Issue 20: Making thinking visible

One of the things we spend a great deal of time thinking about in coaching, particularly when working with groups, is how to create the conditions for genuine understanding.

Part of our role is listening for neatness. Helping an idea land before it is challenged. Creating enough space for an experience to be heard, explored and understood before someone builds upon it, reframes it or contradicts it. Not because disagreement is unhelpful, but because too often we respond to our interpretation of what was said, rather than what was actually meant.

It highlights a very real, very human problem. Not with people, but with communication itself.

Words have always fascinated me. The power of them, their potential. They are our strongest weapons, sharpest tools. They can bridge an unfathomable gap or forge one. They are our gateway to connection, to being seen, understood and yet... and yet, most adults recognise around 20,000 to 30,000 words, almost double that for university-educated individuals.

At first glance, that feels like an extraordinary number. Surely that's more than enough to communicate everything we could possibly want to say. But then you begin to consider that many words have dozens of synonyms, each carrying its own subtle nuance, its own emotional weight, its own flavour. Suddenly, language feels less precise than we like to imagine.

Perhaps that's because words were never designed to carry the full complexity of human experience.

Think about an emotion. Before it becomes a word, it is a tangled web of bodily sensations, memories, beliefs, relationships, context, hopes, fears and predictions. We take all of that richness, all of that complexity, and compress it into a single word.

Frustrated.

Anxious.

Overwhelmed.

One word, expected to hold an entire experience.

Then something remarkable happens. The person listening doesn't simply receive that word; they reconstruct it. They expand it back out again, but not using your experiences. They use their own. Their own memories, beliefs, assumptions, relationships and understanding of what frustrated or anxious feels like. The meaning isn't transferred. It's interpreted.

Psychologists call these mental frameworks schemas; the internal maps we use to make sense of the world. Every conversation, every story, every word passes through those maps before it reaches understanding. Which means communication is never simply about what we say. It's also about the meaning someone else creates from what they've heard.

Maybe that's why we can leave a conversation convinced we've explained ourselves perfectly, whilst the other person walks away with an entirely different understanding. Not because either of us was wrong, but because meaning was never contained within the words themselves. It was created in the space between them.

Now layer on something even more complex.

Imagine you're trying to create a shared understanding of a system. A culture. A vision for the future. You're asking a group of people to describe not only what they see happening today, but also what they believe is getting in the way and what thriving could look like instead.

These aren't neutral topics. They are deeply personal. They are shaped by our experiences, our frustrations, our hopes and our fears.

One person says, "Attitude towards work is one of our biggest blockers."

But what I hear might be, "We're not holding people accountable." Someone else hears, "We've recruited the wrong people." Another hears, "Leadership isn't setting the right expectations."

The sentence hasn't changed, but the meaning has. And then there's the system itself.

Rarely are we trying to understand one isolated idea. We're trying to untangle dozens of interconnected factors; behaviours, processes, assumptions, relationships, structures, incentives and histories that all influence one another. We attempt to hold them in our minds whilst listening, interpreting, responding and making sense of what everyone else is saying.

Our brains were never designed to hold that level of complexity in conscious thought. Modern research suggests we can actively hold and manipulate only around four chunks of information at once. Everything else has to go somewhere. So our brains do what they've evolved to do. They simplify. They fill in the gaps. They let go of the exact words and hold on to what they believe those words meant.

Before long, we aren't responding to what was actually said. We're responding to our interpretation of what was said. And every person in the room is doing exactly the same thing.

It's no wonder creating a genuinely shared understanding can feel so difficult.

This is exactly why we've become so fascinated by LEGO® Serious Play®.

Having recently completed a week of facilitator training in LEGO® Serious Play® with systemic thinking, James and I have come away genuinely blown away by what it makes possible. Not because the bricks are magical, but because they solve a problem we'd been grappling with for years.

They allow people to make an experience visible instead of simply describing it.

The models themselves can be incredibly abstract. In fact, they often are. The important thing isn't whether anyone else immediately understands what you've built. The important thing is that you know what it represents and can explain it with clarity. The meaning isn't in the bricks. The meaning comes from the builder.

What we've found is that this changes conversations in two really important ways.

Firstly, it helps us think about complexity.

Trying to understand a system by holding it all in your head is incredibly difficult. There are simply too many moving parts; behaviours, assumptions, relationships, barriers, opportunities and tensions. As we've already explored, our working memory has limits. We can't consciously juggle dozens of interconnected ideas at once.

But once those ideas become physical, something shifts.

Each model becomes a visual representation of an idea, a memory anchored to a picture. Rather than trying to remember a sentence someone said twenty minutes ago, you remember the bridge with the missing section, the tower balanced on one brick or the figure standing outside the wall. The image becomes a cue, helping you reconnect with the conversation that created it. Whatever the science eventually tells us about exactly how much more we can retain, our experience has been remarkable. Twenty models can be spread across a table and people can walk around, recalling not only what each represents, but how they connect together to form a much larger system.

But perhaps the most powerful shift is something else entirely.

It takes the person out of the problem.

Imagine someone says, "I think one of our biggest blockers is the current climate in our industry."

Immediately, someone else begins interpreting what they mean. Are they talking about the economy? Leadership? Recruitment? Accountability? Excuses? Before long, the conversation is no longer about the original idea. It's about everybody else's interpretation of it.

Building changes that.

Instead of defending an opinion, you create a model and assign meaning to it. You explain what each brick represents, why it's there and how it connects to everything else. That meaning belongs to you because it comes from your experience.

The model gives everyone permission to ask instead of assuming. It slows interpretation down long enough for curiosity to catch up.

They can ask questions. They can become curious. They can build a different model that represents their experience. They might discover they're describing exactly the same thing from a different perspective. Or they might realise they're talking about something entirely different.

Either way, both ideas now have space to exist.

Instead of competing for the same words, they become separate pieces of the system. Visible. Distinct. Available to explore.

The conversation quietly shifts from, "No, that's not what I meant," to, "Tell me more about why you built it that way."

The conversation is no longer me versus you. It's all of us standing around the same model, trying to understand it together.

And in that moment, curiosity replaces correction. Not because we've solved the problem of communication, but because we've created the conditions for genuine understanding.