The Un-Meeting: How to Build Your Strategy from the Bottom Up with LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (5 mins)

In boardrooms across Thailand, the scene is often the same. Senior leaders present a well-researched, top-down strategy. It’s logical, it’s comprehensive, but when it meets the rest of the organization, something gets lost. Engagement is low, implementation is fraught with unforeseen obstacles, and the frontline wisdom of the team remains untapped.

At Build Lab Thailand, we believe there is a better, more effective way to build a strategy—one that is co-created, deeply understood, and passionately owned by the very people who will bring it to life. This is the power of a bottom-up approach, and the most effective tool we have to facilitate it is the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) method.

Shifting the Flow: The Power of the Bottom-Up Approach

The traditional top-down approach assumes that the best ideas and most critical insights reside at the peak of the organizational pyramid. While leadership provides essential vision, this model often overlooks a vital source of intelligence: the employees on the ground.

A bottom-up approach flips this script. It empowers employees at all levels—those closest to your customers, your products, and your daily operations—to contribute their unique knowledge to the strategic process. This approach fosters a culture of ownership, uncovers practical challenges and opportunities that leadership might miss, and generates a level of buy-in that a top-down directive can never achieve.

But how do you systematically unlock this collective intelligence? How do you ensure every voice is heard, not just the loudest or most senior? This is where the magic of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® comes in.

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®: The Ultimate Bottom-Up Engine

LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is a facilitated, hands-on methodology designed to solve complex problems and enhance communication through building with LEGO® bricks. Its very design makes it a powerful engine for a bottom-up approach.

In a workshop led by our certified facilitators, the process is simple yet profound:

1. The Question: The facilitator poses a strategic question.

2. The Build: Every single person in the room builds a 3D model representing their thoughts and ideas in response to the question.

3. The Share: Each participant shares the story and meaning behind their model.

4. The Reflection: The group reflects on all the models and stories, identifying patterns, connections, and emergent insights.

The non-negotiable rule is 100% participation. This immediately breaks down hierarchical barriers. The insights of a junior team member become as visible and valuable as those of a department head. The act of building with one's hands taps into deeper knowledge and allows participants to express complex ideas that they might struggle to articulate in a conventional meeting.

The Synergy: Building a Truly Shared Strategy

When you combine a bottom-up philosophy with the LSP method, strategy development transforms from a presentation into a conversation—a shared act of creation.

• Unlocking Tacit Knowledge: An engineer can build a model of a hidden process flaw that was never on a report. A customer service agent can build a model of a recurring customer frustration that data alone doesn't capture. LSP gives a voice to the invaluable, unspoken knowledge that exists throughout your organization.

• Creating Genuine Alignment: When the team collectively builds a model of the company's future state, the strategy is no longer an abstract concept in a document. It becomes a tangible, three-dimensional object that everyone has contributed to. This shared understanding is the bedrock of true alignment and seamless execution.

• Forging Unbreakable Commitment: In our workshops at Build Lab Thailand, we consistently witness a powerful shift. Participants move from passive recipients of a plan to passionate co-authors of their future. People are naturally committed to what they help create. A strategy built with LSP isn't "management's plan"; it's "our plan."
  
  

Beyond the Strategy Room

This combined approach extends far beyond the annual strategy meeting. In general management, it can be used to tackle change management by allowing teams to build models of their fears and aspirations. It can resolve inter-departmental conflicts by having teams build models of their shared goals. It can define and embed corporate values by making them tangible and discussable.

The future of management is collaborative. The most resilient and innovative organizations will be those that learn to harness the full intelligence of their people. A bottom-up approach provides the philosophy, and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® provides the proven method to put it into action.

Authored by: BuildLab Thailand