Amaia Lesta: Bridging Organisational Psychology and Facilitation

Amaia's Journey in Organisational Psychology

Amaia Lesta is an organisational psychologist, facilitator, and former technology leader with over 20 years of experience. She has led teams through change in complex, fast-moving environments. Amaia holds a master’s in organisational psychology, focusing on decision-making, team design, and group dynamics in agile organisations. She collaborates with teams and leaders to design and facilitate innovation, strategy, and development conversations. Her approach combines evidence-based psychology with practical facilitation methods like Design Sprints, LEGO® Serious Play®, Liberating Structures, and systemic team coaching. Her mission is clear: to help people want to come to work for what they can achieve together, while supporting organisations to create outcomes that benefit users, businesses, and the people who make it happen.

Amaia's Blog

After more than fifteen years leading teams in technology, I embarked on a master's in organisational psychology. My motivation was practical: I wanted to learn how to lead people better, especially during organisational change. My research focused on how organisations using agile practices decide on team structures and member assignments. This topic stemmed from my own experiences witnessing numerous organisational changes that, despite good intentions, often went awry.

During my research interviews, I asked leaders about their decisions to reorganise teams and members. They consistently described anticipating strong emotional reactions from people they cared about. Disappointment, anger, sadness, frustration. For managers who genuinely cared for their teams, being the person who triggered these emotions felt like an emotional burden. This burden often outweighed the strategic trade-offs involved.

The Importance of Participation

This is where participation becomes crucial. Leaders who involved teams in major decisions did so for three key reasons. First, teams could identify risks and realities that leaders might overlook. Second, teams were more willing to implement changes they had helped shape. Lastly, leaders experienced less emotional strain when decisions were co-created rather than imposed. Responsibility and meaning were shared, lightening the emotional load.

Bridging Theory and Practice

In the tech world, I observed Scrum Masters and Product Owners running daily ceremonies. However, many lacked an understanding of the psychological nuances that could make or break those rituals. I realised I was missing this understanding too. As organisational psychologists, we learn about group dynamics, research methodology, focus group design, and motivation theories. For me, the key to applying my Master's knowledge was through facilitation.

Learning facilitation methods like Liberating Structures, Design Sprints, LEGO® Serious Play, and systemic coaching provided me with practical tools. When sessions are designed with psychological theories in mind, facilitation becomes the vehicle for applying psychology. Psychology explains the why, what, and when behind the methods, while facilitation teaches us how to use them effectively with teams.

In my research on agile team composition decisions, I discovered that psychological factors often outweighed the process itself. Decision-makers adapted everything—the process, the timeline, even the decision—based on their understanding of people's needs, feelings, and anticipated reactions. When leaders had established relationships with team members, they could anticipate disappointment or resistance, prompting them to adjust their approach. This intuitive, informal, human-centred, and often unstructured approach proved effective.

The Consultation Phase

The critical moment I observed was the consultation phase—the conversation before executing a team composition change. This phase involved product owners, senior developers, subject matter experts, and affected team members. When done well, this conversation surfaced risks, refined decisions, and built acceptance.

What made the difference? Understanding group biases. My research recommendation was clear: implement group decision-making practices that reduce false consensus, groupthink, and escalation of commitment. However, knowing you should do this and knowing how to do it are two different things.

The next question became unavoidable: how do you facilitate these conversations well in real life?

I found great answers to that question as I further developed my facilitation skills.

Facilitation Informed by Organisational Psychology

For me, facilitation is a skill that helps me bring my organisational psychology knowledge into action. I believe everyone at work can benefit from learning facilitation methods. Imagine if meetings, workshops, and interactions could become better experiences—after all, who enjoys a tedious meeting? Better facilitation can lead to faster, more effective outcomes.

Consider LEGO® Serious PLAY® (LSP). This hands-on methodology allows teams to use LEGO bricks to build models representing ideas, challenges, and relationships. It helps teams think together and make sense of complex topics at work. LSP emerged from a real business challenge within the LEGO Group in the late 1990s. The company faced serious pressure from market changes, such as the rise of video gaming. LEGO needed new ways to think strategically and generate innovative ideas quickly. The method was developed through close collaboration between business insiders and scholars like Johann Roos and Bart Victor, resulting in an approach usable in real teams and research that followed.

