Hi! I’m Joel Birch.
I help school leaders bring out the best in their people by getting them to play with the important ideas that drive their work. I help your staff to have better conversations about bigger ideas.
As a Certified Facilitator of LEGO Serious Play, I help bring everyone into the conversation, surface the group’s collective intelligence, and uncover the ideas that need to emerge and find their right place in the mix.
My work with LEGO Serious Play is great at overcoming the shortcomings of conventional meetings and workshops, and excels at opening up the full range of perspective and creative expertise on your staff.
Especially when your people insist that they’re not creative.
is “acting professional” getting in the way of your staff doing their best work?
You know you’ve got a school full of smart people. The solutions to your challenges are in the room. The big question is “is business as usual actually bringing out their best?”
We can use the LEGO Serious Play method to help you get that collective genius out of heads, and on to the table where your brilliant people’s brilliant ideas can be improved and played with.
at your average staff meeting or development day, do these sound familiar?
we can do better.
Don’t just work on the important things, play with them.
The LEGO Serious Play method helps everyone on your team to communicate their thoughts effectively, forge powerful connections between ideas, and build understanding and solutions more powerful than the sum of their parts.
while the grownups are still talking, we’ll be hard at play.
LEGO Serious Play is hands-on and all-in. It works best when everyone involved in the topic at hand is on hand, thinking with their hands. It is incredibly powerful applied to a complex topic with more than one “right answer,” that needs everyone’s minds in the mix. Each workshop is custom designed to take your conversation where it needs to go, to meet the outcomes you want to achieve.
It empowers your team to do bigger, more authentic work by doing these things:
what can we use it for?
LEGO Serious Play is an incredibly flexible process that can be applied to a huge range of challenges. It excels in the face of a complex topic with no single “right answer,” and when you want absolutely everyone’s input, even over conventional barriers to communication.
Here’s a few broad examples, but you’ve probably got a more interesting one.
Seriously want to play, but you’re not a school?
You need…
how does it work?
To get the best ideas flowing amongst your staff, you can do better than talk, A3 sheets and sticky notes. Using LEGO bricks as the common language for creative expression, I can help the people in your school and community embrace complexity, communicate powerfully, and awaken their latent creativity. LEGO Serious Play is a powerful method for harnessing the full range of expertise, creativity and perspectives in your organisation to solve complex problems.
It’s also great fun, highly engaging, and an amazing way to bring people together.
You’ve got a school full of smart people. You already know that. The solutions to your challenges are in the room. We can use the LEGO Serious Play method to get those ideas out of individual heads, and on to the table where they can be tested, improved upon, and played with. The LEGO bricks are the medium for creative expression, a common language across backgrounds and perspectives. Participants build their ideas and express them through telling stories. The LEGO Serious Play process then helps to bring those ideas and stories together into creative ways forward.
curious about how it might work for you?
Joel Birch is an experienced K-12 educator, professional learning designer, facilitator, and conscientious objector to ever fully growing up.
As a certified facilitator of LEGO Serious Play, Joel uses the power of play, stories, and thinking with our hands to solve problems to help individuals, teams, and whole organisations to leave their “outer grownup” at the door – letting the instincts and insight of their inner child do the important work.
Building on a successful career using constructivist and constructionist learning to enable and develop the creativity of children and their teachers in schools in Perth and overseas, he now works across a wide range of industries, with groups ranging from youth to senior leadership.
“The energy in the room was electric. What an interesting way to engage people in bigger picture thinking, sharing and collaboration. Joel’s facilitation sparked so much creativity.”
“We could not have had this conversation in any other way.”
“Joel is a natural facilitator – he uses LEGO Serious Play to draw out topics and ideas that may otherwise have gone unspoken. When working in close knit teams, we can become too caught up in our usual ways of thinking. The use of LEGO levels the field of conversation to give everyone a chance to contribute.”
these organisations have all done some very serious playing:
you made it this far, let me get you a coffee!
Why just read about it when you could actually play with the bricks for yourself?
Get in touch, and I’ll show you how powerful a LEGO Serious Play workshop can be for your team or organisation.
I’m based in Perth, but more than happy to demo online and hit the road to play.