Companies and individuals are bringing Lego products into the office, saying it helps with creativity, anxiety and communication.
One driver of growth for Lego, the Danish maker of colorful building-block toys, is a program called Lego Serious Play. LSP is a training tool where employees are asked to address company concerns or aspirations by first building a small Lego model from a handful of bricks, then describing what they constructed and why.
The system is designed to improve communication and enhance a company’s performance, according to Robert Rasmussen, a business consultant in Denmark who helped develop the program more than two decades ago. LSP has been used by the U.S. Naval Warfare Division, Harvard Business School and spread across energy, transport and finance industries. Companies including Google, Ernst & Young, Microsoft, Visa, Lexus and Procter & Gamble have used it.
Other companies are using Lego products in different ways.
Google’s New York campus has a Lego room where employees can get out of creative ruts and stimulate new ideas through building Lego models, according to former employee Adam Singer and a representative from the company. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., use plastic bricks to plan and show concepts through construction design.
The use of Lego in the workplace has been the subject of multiple studies that show how communicating through the bricks can help companies develop problem-solving skills, improve communication and overcome creativity challenges. There is further research on how it helps work-related stress and anxiety.
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📷: Julia Vandenoever for @wsjphotos