Insights

The Visible Truth: Using Physical Models to End Functional Bias

2026-07-02 11:09 Strategy & Culture Alignment & Collaboration Growth & Development
This Insight explores how building strategy with physical models, instead of slides, exposes and reduces the functional bias that quietly derails alignment.

“I thought you meant…” might be the costliest phrase in business. It marks the moment a leadership team leaves a meeting believing it is aligned, only to watch departments read the same goal differently days later. This is what we can call functional bias: every department filters an abstract strategic word through its own priorities. The pattern is measurable, and it shows up first as miscommunication, execution drag and siloed decisions. Slides and spreadsheets rarely fix this, because flat, verbal tools are often part of what causes it. So what would it take to make that bias visible enough for a team to solve?

Crack the Nut: Make Functional Bias Visible, Then Build Past It

Trends in brief:
  • 100% of knowledge workers surveyed report miscommunication at least weekly, with one in four experiencing it several times a day (Grammarly, 2024).
  • For the average full-time knowledge worker, business leaders estimate poor communication wastes 7.47 hours per week (Grammarly & The Harris Poll, 2022).
  • Two-thirds to three-quarters of large organisations struggle with strategy execution, with coordination across silos and adaptation at the front line among the key issues (Sull, Homkes & Sull, Harvard Business Review, 2015).
  • Team-focused transformations can lead to 30 percent efficiency gains when organisations implement them effectively (McKinsey, 2024).

How can leaders make functional bias visible enough for a team to solve it together?

Turn Abstract Goals Into Physical Models

What: LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) asks each person to build a small model of a strategic idea, instead of only describing it in words.

Participants don’t just talk listen - they build, share, and listen with their eyes and their ears. Each person’s hands construct their own reading of a goal such as “operational agility,” and that reading becomes visible on the table. Because the model sits between colleagues rather than inside their heads, disagreement becomes something the team can inspect together, not argue about personally. For the organisation, one vague sentence in a strategy deck turns into as many concrete, comparable interpretations as there are functions in the room - caught early, rather than discovered a quarter later.

Proof: Roos, Victor and Statler show that changing strategy-making from verbal, computer-based and two-dimensional media to 3-D media such as LEGO bricks can change both the strategy process and the content generated (Roos, Victor & Statler, Long Range Planning, 2004).

Let Every Model Speak Before Anyone Argues

What: LSP structures participation so that everyone builds and everyone presents, not only the most confident voices in the room.

Every participant builds privately first, so no one anchors their thinking to what a senior colleague says out loud. Each person then explains their model in turn - a rule, not an invitation - so the quietest specialist gets the same airtime as the CEO. For the business, this means the blind spot hiding inside one department’s reading of the strategy surfaces during the workshop, not months into a costly execution.

Proof: Research on LSP-facilitated team sessions links the method to stronger collaboration, team cohesion and psychological safety in organisational settings (Wheeler, Passmore & Gold, Journal of Work-Applied Management, 2020).

Merge Individual Models Into One Shared Landscape

What: Once each person has built their model, the team connects the pieces into a single shared model or landscape.

Leaders physically link the models, and for the first time in the room, a supply-chain risk sits next to the marketing plan, and a sales ambition touches the operations team’s real delivery capacity. People point at a specific connection on the table instead of debating an abstract paragraph in a slide deck. The finished landscape can become a working reference the executive team returns to at each quarterly review, helping prevent functional bias from quietly creeping back in.

Proof: In a FocusU case study, a leading global chemical manufacturer used LSP with 35 members of its senior executive leadership team. Each leader built a model of the future organisation, shared their perspective, and the group then forged the distinct insights into a final model representing a common vision for growth, expansion and sustainability (FocusU Case Study).

Why It Works

Functional bias thrives in the gap between what a strategy says and what each department assumes it means. Physical models close that gap by making the assumption itself the object of conversation - small enough to point at, hard enough to hide. Strategic alignment stops being a hope and becomes something the whole team can see, discuss and adjust together.

Ready to Build Your Team’s Visible Truth?

Explore how Smart Minds and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® can help your leadership team turn strategy from a document into a shared, visible truth - see our workshops and Foundational Certification.

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