Building Models
2026-08-21
No, not those models!
I’ve spent a fair chunk of my career building models - or at least building teams that build models. When I first became a manager I was tech lead for Sky Bet's 'trading models' team, and when I moved to FanDuel it was to build recommendation models. This is a blog post about models. Not those kind of models though! The kind I'd normally build with my kids at home, but this time at work...
This week I was lucky enough to be invited to Tom Hoyland's workshop in the Flutter office on 'Lead Better Conversations, Build Stronger Teams'. Tom is a fantastic facilitator and coach, and he imparted some of his wisdom and tips on how to lead serious and difficult conversations within a team in a clean, inclusive and safe way. I would 100% recommend attending one of his courses.
One of the main techniques Tom used throughout the day was Lego Serious Play, where you build Lego models and use these as metaphors to help you think through problems, look at them from different perspectives and communicate them memorably. I'd seen Tom post about LSP before but not done it myself and if I'm being honest, going into it I was intrigued, optimistic but also a little skeptical.
Would using Lego in the workplace really work?
I always try to be open minded and love learning new mental models and communication techniques. Having worked with Tom before I also knew that I was guaranteed to come away with some great new ideas from him.
It does on the face of it sound a bit like corporate theatre though doesn’t it? I can imagine a satirical web cartoon might exist somewhere about executives going on a retreat to build a duck out of lego whilst their company burns back home 🦆🔥
There's also a personal imposter syndrome element in there. My kids love Lego and our house is full of it. One thing I've discovered about myself through playing with them is that whilst I'm great at doing a complex build with them with instructions to follow, if you give me a pile of random bricks, a timer and the instruction to 'build something interesting' I often falter, certainly by comparison to my Lego wizard 8 and 5 year olds. If I struggle building cool stuff for a 5 year old in my pyjamas, could I do it in a meeting room in a smart shirt?
I'm fully converted!
The good news is, the workshop was brilliant and I'm now a big LSP fan! We broached some pretty serious and scary topics, and the model building helped me and the rest of the group open up, look at things from different angles, share thoughts and zoom out and look at the bigger picture. The spatial element in particular surprised me - looking at models people had built from different angles, and questioning specific elements really helped to explore things a layer deeper than we normally would have done.
I won't dig into the serious topics here, or give away too many of Tom's secrets as I'd rather you sign up for one of his sessions and experience it yourselves.
I will share a fun ice breaker though that we learned so you have something to take away - Explain This.
A lego ice breaker
Tom gave us 1 minute to build something totally random with the bricks at our disposal. He then pulled a topic out of a hat and got us to give a convincing bullshit pitch on the topic using our model as a prop. Ours was 'a company tech strategy', and I was quite amazed by how well I could fit a narrative around my model!
- All good tech strategies are built on solid foundations. The boring but crucial, secure, reliable enabler represented by this grey baseplate.
- On top of that we have green shoots, representing growth and innovation. We will invest in the growth of our employees as we adopt new technologies. The green plants also represent sustainability as we look to shift towards energy efficient compute, saving the planet as we scale.
- Out of shot, our growth plant is sat on an orange-red brick, symbolising how our tech strategy is augmented by Claude as we move to an AI-Native world.
- Finally, you will see from the ladder that we are moving away from waterfall development to a more agile world. We are now climbing the waterfall, making decisions on the ground before climbing iteratively rung by rung to the moon.
Why is this a great ice breaker? It gets people thinking, talking, using their hands, it's light hearted and fun. Importantly though, you can also make it relevant to your day. As much as I like asking people to go round in a circle and tell me what's better a puppy or a kitten, I'm pretty sure this would have warmed people up better for an actual workshop about building a tech strategy.
No Lego? No problem
Don't have any Lego, or working remotely? Don't worry, the same idea works in different ways, like asking people to get 4 random items from their kitchen or the supermarket, and then use them as explainers for whatever topic you’re about to explore. You don’t need to use lego, just anything that will spark imagination and get people thinking and improvising.
Piecing It All Together
I’ve given you a fun ice breaker tip, but really for me the main takeaway here should be to invest in your learning, try new techniques and ideas, especially if they’re different to what you would normally do and potentially make you a little skeptical. You’ll walk away having sparked some thoughts and hopefully with some new tools to add to your shed.
If you want to learn about Tom and some of the work that he does, you can find his website here or of course reach out to him on LinkedIn (or Slack if you work at Flutter).