For many young children today, play time means screens, not toys. That’s a problem for a theme park designed for families to celebrate playing with plastic building bricks.
Fortunately, the design team at Legoland’s Merlin Magic Making understood the first rule of leadership — you have to meet people where they are. Whether you are a teacher, a politician or an artist, if you want to engage your constituents, you must start with something they already understand. That familiarity builds the trust and confidence that your audience needs to follow you wherever you wish to take them.
I recently had the opportunity to tour the construction site of Legoland California’s new Lego Galaxy land. The centerpiece of that new development is Galacticoaster, Legoland’s first indoor roller coaster. The attraction includes a clever interactive design element where groups of riders can choose how to virtually decorate the spaceship-themed roller coaster train they will ride.
Legoland is using large vertical screens in a preshow room for this interaction. By doing that, Legoland is playing in the medium with which today’s young children are most familiar. Start them on the screens that they know, then put them on a physical ride that uses projection technology to allow riders to see themselves in that digital environment.
After that, when the visceral experience of a family roller coaster is done, Legoland exits its guests into a Lego play environment where kids can get their hands on the plastic bricks that they already played with on screen. It’s a smart way to use something familiar to lead today’s kids into the joys of tactile play.
Not every attempt at creative leadership plays out the way that designers intended, of course. Consider what is happening at Disneyland with its Star Wars land.
Disneyland has announced that it will bring original trilogy characters such as Darth Vader into Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge, starting April 29. When Disney first announced plans for this land, the company was rolling out its sequel trilogy for the Star Wars franchise. While successful at the box office, those films have failed to grow the same level of passion for the Star Wars franchise that the original films, and even the prequel trilogy, did decades ago.
Chewbacca greets visitors at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge inside Disneyland on Friday, January 16, 2026. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Disney tried to lead its Star Wars fans into a new generation of stories to be told in Galaxy’s Edge. Fans have raved about the Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance attraction, but many Star Wars fans also are not satisfied living an adventure grounded in only the sequel trilogy. They want to see and hear and interact with characters from throughout the Star Wars timeline.
Imagineers are not completely abandoning their original concept for Galaxy’s Edge. Disney’s announcement suggested that they will restrict characters from different eras to different sections of the land, to prevent interactions that could not happen in a canon Star Wars story.
It’s not pandering to understand what an audience wants and to work with that. It’s just good leadership to listen with respect. Because if you cannot influence people to follow you, it does not matter where you want to take them.