LSP enhances team cohesion, collaboration, and psychological safety by fostering open, balanced conversations (Wheeler, Passmore, and Gold, 2020). Research on innovation and co-production workshops shows how LSP helps teams externalise thinking, align different perspectives, and work productively with complexity (Langley and colleagues, 2018). Across multiple studies, LSP supports equal contribution, reduces the impact of hierarchy, and helps teams progress more effectively than traditional discussion-only formats. I see this in LSP sessions myself—participants often say that LSP allows for equal voice, sparks creativity, and accelerates progress compared to conventional meetings.

Liberating Structures

Now, let’s talk about Liberating Structures. These are small, practical facilitation patterns that can be introduced into almost any meeting to improve how people think and interact. For example, the simple 1-2-4-All structure encourages individual thinking first, then pairs, then groups of four, and finally the whole group. This structure directly addresses conformity bias. Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments (1951, 1956) revealed that many people conform to obviously incorrect group judgments, especially when they hear others speak first. His research also showed that even a single dissenting voice dramatically reduces conformity. Protecting individual thinking before group discussion improves accuracy.

Liberating Structures translate these psychological insights into everyday organisational practice. By design, they prevent the loudest or most senior voice from dominating too early. Each person’s thinking is safeguarded during the individual phase, ideas are explored safely in pairs and small groups, and by the time the whole group convenes, multiple perspectives are already present. For instance, when used in strategic planning, Liberating Structures lead to increased creativity, faster progress through meeting tasks, a higher number of meaningful contributions, and stronger engagement in discussions and decision-making (Academic Radiology, 2023). They offer a way to enhance everyday meetings without overhauling everything, focusing on changing interaction patterns rather than the people or the perfect agenda.

Adapting to Virtual Settings

Learning during my organisational psychology MSc and PGDip in psychology transformed how I approach online versus in-person group workshops. Research shows that virtual settings alter power dynamics; some feel safer speaking up, while others may feel disconnected. Sensitive topics require different handling online than face-to-face. Cognitive load is higher during video calls. Armed with this knowledge, I don’t just replicate the same meeting on a virtual platform. I redesign it. I incorporate more breaks and encourage parallel thinking through chat. Psychology informs me why these adjustments matter and what to consider, while my facilitation skills guide me in implementing them.

What Changes for People

When teams make difficult decisions together using effective facilitation, challenging emotions don’t vanish. Disappointment, frustration, or loss may still linger. What changes is not how people feel, but how decisions are made and how responsibility is shared. The process becomes clearer, more deliberate, and less arbitrary. Assumptions are surfaced, trade-offs are openly explored, and decisions are shaped with more input from the system rather than driven by a single perspective. This approach reduces blind spots and enhances decision quality, even when the outcome remains challenging.

The burden shifts from individuals privately managing the consequences of opaque decisions to teams engaging with complexity more openly and realistically. This is where organisational psychology truly comes alive for me—not in abstract models, but in the everyday moments where people collectively decide how they will work, change, and move forward. The journey from learning to practice was paved through skilled facilitation, applying our training to the conversations happening daily in organisations. I now facilitate innovation and development conversations professionally, and this blend of psychological understanding and facilitation methods continues to shape my work.

The Call to Action

Whatever your role in organisational psychology—be it HR, L&D, consultancy, or leadership, consider this: if you’re wondering how to apply what you learned in your Master's, skilled facilitation might be your answer. Where could you bring more psychological rigor to how conversations happen in your organisation? You already possess the knowledge. Facilitation could be the vehicle that allows you to utilise it effectively.

PBI Take

We love this because it captures something many psychologists feel but struggle to articulate: knowing the theory is not the same as applying it. Amaia’s work reinforces applied psychology in action. Her reflections echo research on conformity and group dynamics, such as the work of Solomon Asch, which shows how easily group judgment can distort decision-making. Structured methods like 1-2-4-All protect independent thinking and enhance the decision-making process.