Designing the Future of Inclusive Workplaces

The Stage
This was Fair Play's first public Conversation Lab — not a presentation, not a panel discussion. A facilitated conversation using LEGO® Serious Play®, bringing together academic expertise and organisational design thinking from the field to create a genuinely multi-faceted workshop tackling an age-old problem.

Backed by a YWCA community grant, the session set out to explore what genuine workplace inclusion actually looks like, beyond policy documents and box-ticking exercises. Research grounding came from the University of Canberra; organisational design thinking came from the field — and LEGO® bricks gave it all a shape, turning theory into something people could actually build and discuss.

What we did
Participants built models representing the barriers to workplace inclusion, then worked through problem-solving across three pillars: structural (physical spaces and systems design), cultural (workplace norms and psychological safety), and experiential (individual lived experience, including masking and unwritten norms). Each pillar moved from a diagnostic build ("where does this fall short?") to a generative one ("what would good actually look like?").

Three patterns emerged as critical to building genuinely inclusive workplaces: leadership commitment as the sustaining factor, inclusion as something that must keep evolving rather than being finalised once, and the strength of connection between people as what actually creates safety at work.

What shifted
The experiential stage landed hardest. Multiple groups, working independently, arrived at the same underlying idea through entirely different metaphors: inclusion will always keep evolving, but keeping workplaces human — creating real psychological safety — is the actual enabler. Not the policy. The felt experience underneath it.

Curious what this could surface for your team? Let's talk!