “By utilizing the fundamental stages of design theory and practical knowledge, this process will ultimately help design effective solutions. When your solutions are well thought out, the chances of success are greater.” 

Because the participants were encouraged to showcase their problem throughout the day with a presentation at the end of the workshop, Bhattacharya had a front-row seat to the way members engage with abstract concepts like innovation or entrepreneurial mindsets. 

“You could literally see the transformation that occurred, from showcasing something simple towards ending with a complex solution that was created in the context of design learning,” he observed. 

Staff member Hope Ridley, UWG Career Services’ assistant director of career planning and development, said the biggest shift in her thinking was when she realized that design thinking provided an “aligned map” for what they already do in her office. 

“Seeing the stages laid out and working through them helped me consider the ways we’re already doing this work,” she continued. “Using LSP to build and express difficult-to-verbalize ideas reminded me that the most meaningful breakthroughs often happen when we get out of our heads and into our hands. Mind-body work!” 

As a professor of management, Dr. Kim Green said entrepreneurs often need to work through resource constraints to take a business concept from idea to reality and be able to communicate the information to others. 

“While working with the LEGO bricks, your mind is seeing new ways of looking at a problem, especially if you must improvise,” she remarked. “In business, if you don’t have the resources you think you need, thinking creatively can identify alternatives that could even end up being better than the original plan. This workshop showed how this concept of resource constraints and finding creative alternatives can be demonstrated clearly with hands-on activities that use materials provided, such as LEGO bricks.” 

Bhattacharya said his hope for faculty and staff who experienced this blend of play, creativity and structured problem-solving is that they rethink their strategies and help make the learning process more dynamic. 

“How they teach is probably more important than what they teach,” he concluded. “Experimenting and letting students experiment and define the problem they are trying to address in the context of whatever course they’re taking is probably the most important thing any faculty could do in a classroom setting.”