Block
The first step in Block.Build.Begin
“
Nothing so undermines organisational change as the failure to think through the losses people face.
~William Bridges
Change moves through a team long before anyone names its impact. Left unrecognised, it doesn't stay contained, it reaches everything. Block is an online or in-person, hands-on session for a team wanting to find out what's actually holding it up, not the transition in general, the specific thing.No prior experience of LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is needed. What's needed is 2 to 2.5 hours, some LEGO® to build with, and a change the team is currently living through, together.
Why Block?
Teams don't struggle to name the transition they're in. They struggle to name what's actually in their way, and that's rarely because nobody's noticed it. More often, it's a choice not to say it out loud, or it's not being fully expressed because it hasn't fully taken shape yet as something a person could put into words. Sometimes it isn't spoken because it doesn't need to be, everyone's quietly built their own version of what the block is, filled the silence with their own assumption, and moved on as if that assumption were fact. And sometimes what's shaping a team most isn't any single thing anyone's holding back, it's the space itself that everything else in the team is quietly organised around.
This is what Block is about. Not deciding in advance what's wrong and fixing it, but surfacing what's actually there, whether that's something being deliberately held back, something not yet articulable, or something so unspoken nobody in the team has ever named it as a thing at all.
The three phases
Block draws on William Bridges' Transition Model:
Ending, where something familiar is being lost, a role, a structure, a way of seeing yourself
Neutral Zone, the disorienting middle where the old way is gone and the new one hasn't taken shape
New Beginning, where a new way of working starts to take hold.
Most of what gets surfaced in a Block session sits in the first two.
More information about Bridges’ model can be found on the Transition page.
What's usually underneath
Often, what's stopping a block from being said out loud isn't the transition itself, it's that the trust to say it hasn't been there since the change happened. A restructure, a departure, a new leader, any of these can quietly unsettle the psychological safety a team relies on without anyone remarking on it. Block doesn't set out to rebuild that directly, but naming something real, together, in a room where nobody's punished for it, tends to do exactly that. Trust isn't the goal of the session. It's usually what makes the rest of it possible, and what grows a little because of it.
Who it’s for
Any team navigating workplace change, together: a redundancy round, a restructure, a change in leadership, a change in structure, or anything else that's shifted what the team was and left it working out what it's becoming. It's built for the team as a whole, not for one person's transition in isolation, on the basis that most of what's actually holding a team back is shared, even when nobody's said so.
Why this works
Most of what makes a transition hard never gets said out loud, not because people are hiding it, but because it's genuinely difficult to talk about something you can't quite see the shape of yet. In a team, this compounds: everyone's half-carrying something, and no single conversation gives the whole team a way to say it at once.
Built in LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, that same thing stops being a feeling each person is stuck inside alone and becomes something the whole team can look at, turn round, and change together. Move a piece. Watch what shifts. Test a consequence before it costs anything to be wrong, as a team, before it plays out for real.
A model on the table isn't fixed the way a spoken opinion tends to become fixed once it's out loud. Once something's said in a meeting, it's hard to walk back without it costing someone face. A model doesn't have that problem. Someone can pick up a piece and move it, try the block somewhere else, hand a part of it to someone else and ask what it looks like from where they're sitting, without anyone having to defend a position or admit they were wrong. That's what makes it possible to actually play with a problem rather than just describe it, try an idea, see what breaks, put it back, try another.
That matters most when people in the same team are seeing the same situation completely differently. Talking tends to flatten that difference, everyone reaching for the same few words to describe what they mean, agreeing on language long before they've actually agreed on what's true. Building keeps the difference visible. Two people's models of the same block can sit side by side, genuinely unlike each other, and the gap between them becomes something the team can look at directly, rather than something smoothed over because nobody had the words to name it as a disagreement in the first place.
This is systems thinking, done with your hands instead of a whiteboard, and it surfaces more, faster, than talking alone does, particularly when the people in the room haven't found a shared language for what they're going through.
What to expect
Each person builds what's in their way, then tells the story behind it. Once everyone's spoken, and not before, the team places their builds into the part of the transition they think they're actually in, all at once, so nobody's placement is shaped by anyone else's.
Most models land in Ending or Neutral Zone, that's usually where the real work of the session is, and where the team spends most of its time. Occasionally someone places themselves in New Beginning, which is worth a moment's attention rather than nothing, it might mean they're genuinely ahead, or it might mean they're glossing over what's still blocking them. And if the whole team lands there together, that's worth noticing too, not proof of anything on its own, but a pattern worth asking about rather than moving past.
What tends to emerge is a landscape nobody in the room could have described if you'd simply asked them: who's stuck where, which blocks echo each other, where the assumptions people had been quietly carrying turn out to be wrong, or right in ways nobody had said aloud.
The session closes with the block named, together, as a team, not resolved, but seen and said for the first time.
Agency, and where it starts
Change happens to a team. What a team does with it, whether people hold onto who they are inside their role, their relationships, their sense of belonging, or lose themselves in it, is a separate question, and it's the one transition agility is really about. That skill gets built over Block, Build, and Begin together, but it starts here, because agency isn't possible over something you can't yet name. Block is where a team gets its first real look at what's actually been shaping it. What it does with that look is where agency begins.
Some reasons people come
Teams come for different reasons:
Two teams have merged. The awkwardness hasn't really been named yet, just worked around, and they wanted a way to actually get it on the table.
The business has pivoted. They wanted space to work through the fact that the job people signed up for isn't quite the job they're doing anymore.
Inherited a team in the aftermath of change. The trust wasn't there yet, and they wanted a genuine way to start building it rather than assuming it would come with time.
So much change, for so long. No one in the team wanted to be the one who said they'd had enough, and they wanted a space where that could finally be said.
Same session, different starting points, the block is rarely the same twice.
After the session
Nothing else, Build or Begin, works until the block has been found. Once a team's block has been named, Build is where the shared skill of moving through the middle actually gets trained, and Begin is where the new way of working starts to take hold. Some teams know straight away they want to carry on. Others want space to sit with what came up first. Either is fine, there's no pitch at the end of a Block session, just an open door for when the team is ready to keep going.