Building a Connected Leadership Team After a Merger with LEGO® Serious Play®

From Silos to Shared Purpose

When two housing associations came together, the ambition was bold and forward-looking: to
create more sustainable homes that people could love living in for generations to come.
The merger gave the new organisation greater strength, scale and potential to deliver on that
promise for its customers and communities.

Yet ambition alone wasn’t enough because behind the headlines, two leadership groups were
now navigating how to operate as one. Each had their own history, systems and ways of working.

The challenge was clear: how could the organisation achieve their shared mission, and how
could they strengthen connection, communication and trust across its newly formed
management community.

Challenge

With around 50 senior managers brought together from across the organisation, the leadership
team wanted to create the conditions for genuine collaboration and high performance.
Dynamics from the big changes revealed familiar challenges:

• Teams were operating in silos, with limited visibility into one another’s priorities.
• Conflicting KPIs and pressures were making it difficult to see the bigger picture.
• High workload and urgency meant there was little time to step back, listen, or learn together.

As one participant expressed during the workshop:

“There’s a lot of noise and conflicting priorities… The vision is sometimes unclear.
Everything feels urgent and last-minute.”

The leadership team recognised that to realise their long-term ambitions, they needed more
than structural alignment: a shared understanding, mutual respect and consistent
communication.

Approach

Make Happy designed and facilitated a full-day LEGO Serious Play experience.

The day was carefully designed as a journey: moving from reflection to insight to action, allowing
participants to experience what high performance feels like, not just to have discussions about it.

Morning: Understanding the Work

Skills building

Before moving into the core challenges, the session began with a series of short skills-building
exercises. These are a critical part of LEGO Serious Play. They help participants get comfortable
with building as a way of thinking, not just a creative activity. For many, this is unfamiliar at first.

Through simple, timed builds, participants practice:

• Building metaphors rather than literal representations
• Telling clear, concise stories through their models
• Listening actively to others without interruption or judgement

This levels the playing field quickly. Regardless of role, confidence, or communication style,
everyone develops a shared way to contribute.

Just as importantly, it creates psychological safety. By the time the group moves into more
complex or sensitive topics, participants are already engaged, present they are ready to share
more openly.

What might otherwise take hours of discussion begins to surface in minutes – because people
are expressing ideas through models, not just words.

Moving to the ‘strategic question’

With that shared language in place, the session opened with an invitation to honesty:

“Build the work challenge that keeps you up at night.”

This first individual build brought unspoken realities to the surface – the pace, the pressures and
a sense of being pulled in multiple directions.

Next came a new prompt:

“Build the single behaviour, mindset, or way of working that allows this team to perform
at its best.”

At six tables with people from across different functions, managers built and shared stories
about their models that represented the habits they most valued, these included trust, listening,
adaptability and the importance of giving everyone a platform to speak. These were then merged
into shared table models, each a metaphor for how the organisation might operate at its best.

A third round focused specifically on communication – where it helps or hinders performance.
Teams explored what “excellent communication” would look and feel like if the group truly got it
right.

Finally, participants identified any blockers, the habits or blind spots that might hold the team
back and then importantly, what potential could be unlocked if those blockers were addressed
or removed. Each of these builds captured both the problem and the opportunity within it.

Collaborative Build: The Blueprint

Having explored performance, enablers, communication and blockers, the tables collaborated to
create shared models.These would become tangible blueprints of high performance across the
six teams. These combined individual perspectives into a collective story of what needed to be
true for the group to perform at its best: clarity, trust, open dialogue and systems that support
rather than constrain.

Afternoon: Turning Insight into Action

After lunch, participants returned to their functional business units to transform insight into
tangible ‘concrete’ initiatives.

Each team used a Project Poster format to capture three priorities that would really focus
people’s thinking on how this would actually be implemented and delivered:

• Project Name
• Why this matters
• Lead & supporters
• Three next steps
• Resources needed

By the end of the session, twelve actionable projects had been developed ranging from
improving communication rhythms to redesigning feedback loops and creating shared learning
opportunities. Every project had an owner, some clear next steps and visible sponsorship.

The final activity invited each participant to build one last personal model:

“Something you want to take away – a behaviour, mindset, or intention to support the
team’s success moving forward.”

They wrote these reflections on cards to take back to their desks — a small but powerful
reminder that culture change starts with individual action.

Outcomes

The day delivered more than colourful models; it delivered alignment, ownership and a real
sense of momentum.

Participants left with:

• A shared definition of high performance rooted in behaviours and relationships, not job titles.
• Twelve live project ideas to improve communication, collaboration, and delivery within their teams.
• A renewed sense of empathy and connection across regional and functional boundaries.
• Individual commitments to act on personal insights back at work.

By surfacing unspoken tensions and hopes in one facilitated space, the organisation saved what
could have taken months of separate meetings to uncover.

Many managers commented afterwards that this single day created more clarity and trust than a
season of traditional planning sessions.