How Play Unlocks Creative Strategy | Azeem Saheer

Azeem Saheer is a human capital specialist, facilitator, leadership coach, and podcaster with 17 years of experience helping organisations unlock human potential. A PCC-level ICF coach and emotional intelligence and emotional culture practitioner, Azeem uses LEGO Serious Play as his primary tool for transforming how teams think together, break down silos, and surface ideas that traditional workshops leave buried. In this conversation, we explore why the problem in most organisations isn't a lack of ideas - it's a lack of stories and meaning that connect. Azeem breaks down the neuroscience behind building with your hands, why directing questions at a model (rather than the person who built it) removes ego from strategy conversations entirely, and how asking a team to break the model they've just built is the most important step of all. We also get into two case studies that stick: a supply chain team at Sri Lanka's largest food and beverage company who discovered that they had no idea what their colleagues in other departments were achieving or struggling with, and an ice cream R&D team, labelled by management as non-innovators, who produced ideas for effervescent flavour tablets and QR-coded shelf-life tracking the moment they were given the right environment to think freely. You'll take away: - Why your hands are directly wired to the largest part of your brain's cortex and how LEGO Serious Play exploits that connection to unlock ideas people didn't know they had - The simple shift that transforms a defensive strategy session into an open one: direct your questions at the model, not the person - How placing team models on a single table can expose silo thinking, duplicated effort, and misalignment in a single session - Why the problem is almost never the people and almost always the environment you've given them to think in - The five-step LEGO Serious Play facilitation process - How Azeem uses AI to pressure-test his challenge questions before he walks into the room If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and leave a review — it helps us reach more people who are serious about making innovation stick. Connect with Azeem: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/m-azeem-saheer-pcc-837b3759/ Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/ei-cafe-with-azeem/id1540856792 Connect with Vaughan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaughanbroderick/ X: https://x.com/theVBroderick Website: https://vaughanbroderick.com/ Book: https://innovationinactionbook.com/ #LEGOSeriousPlay #Innovation #DesignThinking #Facilitation #Leadership #HumanCentredInnovation #ExpertInnovators #CreativeThinking #StrategyDesign #EmotionalIntelligence #TeamBuilding #OrganisationalCulture #PlayAtWork #FacilitationTools #ChangeManagement