Breaking the Doom Loop: Using LEGO Serious Play to unlock action on sustainability

Join Climate Play's Founder and learning innovator, Lucy Hawthorne, for a dynamic, hands-on workshop designed specifically for sustainability leaders wanting less doomer-ism and disengagement and more breakthrough conversations and action. 

Are you struggling to open doors to sustainability conversations? Do people automatically assume its going to be a) miserable, b) more work / money / more time, c) not their problem? Are you struggling to get your people to engage or be more ambitious? Are you crying out for some positive ways to handle the tough stuff? 

Who is this for?

Anyone who leads sustainability engagement work where you're trying to get others on board with your strategy and ideas.

Are you...

• An in-house ESG Lead or Sustainability Manager/Head in a corporate?
• A sustainability academic trying to get deep thinking going amongst your students?
• A sustainability consultant trying to encourage more ambition amongst your clients?
• A researcher or community leader trying to understand what is most important to your people when it comes to people and planet?
• Anyone else trying to ditch doom and spark game changing ideas :)

In this playful and thought-provoking session, you'll explore how LEGO® Serious Play® can be a surprising way to open up sustainability conversations that might not happen, or go well, otherwise. We'll explore how to convert the cynics, help the shy people share, shift from problem to solution-mode without anyone feeling overwhelmed or cranky, and help everyone leave feeling more optimistic. 

Join and experience for yourself how approaching serious topics in a playful way can increase - not distract from - impact.

COME ALONG IF YOU:

• Run sustainability-related workshops, meetings, programmes or coaching and want better engagement
• Feel like you're always pushing people to act, and would love them to want to be involved
• Need ways to help conversation go deeper on tricky topics, without people running a mile
• Crave community with others who believe a different, more positive way of engaging is needed
• Are in need of some fun at work!

OVER 90 MINUTES YOU WILL:

• Try out a few LEGO® Serious Play exercises to experience for yourself how it can improve thinking, creativity and connection
• Explore common engagement challenges and get ideas on how to tackle them, such as passivity and avoidance, overwhelm and anxiety, getting beyond the 'usual suspects', and resistance to big changes
• Hear about practical use cases for combining LEGO Serious Play with sustainability frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Inner Development Goals (IDGs), system thinking models and more
• Get ideas on how a serious play approach could help you get to the heart of the questions and conversations we desperately need to have
• Learn facilitation techniques that build trust, improve psychological safety and have an inclusive, low-barrier for entry for diverse participants

This is a highly experiential AND practical session. Expect to be building and planning your next engagement moves from the start! 

What else?

We'll also share about upcoming ways to work with Climate Play, either through our facilitated workshops or by training yourself or your team in our breakthrough play-based approaches. 

What do I need?

Bring a couple of handfuls of random LEGO if you have some (the more varied in size, shape and colour the better). If you don't have any, then just bring a couple of handfuls of random objects.

About Climate Play and your workshop leader

Lucy Hawthorne is half-nerd, half-mischief and leads Climate Play, where she shakes up how people think, talk, and act on sustainability through innovative, play-based methods. She is on a mission to spread playful methods and mindsets to help ditch doom and spark world changing action :)

Before launching Climate Play, Lucy spent ten years in NGO campaigning where she helped achieve some big wins (a ban on fracking in the UK), but became concerned that the heaviness of the climate narrative was affecting people's ability to act. And so Climate Play was born...

Climate Play hosts the world’s only LEGO® Serious Play training dedicated to sustainability and later in 2025 will expand its training into an academy of LEGO-based sustainability learning. This will be the only dedicated space where learning-by-LEGO meets futures-thinking and sustainability. It’s designed to spark creativity, deepen connection, and inspire action. It will be modular, online and in-person, and is gateway to access to the growing Climate Players community, an exciting network of like-minded changemakers.

Questions

Email Lucy Hawthorne, Chief Player, with all your play and climate based enquiries! lucy@climateplay.org.