Impacting Learners at LEGO

LEGOs have been beloved for years, but they recently became the world’s most valuable toy brand. This doesn’t surprise us—no one knows how invested LEGO is in their brand better than we do. Several years ago, we worked with the company to create courses for their Brick Specialists (which we recently updated). LEGO’s brand informed everything we created for them, from the learning objectives to the visual design. The desired outcome? Learners would be impacted to live the brand in everything they did.

Our Approach to Impact Learning

The Needs Analysis

Whenever possible, we do a needs analysis before we even touch our design. (Quick refresher on needs analyses if you’re not familiar—“the purpose of the analysis is to make sure we truly understand the root of the performance problem.”) With the needs analysis, we find the behaviors that, when changed or implemented, will achieve the desired goal.

For one of our LEGO courses, the goal was to provide excellent branded guest service. We identified three behaviors that are necessary for that to happen: the Floor Leaders needed to assess the needs on the store floor accurately, coach associates effectively, and delegate tasks appropriately. This would leave them free to focus on the most important part of their job: providing a special, LEGO-branded experience for each guest.

The Visual Design

The LEGO brand is one of imagination and fun, so we stressed the “play” mindset of Brick Specialists in the content of every course we developed. However, we knew that playful content would be undermined by a run-of-the-mill or even boring visual design, so we set to work creating one of the most visually unique courses in our portfolio.

Every component of the course featured LEGO’s bright colors and the signature crenelated brick shape. Most of our courses use written feedback on knowledge check activities: “That’s right!” “Not quite. Try again.” The LEGO safety activities feedback forewent this kind of feedback, instead featuring animated LEGO figures humorously experiencing mishaps after ignoring safety rules.

The Game

Whenever possible, we like to include some kind of simulation in a course to help learners synthesize and practice everything they’ve learned. One of our courses for LEGO includes one of our very best simulations: The Floor Leader LEGO game.

The game is designed to be about five minutes long, with 20 decision points during gameplay. It simulates a Floor Leader’s shift on the LEGO salesfloor. After choosing a LEGO figure to act as Floor Leader (the options include Emmet, Wyldstyle, Batman, Spider-man, and Rey from Star Wars), the learner makes decisions based on the brand and behaviors they learned earlier. After time runs out or a game-ending mistake is made, the learner receives scores on customer service, coaching, and performing other required Floor Leader tasks. The game helps learners really absorb the desired behaviors, but it’s also super fun and kind of addicting. (Some employees at AllenComm may or may not play a few rounds when they have downtime.)

In Conclusion

When it comes to impactful courses, our work for LEGO truly offers something special. We’re so glad we had the chance to make a difference for such a great brand! If you’re looking to make an impact on your learners, reach out to us. We love a challenge!