Communication Through Creation: What LEGO Can Teach Us About Mindset, Meaning, and Dialogue

“Play is the highest form of research.” — Albert Einstein

When was the last time you built something with your hands, not for function, but for thought?

We live in a world dominated by PowerPoints, dashboards and digital whiteboards. We analyse, we explain, we rationalise,  but rarely do we create as a way of thinking. Yet sometimes, the fastest route to clarity isn’t verbal or written. It’s tactile. It’s physical. It’s play.

LEGO has the potential to be one of the most powerful communication tools in psychology, coaching and leadership,  not because of nostalgia or novelty, but because of what happens when we externalise thought. When ideas move from our heads to our hands, something profound occurs: the abstract becomes concrete; the internal becomes visible.

Recent educational research supports this idea. A 2025 Connected Art study across universities in the UK, Germany and Spain found that hands-on creative work fosters critical and creative thinking, especially when learners collaborate to build meaning. The researchers used what they called joint practice development,  a constructivist, arts-based approach that invited adult learners to co-create visual representations of abstract ideas.

Their findings revealed that physical creation unlocks authenticity, complexity and emotional expression. As they put it, “learning happens not just through reflection but through the act of making.” In essence, when people build, they don’t merely express understanding,  they create it.

That’s exactly what happens when people use LEGO as a language for thought. It turns cognition into construction, dialogue into design, and introspection into insight.

From Play to Psychology

“The bricks are never just bricks — they’re language in 3D.” — Jon Sutton, BPS

LEGO Serious Play began life in the corporate world as a way for executives to “think with their hands.” But psychologists quickly recognised that this playful medium accessed something deeper, a kind of thinking that is pre-verbal, embodied, and creative.

Jon Sutton’s When Psychologists Become Builders (BPS, 2012) charts LEGO’s evolution from a corporate innovation tool to a medium for psychological exploration. In his review, practitioners describe using the bricks to examine everything from social communication in autism, to team cohesion and leadership in organisations, and even identity formation and creative learning within education.

What makes LEGO special is its low barrier to entry and high expressive potential. Anyone can build, you don’t need artistic talent or training. Yet through colour, texture and structure, people naturally build metaphors. They externalise internal states: a bridge representing connection; a wall representing resistance; a ladder symbolising growth.

This process reduces defensiveness and invites curiosity. Because it’s metaphorical, it creates distance between the self and the story. People talk about the model rather than about themselves,  which paradoxically allows them to be more honest, vulnerable and insightful.

The model becomes a safe mirror, allowing what Carl Rogers called “organismic valuing”,  the innate human tendency to explore truth when we feel secure enough to do so.

It’s communication without confrontation. Dialogue without defensiveness. Reflection without pressure.

Building a Growth Mindset

“It kind of let your imagination work with your mind… to form new ideas in ways you wouldn’t be able to do just through your mind.” — Athlete, O’Sullivan & Baxter, 2023

A 2023 study by O’Sullivan & Baxter in the Journal of Sport Psychology in Action showcased LEGO’s capacity to change thinking patterns in elite athletes. The researchers worked with members of a trophy-winning hurling squad to explore how building could help reframe fixed-mindset triggers into growth-oriented beliefs.

One athlete, recovering from repeated injuries, built his Four Pillars of Success, nutrition, hydration, sleep, and attitude,  linking them with ladders to represent connection and balance. Through the process, his perception shifted: from self-protection and isolation to openness and collaboration.

He realised that saying “no” to people wasn’t strength, it was fear. By reimagining his system through LEGO, he saw how his supports; coaches, teammates, recovery specialists, weren’t threats to autonomy but resources for growth.

His comment summed up what many athletes experience: “The Lego helped me form new ideas in ways I couldn’t through my mind alone.”

In psychological terms, LEGO helped him externalise and re-integrate competing beliefs. It turned mindset theory into a tangible tool, something that could literally be built, examined, and restructured.

That’s what growth mindset work is at its best: seeing patterns instead of problems, and rebuilding the system from within.

Creating Perspective in Practice

In my own applied work, LEGO has become a trusted method for visualising complexity, uncertainty, and transition,  a way to transform ambiguity into action.

One athlete I worked with faced an eight-month recovery from a serious injury. It wasn’t just a physical challenge; it was psychological. She felt disconnected from her sport, her team, and her progress. When motivation faded, we introduced LEGO.

