Case Study:
Strengthening Team Ownership and Agility in a Small Distributed Business with
Lego Serious Play
Client Background
The client was the founder and manager of a small business with teams distributed across two locations. The intervention took place in person with the smaller, co-located team, while the broader business continued to operate across both sites.
Challenges
There was a need to better understand how the team functioned as a whole, and to create more shared ownership of both challenges and solutions, specifically:
Delegation of responsibilities
Decision-making processes
Structuring the working day to ensure team effectiveness
The Approach
We agreed on a full-day, in-person team coaching session.
The session was intentionally designed in advance to move beyond a purely operational focus on delegation and working structures, and instead enable the team to:
generate their own insights, take ownership of challenges, and co-create sustainable ways of working.
Lego® Serious Play® was selected as the core methodology for its ability to unlock deeper reflection, equal participation, and collective sense-making.
The client was particularly drawn to its creative and engaging approach.
The session followed a structured flow, outlined below:
Exploring Strengths and Team Identity
Each team member built an individual model representing their strengths and passions within the team. The team then combined their models into a shared model.
Outcome:
Shared understanding of their collective strengths
Team starts to see themselves as a cohesive unit rather than individuals working in parallel
Surfacing Challenges
Participants created individual models to express what they saw as the team’s biggest challenges, allowing every voice to be heard in a balanced way.
The team combined their models to a shared model, representing a joint understanding of these challenges.
Outcome:
Shared understanding of all challenges (not just that of the leader)
Ownership begins to shift from “Leader Only” to Team
Team are fostering openness and trust - foundations for psychological safety
Co-Creating Solutions
Using their understanding of both strengths and challenges, team members built models showing how they would improve the situation.
These ideas were integrated into a shared future model, forming a collective vision of more effective ways of working.
Outcome:
Co-created practical, relevant solutions grounded in their reality
Strong buy-in and shared accountability for implementation
Commitment & Action
Finally, each participant built a model representing their personal commitments and key takeaways.
This step reinforced accountability, reflection, and the transition from insight to action.
Outcome:
Clear individual commitments established
Commitment to embed the session’s insights into day-to-day behaviour.
The Results
By the end of the session, the team had:
Created clear, shared agreements on how to better structure their working day
Developed a stronger understanding of workload distribution and how to manage it collaboratively
Built a sense of shared ownership over both challenges and solutions
Strengthened trust and openness within the team
Follow Up
In the 6 week follow up call, the manager reported that the changes had been sustained, with visible improvements in commitment, collaboration, and overall effectiveness.
Notably, the new ways of working were also adopted by the second team in the other location.
Client Testimonial
Moya Sands
Founder
“I had the pleasure of working with Yeshim during a LEGO® Serious Play® session she facilitated with our team, and it was a genuinely insightful experience. She has a rare ability to help people surface ideas and perspectives they didn’t even realise they were holding, using colour, shape and metaphor to express both challenges and opportunities.
Yeshim guided us skilfully from individual reflection into shared understanding, helping us see our challenges more clearly and align as a team around practical ways forward. She is perceptive, thoughtful and highly engaging as a coach, and I would highly recommend her to any team looking to unlock fresh thinking and move towards their goals with clarity and confidence”