🧱 Take a LEGO Ideas approach to Culture

Ritual: 07 Building Community with Building Blocks

Sep 13, 2023

The Hogwarts Castle, a Medieval Blacksmith and Van Gogh’s Starry Night. What do each of these share in common? They are all sets that originated with LEGO Ideas — a community-driven platform where LEGO enthusiasts submit models for production consideration. Creators strive for 10,000 votes, and fans choose their favorites. For the final round, full-time LEGO designers review and select the winner.

Recently, LEGO Ideas celebrated its 50th product release — an Insect Collection by fan José María Pérez Suero. As I explored all of the creative LEGO Ideas published since 2014, I was mesmerized by the innovation, creativity and community. I observed many parallel lessons about the ways we communicate and connect at work. Here are the top 10 learnings:

🛣️ Create Communications Channels
📣 Treat Employees like Fans
💡 Invite Ideas from Experts
🧰 Empower Employees with Tools to Create
🎨 Tap into Community
💰 Reward Team Members
🏄‍♀️ Keep The Momentum
🌲 Embrace Growth
🧪 Create a Lab
🧱 Complement Each Other

Note: This edition draws from research on LEGO, including MIT Sloan Management Review, National Geographic, Fast Company, Beyond the Brick: A LEGO Brickumentary, The LEGO Story: How a Little Toy Sparked the World's Imagination

#1 🛣️ Create Communications Channels

For years, LEGO didn’t listen to its adult fans. The company ignored their self-hosted conventions, user groups and letters with ideas. LEGO even posted “Do Not Take Solicitations” on its website. But, when LEGO faced bankruptcy, the company’s leadership quickly pivoted to embrace its fans. Creating the LEGO Ideas platform was one of the results of this change.

The pilot program launched in Japan — it was named Cuusoo which means “imagination” or “wish” in Japanese. Its success led to a turnaround and a re-launch as LEGO Ideas. With the platform, LEGO created communication channels for fans to interact with each other as well as the LEGO team. This fostered an even stronger community and some of the most incredible LEGO creations.

🧱 Lesson Learned: Give your employees the ability to interact, support and find each other, you never know the creative results in return.

#2 📣 Treat Employees Like Fans

Once LEGO embraced its fans, the enthusiasm led to even more admiration and contributions submitted to the Ideas platform. The company offered rewards and benefits to the Ideas community, treating the fans with hospitality by welcoming them, fostering belonging and developing connections.

In addition, LEGO’s Ambassador Network and Certified Professionals are ways to contribute to the community. These creators are celebrated prominently by LEGO on its website, blog, social media and events! In return, this generates more enthusiasm and exposure for LEGO and its fans.

🧱 Lesson Learned: Celebrate employees for their contributions. Hospitality at work can go a long way. Learn more about Unreasonable Hospitality from a prior edition here.

#3💡 Invite Ideas from Experts

LEGO Ideas invited its knowledgeable fans with specific skills to contribute. In MIT Sloan Management Review, the authors, Yun Mi Antorini, Albert M. Muñiz, Jr. and Tormod Askildsen, wrote:

Collaboration is most successful, LEGO management has found, when outside parties have a particular area of expertise, such as architecture or sensor design and manufacture, that individuals within the company don’t have.

🧱 Lesson Learned: Give people opportunities to share their expertise and ideas when building culture intiatives.

#4 🧰 Empower Employees with Tools to Create

As a product, LEGOs are building blocks — they can be stacked and connected to each other with nearly infinite creative results. Actually, up to 915,104,765 combinations to be exact, according to research by Søren Eilers, a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.

🧱 Lesson Learned: What are the building blocks you can give your employees? By giving them the tools, they can design culture programs.

#5 🎨 Tap into Community

Treat employees like fans who crave connection with each other. Give them the power to vote (within reason of course). When LEGO’s Executive Chairman and former CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp spoke at a user convention in 2005, he said:

“We think innovation will come from a dialogue with the community.”

This marked the onset of a new era of openness, partnerships and products that ultimately led to financial success.

🧱 Lesson Learned: When you bring your employees together, the collective can make a great impact as passionate supporters of your brand. They can welcome new employees, organize events and promote a strong employer brand.

#6 💰 Reward Team Members

When a LEGO Ideas design is selected for production, creators get to see their ideas on store shelves! As a perk, they receive 1% of the total net sales of their product. The pride creators feel is priceless.

In the documentary Beyond the Brick: A LEGO Brickumentary, there’s a powerful scene when adult LEGO hobbyist Stephen Pakbaz receives the box set he created for the first time. As a Mechanical Engineer who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he’s so happy to share the LEGO Mars Rover’s Curiosity with the world to fuel curiosity for space exploration.

🧱 Lesson Learned: There are many ways to reward employees with recognition or branded company products.

#7 🏄‍♀️ Keep The Momentum

LEGO recently launched the 50th Ideas project into production. The company continues to encourage fans to submit ideas. Its blog recently published that 71 Product Ideas Qualify for the First 2023 LEGO Ideas Review. This momentum draws fans to follow along and continue contributing.

🧱 Lesson Learned: When you continue to engage employees, there’s a rhythm of connection established. They look forward to opportunities. Offer ways to participate and contribute frequently.

#8 🌲 Embrace Growth

The spirit of LEGO Ideas is all about learning. Try out new designs, experiment with creativity and keep growing.

According to MIT Sloan Management Review, LEGO now taps into many models for growth — suggestion boxes, polls, a digital designer tool, panels, partnerships, project rooms and many more.

Executive Chairman of LEGO and former CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp embraces growth — this mindset turned LEGO around financially. In Jens Andersen’s book The LEGO Story: How a Little Toy Sparked the World's Imagination, the author quotes Knudstorp from a 2007 interview:

Products can be developed in collaboration with customers. We must have faith that the collective wisdom is stronger than what the company can ever become alone. For a company that’s used to vigorously defending its intellectual property, it’s a big leap.

🧱 Lesson Learned: Keep evolving. With growth comes opportunity!

#9 🧪 Create a Lab

LEGO Ideas originated from the company’s Future Lab. Fast Company referred to it as:

A secretive and highly ambitious R&D team, charged with inventing entirely new, technologically enhanced ‘play experiences’ for kids all over the world.

The Lab has also hosted hackathons to experiment with new ideas and recommend insights.

🧱 Lesson Learned: Create a space for employees to share ideas. It can start with a digital channel or group and expand to programs and ultimately a Lab team focused on innovation.

#10 🧱 Connect to Each Other

Executive Chairman of LEGO and former CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, once said:

It’s a very simple idea. All bricks are complementary. They all fit together. Which creates a system that you can be endlessly creative in.

🧱 Lesson Learned: Find ways to connect and build off of each other’s ideas and projects. We’re all working towards the same goal, and we can go in exciting directions when we’re aligned and supporting each other's success.

What do you think we can learn from LEGO Ideas? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Switchboard

Discussion about this post