Each brick represented a stage of recovery. The setbacks became barriers. The green pieces symbolised small wins. Her support network was built into the structure itself; visible, stable, real.

As she built, something remarkable happened: emotion gave way to clarity. The act of constructing allowed her to detach from frustration and reconnect with purpose. She could literally see her path,  the steps, the supports, and the choices.

Later, I used the same process with athletes mapping an Olympic cycle;  four years of relentless preparation condensed into a physical, colourful landscape. Peaks symbolised breakthroughs, valleys represented setbacks, and bridges connected learning moments to future opportunities.

What emerged wasn’t just a visual plan,  it was a living system. The athletes could point to each section and articulate what it required: resilience, communication, self-awareness, adaptability. And when uncertainty arrived,  injury, loss, or selection changes,  they didn’t crumble. They rebuilt.

That’s what LEGO teaches us about strategy: clarity isn’t about control; it’s about construction.

How LEGO Teaches Adaptability

“Don’t fall in love with your wins.”

Adaptability is the hallmark of sustained success,  and LEGO is adaptability made physical.

In every model lies impermanence: you can rebuild, reframe, reimagine. Plans made in LEGO aren’t written in ink; they’re built to evolve. That makes them both fragile and liberating.

There’s a kind of poetry in this process; no crossed-out lines, no erased mistakes, only reconfiguration and forward movement. It mirrors performance and life itself: we build, we break, we rebuild.

As a performance psychologist, I often tell athletes, “You can’t control the outcome, but you can reset the process.” LEGO embodies that principle. The bricks become metaphors for mindset agility; how we handle pressure, change, and imperfection.

Performance isn’t about building the perfect plan. It’s about cultivating the ability to rebuild when the landscape shifts.

Processing Through Play

“The thrill of abundance… the joy of a new start every time I break up some previous construction.” — Uta Frith, Dear LEGO

On a personal level, LEGO has long been how I process information and emotion, particularly as someone on the autism spectrum.

For me, building is more than play. It’s absorption, reflection and regulation. When the world feels noisy, the tactile rhythm of sorting and connecting bricks quiets the mind. It’s mindfulness through movement,  thought, attention and creativity converging in a kind of meditative flow.

That same state of absorbed focus; what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow,  is what I see in athletes when they build. It’s the moment they stop analysing and start creating. They move from anxiety to awareness, from control to curiosity.

It’s not escapism. It’s embodiment.

And often, the breakthroughs happen not in discussion, but between the clicks of two bricks.

Why It Works

The psychological mechanisms at play are well-documented.

1. Hands-on thinking; or embodied cognition,  explains how physical movement changes mental processing. When people handle ideas physically, they integrate emotion, logic and intuition simultaneously.

2. Play and psychological safety go hand in hand. Play removes ego and hierarchy. In LEGO sessions, everyone builds, everyone shares. This levelling fosters honesty, curiosity and collective insight;  essential ingredients for psychological safety.

3. And finally, metaphor as meaning. LEGO models provide a shared language that bridges perspectives. It’s no longer you versus me, but us versus the model. That subtle shift invites exploration and empathy, rather than judgement and defence.

This combination of embodiment, safety and metaphor creates a rare kind of learning space,  one that is both analytical and emotional, individual and shared.

From Sport to Strategy

Across performance environments;  from Olympic athletes to corporate leadership teams, I’ve seen LEGO turn conversation into collaboration.

Sailors have used it to map how communication shifts under pressure. Rowers have built race-day dynamics to explore decision-making and trust. Leadership teams have rebuilt culture brick by brick, visualising barriers and bridges to collective success.

Every time, the same thing happens: the room slows down. People listen. Conversations deepen. Clarity emerges.

It’s what O’Sullivan described as “Aha → Wow → Change.” The moment when construction meets cognition, when the act of making turns into a moment of meaning.

Beyond the Brick

There’s something profoundly human about play. It reconnects logic with imagination. It softens the edges of hierarchy and reconnects us to curiosity. The very foundation of learning and innovation.

Einstein once said, “Play is the highest form of research.” Perhaps it’s also the purest form of communication.

So next time a team is stuck in abstraction or over-analysis, try putting a pile of LEGO in the middle of the table.

You might not just build a model,  you might build meaning.