At one of Sri Lanka’s largest food and beverage companies, management decided the R&D team couldn’t innovate. No one questioned this judgment.
Then M. Azeem Saheer walked in with a pile of LEGO bricks, no slides, and a process.
By the end of the session, the team had generated ideas: a dissolvable drink tablet, a QR-code expiry system for dairy, and a water tablet activated by saliva.
As Azeem put it: “Management labelled these people as uncreative. The issue isn’t them – it’s that they never had an environment to think freely.”
Does this sound familiar?
About this week’s contributor
M. Azeem Sahir is a human capital specialist, ICF PCC-level Executive coach, and a leading LEGO® Serious Play® LSP Method Master Trainer in Sri Lanka. Over 17 years, he has partnered with organisations spanning technology, Financial, Manufacturing, Apparel, food and beverage industries, helping teams unlock creativity, break down silos, and build lasting strategies. His work blends play, emotional intelligence, and organisational design. Azeem is one of the Lead Facilitator at Luminary Learning Solutions- Sri Lanka. He is also a contributor to Innovation in Action.
Standard strategy formats with presentations, roundtables, debates often fail. They favour the comfortable, fuel egos, and reward the loudest.
You get a polished version of the old answer.
Much of business practice is focused on convergent thinking – analysing, deciding, narrowing down.
Divergent thinking, which requires generating a wide range of options without premature judgment, gets far less attention. When a strategy session starts converging before people have genuinely explored, you’re making choices from a narrow range of options.
That’s not a bad strategy so much as a narrow strategy – the best version of what people already believed walking in.
There is another approach – using plastic bricks.
Thinking with hands
LEGO® Serious Play® gives people what Azeem calls the freedom to be an open book. “No dimensions, no boxes, no frameworks.”
“That open-endedness enables people to go beyond what they think they know.”
The mechanism behind this is something Azeem calls thinking from hands. Our hands are directly connected to a major part of the brain’s cortex. When we start playing with a LEGO piece, the brain starts building stories and searching for meaning by drawing on the subconscious in a way that conversation alone rarely reaches.
He uses a simple illustration to explain it. Think about sitting a difficult exam as a child. When the hard question came, what behaviors did show up? You might have scratched your head, tapped your pencil, bitten your fingers. You were trying to search for the answer in your subconscious. The same process happens with LEGO. The physical act of fiddling with a brick triggers a mental search. Stories emerge. Connections surface.
This subconscious process is called incubation. The problem is internalised, and new connections appear, connections that analytical effort can’t force. LEGO Serious Play structures this process instead of leaving it to chance.
There is also something important happening cognitively when both play and problem-solving occur simultaneously. As Azeem explains it, when people are having fun building a model and solving a complex problem at the same time, both the analytical and creative sides of the brain activate together. The result is faster connections, more novel ideas, and outputs that surprise even the people who produced them.
If you want genuinely divergent thinking – exploration that is wide and deep before any convergence begins – you need a process that changes the input channel. Looking at the same slide together produces the same thinking together. Physical engagement breaks that pattern.
The model creates connection
LEGO® Serious Play® most overlooked benefit isn’t creativity.
Challenge a slide, and you challenge its creator. In hierarchical or defensive organisations, bold ideas stay hidden. Quiet people don’t speak up.
In a LEGO® Serious Play® session, questions are directed at the model. Not the person.
In a normal strategy session with no model, questions are raised for the presenter. They feel personally challenged. They become guarded, defensive.
“But here the challenge is given to the model. People can see it as a third-party view – a helicopter view. The question isn’t a threat. It’s an invitation.”
This is how silos break. Not by forcing collaboration, but by changing how ideas get shared and challenged.
When Azeem facilitated the supply chain team at that same food company, separate departments – R&D, procurement, sales – had been working in isolation for years. When their models came together on one table, and teams were asked to connect them, something shifted. People heard about challenges in other departments that they had never known existed. Duplication surfaced. Shared direction became visible.
“We didn’t know R&D had so many achievements,” one participant said. People must feel it is safe to try new ideas or suggest different ways of doing things. LEGO® Serious Play® doesn’t lecture people about psychological safety. It engineers the conditions for it through the process’s structure itself. The model absorbs the risk, so the person doesn’t have to.
Want more of this kind of thinking?
Innovation in Action launches on 1st July (Australia) and 1st August (New Zealand). Christian and I wrote it for exactly this kind of challenge – the gap between having a good idea and actually getting it to stick.
LEGO® Serious Play® is featured as a practical Discovering tool, with step-by-step facilitation guidance within the DUCTRI framework.
Everyone who pre-orders before launch gets access to the Activation Q&A – a live session with Christian and me where we work through your specific challenges directly. Seats are limited and won’t roll over after launch.
Pre-order here.
Break the model
You spend an hour building a model that shows your team’s strategy and best thinking. You explain it, refine it, and get attached.
Then Azeem asks you to break it.
Not metaphorically – take it apart, brick by brick.
“Our brain quickly attaches to a model,” Azeem explains. “That becomes our comfort zone. Change is hard. Once I ask them to break the model and detach, they can build a new, better version. That’s how innovation happens.”
This is the physical enactment of one of the hardest things in organisational life: letting go of the current answer in order to find a better one.
The creative process moves from preparation to incubation to illumination, and then to verification. Getting attached to the first answer blocks the process. When you lock in early, you limit your options. The first reasonable idea is rarely the best.
The ice cream company’s R&D team didn’t reach their best ideas by refining the first model it built. They got there by being pushed – challenged again and again: if you were going to change this, what would you change? The act of physically rebuilding mirrored the cognitive work of genuinely rethinking a problem rather than polishing an existing answer.
Breaking the model isn’t just a creativity exercise. It’s a structural intervention to prevent converging before exploring.
Practitioner Insights
Three things worth taking into your next piece of work.
Change the input to change the output. If your workshop has everyone looking at the same surface – slides, a shared document, a single whiteboard – you have already constrained the thinking before anyone has spoken. The DUCTRI Discovering phase is built on divergent thinking: exploring widely and deeply before converging on a direction. Physical engagement changes the cognitive channel.
Make the idea separate from the person. The most persistent innovation problem in most organisations isn’t a shortage of creativity. It’s the social dynamics that prevent ideas from surfacing in the first place. When the format pits ideas against the people who had them, the loudest voice wins, and the best idea often doesn’t. Changing the medium – making ideas tangible, three-dimensional, and separate from their author – is one of the most practical moves a facilitator or leader can make.
Design for detachment. The hardest part of innovation leadership is not generating new ideas. It is letting go of current ones. If your strategy sessions reliably produce plans that look like refined versions of last year’s thinking, ask whether your process is designed to break existing thinking or merely improve it. Deliberately introducing disruption – asking people to rebuild, reframe, or reverse assumptions – is a diagnostic as much as a technique. What gets rebuilt, and how, tells you more about your organisation’s real creative capacity than any slide deck ever will.
Want to go deeper?
Watch the full conversation with Azeem on YouTube where we get into the Sri Lanka case studies, the neuroscience of thinking from hands, and how he adapts the methodology for very different organisational cultures.
Connect with Azeem on LinkedIn where he shares facilitation insights and podcast episodes on creativity and play.
Immense thanks to Azeem for his generosity and insights in this conversation. There is something rare about someone who has found a method they genuinely believe in and can explain precisely why it works, not just that it does.
A question to sit with this week: In your last strategy session, were people exploring ideas or defending them?