Imagine 30 senior leaders with varying professional business experience from 20 to 25 years put into a training room to learn about Transformational Leadership through People Engagement.

Imagine their surprise and perhaps even skepticism when the training commenced with an opening exercise where they were each asked to build a duck using 6 LEGO bricks. At the end of the 10 minutes of duck building, the leaders looked up, some laughed at their creations, some proudly paraded their ducks and showed off their handiwork to their colleagues while others sat back to acknowledge the excitement, high level of engagement and interaction among the group, a sight that was not common with this group.

Just under 15 minutes, the power of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY has started with each participants working with their hands and then talking about their creations, comparing with each other in a way that was uncharacteristic of senior leaders at a formal learning event.

This was a one-and-one-half day workshop held in August 2011 at MasterCard's Regional Office in Singapore for 30 senior business leaders. While the core curriculum was MasterCard mandated training materials, by weaving the LSP methodology strategically into the program, the whole training experience took on a different dimension of enhanced interaction and saw communication pathways opened as the participants used the bricks to build imageries and models as well as illustrate issues that they were important to them. They found a voice to share with their peers and colleagues in a non-threatening way. The core curriculum became alive and issues became real and clearer for the team when these were illustrated through the power of LSP.

The highlight of the training was when the group developed a set of Simple Guiding Principles (SGPs) for MasterCard that these leaders would embrace and propagate throughout our organization. Through building individual models and then describing what the model meant, followed by a large team discussion, the SGPs were agreed upon as a team - very powerful collaboration which also meant that everyone in the room subscribed to supporting these SGPs in their own teams.

At the end of the program, I arranged for everyone to share one learning and one feeling. It was very clear that as each person spoke that they fully experienced the benefits of understanding and communicating with each other at a very different platform - one that encouraged them to open their perspectives to the different points of views as well as encouraged them to find common points of connections as one large leadership team in the organization.

There were many personal takeaways as well and this was evidenced by the pride with which each leader packed up his / her model built during the program and most of these are now placed in the respective offices of the leaders as reminders of how they will and can build and sustain transformational leadership at MasterCard.

Attending the training was a decision that I took as part of my ongoing professional and personal development as a HR professional. I use the LSP methodology in our training programs to create a higher level of engagement and holistic thinking as well as facilitation for meetings and discussions for both large (30 to 40 people) and small teams (2 to 3 persons). Additionally, I find using LSP approaches during individual coaching sessions very helpful especially in helping my coaches to express their thoughts, ideas and feelings without feeling confrontational or prescriptive.

Ann Ann, Low, Vice President MasterCard
Human Resource Division - Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa Region

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Rasmussen Consulting (formerly Robert Rasmussen and Associates) specializes in using the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology to effectively harvest an organization's collective intelligence to enhance strategic behavior for better and faster decision- making. We are based in Denmark with offices in US and Japan.www.rasmusssenconsulting.dk.