About

A sales coach told him to get into training. That was 1995.

Chris Pepper is a certified LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator with 21 years in Australian learning and development, based in Melbourne and working right across the country. Brick Spark is his — every session designed, built and facilitated by him, with nobody in between.

Talk to Chris See the workshop formats

The start

Better at helping customers than closing them.

The first job was selling advertising for Yellow Pages, and the part Chris was good at turned out to be the part that wasn't selling — sitting with a customer, working out what they actually did, helping them understand their own product. The closing side never came naturally, and he'd be the first to say so.

His sales coach watched that for a while and suggested he think about becoming a trainer instead. A Certificate IV in Workplace Training and Assessment followed in 1995, and that was the end of the sales career. Twenty-one years on, he's worked as a learning and development specialist across the country, and through most of the ways an organisation can try to teach its people something.

Contracting and consulting came later, partly because it paid better, mostly because the work kept changing — every project a different industry, a different room, and a fair bit he never expected he'd end up doing.

Cert IV Training & Assessment, 1995 LSP certified, 2024 21 years in L&D Melbourne based, Australia-wide

Also on LinkedIn, if you'd rather check the working history first.

Chris Pepper, certified LEGO® Serious Play® facilitator, in a Brick Spark t-shirt

People make the business

Hands unlock thinking

Be real, always

Fig. 01 — Chris, and what he builds from

Two decades as a learning & development specialist, across organisations like

The belief

People make the business.

"Businesses often cut the training department when cost cutting needs to be made, when they should be investing more in their staff — because ultimately, they're the ones that do the work and make the profits."
Chris Pepper

That's the reason Brick Spark exists. Tap into what makes people think and you get the best out of them, which is a harder thing to put on a balance sheet than a training budget is to cut — and a more expensive thing to lose.

The method

Why bricks, after two decades of classrooms.

The same lesson, over and over

Twenty-one years of running rooms teaches you one thing repeatedly: the people with the most useful thing to say are often the ones who say the least.

Why the usual fixes miss

An agenda doesn't change who talks. Asking the quiet ones directly just puts them on the spot in front of the people who've already filled the air.

What changes with a build

Everyone builds before anyone talks, so every person comes to the conversation with something of their own to point at. Nobody has to win the floor first.

The bricks aren't the point — they're what gets the thinking out of people's heads and onto the table where the room can work on it. There's more on how a session runs, and on the six formats Chris is asked into most.

The facilitation came first and the method came later. Chris certified in LEGO® Serious Play® in April 2024, under Michael Fearne of Pivotal Play, after two decades of working around the same problem with agendas, breakout groups and every other tool the job hands you. The certification wasn't a career change — it was the piece that finally solved something he'd been managing rather than fixing.

How he works

Be real, always.

Be yourself and don't change to suit the room. Keep learning whatever's new. Get to know what makes people tick. Not everyone is going to like you, and that's fine as long as you like yourself — people spot fakeness a long way off, and they'd rather have someone straight with them.

In practice that means an honest read on whether a workshop is the right call, including the times it isn't. Chris designs and facilitates every session himself, so the person you talk to beforehand is the person standing at the table on the day. No associate facilitators, no handover, no account manager.

Away from the table

Melbourne, footy, and a podcast.

Outside work Chris follows the Demons, which takes a particular kind of patience, and he turns up on the Lace Out footy podcast when they'll have him. It's not far off the day job — get people talking about something they genuinely care about and you find out what they actually think.

Next step

Tell Chris about the room.

Two lines is plenty — the decision on the table, roughly who's in the room, and a date that could work. A session plan comes back within one business day, or an honest note if a workshop isn't the right call.

Talk to Chris Take the fit assessment