Session Speaker: Dave Jones, Uplift Consulting
Theme: Leadership, Management & Teams
Date: Winter Trimester, January 2025
Dave Jones brought LEGO® Serious Play® to Magma not just as a novel activity, but as a serious tool for leadership reflection. At first glance, building models out of plastic bricks might seem like a fun detour from the usual whiteboard strategy sessions. But what Dave revealed was more profound: metaphor can unlock the things words won’t say.
The tactile nature of building with LEGO bricks encourages participants to express complex ideas, explore multiple scenarios, and develop solutions in a collaborative and three-dimensional environment. With your hands busy, your brain moves differently. You don’t pitch ideas, you discover them. And sometimes, what you build tells the truth before you’re ready to say it.
Each participant created a model of their leadership role and aspirations. Then we shared. The honesty that came from explaining what the pieces meant, which is often subconsciously chosen, offered insights that regular conversation might never have surfaced. Not only that but ir also prompted some difficult questions: are we really leading the way we think we are? What stories are our teams building in silence?
Dave anchored the session in the Tuckman Model — Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing. These aren’t abstract stages. They’re emotional states with specific leadership needs:
But here’s the part that stayed with many in the room: most teams don’t live in one stage. They slip back as often as they move forward. Changes in personnel, pressure, or purpose can reset the team entirely. That means your leadership style can’t be set-and-forget.
The real skill isn’t fixing problems. It’s reading the emotional temperature, tracking the signals, and matching your response to what the team needs right now, not what worked last time. That takes attention, patience, and humility.
For anyone tempted to jump into ‘fixing’ team dynamics, Dave’s message was quietly radical: your job is to notice, not to nudge. When you listen first, and really see where your team is, you’re far more likely to act wisely.
One of the most powerful elements of LEGO Serious Play is that it flips how we express ourselves. We’re not starting with a fully formed answer and trying to justify it. We’re starting with something visual and letting the story emerge. This levelling of communication made it easier for quieter voices to contribute, and for assumptions to be challenged, gently, but directly.
That’s a big takeaway for leadership. If you want people to open up or solve something tough, try changing how you ask, not just what you ask. Visuals, metaphors, physical movement — all of these engage different parts of the brain. When you change the format, you often change the outcome.
This session reminded us that team health isn’t a fixed state, and leadership isn’t about having a single gear. It’s a relationship that evolves,one that benefits from creative tools, active noticing, and the courage to let others speak before you do.
So what might this look like in your own business?