Lego Serious Play is a consultant service offered by a LEGO Serious Play Certified Partner. Its goal is fostering creative thinking

Creativity

Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...

 through team building metaphors of their organizational identities and experiences using Lego bricks

Lego

Lego is a line of construction toys manufactured by the Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colorful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures and various other parts...

. Participants work through imaginary scenarios using visual three-dimensional Lego constructions, hence the name "serious play".

In 2009 the method was further developed for use in schools. Teachers are trained to use it with students from 6 years. The objectives are the same; to foster creative thinking and teamwork, with focus on facilitating a process that enables deeper reflection and constructive dialogue.

The method is described as "a passionate and practical process for building confidence, commitment and insight". The approach is based on research which suggests that hands-on, "minds-on" learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities. It is claimed that participants come away with skills to communicate more effectively, to engage their imagination

Imagination

Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...

s more readily, and to approach their work with increased confidence, commitment and insight.

Origins of Lego Serious Play

Johan Roos and Bart Victor created the “serious play” concept and process in the mid-1990s as way to enable managers to describe, create and challenge their views of their business. Dr. Roos is now President of Copenhagen Business School

Copenhagen Business School

Copenhagen Business School, also known as CBS, is situated in Copenhagen, Denmark. With more than 17,000 students and 1,300 staff members, CBS is also one of the largest business schools in Europe. CBS offers a wide range of business-oriented university programmes and a research environment...

 and Dr. Bart Victor is Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership at Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1873, the university is named for shipping and rail magnate "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided Vanderbilt its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the...

 but when they created serious play they were both professors at IMD in Switzerland.
The conceptual foundation of serious play combines ideas from constructivism (Piaget 1951), its subsequent version constructionism (Harel and Papert 1991), complex adaptive system theory (Holland 1995) and autopoietic corporate epistemology (von Krogh and Roos 1994; 1995) applied to the context of management and organizations.

The empirical foundation of the concept of serious play stems from Roos and Victor’s experiments with leadership teams in Tetra Pak, Hydro Aluminium and TFL and during an IMD program for the top 300 leaders in LEGO Company. They presented their early ideas in a short article published by IMD in 1998 entitled "In Search for Original Strategies: How About Some Serious Play?" and in the 1999 article "Towards Model of Strategy Making as Serious Play" published by European Management Journal. In 2004 the journal Long-Range Planning published their article “Playing Seriously with Strategy” (with Matt Statler), which serves as the foundation for the concept and practice of LEGO Serious Play.

From Experiment to Product

Initially the owner of the LEGO Company, Mr. Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, was hesitant, but presented with the early findings he became convinced that Roos and Victor’s ideas had value and decided to encourage and sponsor a commercial application under the auspices of the LEGO Company. As a first step he ensured Roos and Victor could use the talents of designer Paul H. Howells from LEGO Company in UK. This resulted in a company called Executive Discovery that is now a member of the LEGO family of companies.

For the first few years Bart Victor led the product development and commercialization process of Serious Play through Executive Discovery, with which he invited Mr. Robert Rasmussen from the LEGO Company and Professor Dave Owens from Vanderbilt University to help bring the first product to market. The first “LEGO Serious Play” application was labeled Real-Time Strategy and is based on the concepts Identity, Landscape and Simple Guiding Principles developed in Johan Roos' 1999 book The Next Common Sense (with Michael Lissack). Later on, the Executive Discovery team developed and commercialized several other LSP applications. In the following years, LEGO Serious Play was developed into a consulting method used by companies other than LEGO, including Daimler Chrysler, Roche Pharmaceutical, SABMiller, Tupperware, Nokia and Orange. It has also been used in non-profit/NGO groups (e.g., SOS Children's Villages), as well as in government (e.g. Danish Patent and Trademark Office and the Danish Agency for Governmental Management under the Ministry of Finance).
Recently, the LEGO company decided to go from a partner based community to open source, releasing the methodology as under a Creative Commons licence.
The two main communities of people using LSP are: Serious Play Pro, and Strategic Play Room.

The Research Effort

Johan Roos decided to develop further the very idea of playing seriously in organizations. Encouraged by an initial donation from Mr. Kristiansen and the LEGO Company in 2000, Johan Roos resigned from his professorship at renowned IMD to establish the non-profit Imagination Lab Foundation http://www.imagilab.org/. The foundation is neither affiliated to LEGO Company nor Executive Discovery in any way.

Over the next few years he led the theoretical and clinical research pursued by team of scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, music and the management disciplines. During his leadership the foundation secured more than CHF 13 millions in donations from large corporations, including LEGO Company, Microsoft, EMC, Firmenich, Nokia and Orange and experimented with some 1.500 managers in a variety of organizations. Imagination Lab established a Working Paper http://www.imagilab.org/research_workingpapers.htm series and a series of short publications for practitioners http://www.imagilab.org/research_nextpractice.htm that report the findings from the research and bout and with serious play based ideas processes, broadly defined. In 2006 Roos established the annual Imagination Lab Award for Innovative Scholarship http://www.euram-online.org/r/default.asp?iId=LHGJD in collaboration with European Academy of Management (EURAM http://www.euram-online.org/r/default.asp?iId=GIFML).

In 2006, Palgrave Macmillan published Roos’ book Thinking from Within that synthesizes a decade of conceptual and applied research on serious play-like processes with a range of materials in addition to LEGO bricks. In this book Dr. Roos also introduces ideas and processes of socio-drama, collective virtuosity and practical wisdom that go beyond the initial ideas of serious play, hence the notion of thinking “from within”.

The webatelier.net Lab of the Università della Svizzera italiana (University of Lugano, Switzerland) has further developed the methodology, releasing in 2011 URL - User Requirements with Lego (under the Creative Commons licence).

Corner Stones

The concept is based research in three areas of development.

• Play
  Play (activity)
  Play is a term employed in ethology and psychology to describe to a range of voluntary, intrinsically motivated activities normally associated with pleasure and enjoyment...
  
   - Play is defined as a limited, structured and voluntary activity that involves the imaginary. That is, it is an activity limited in time and space, structured by rules, conventions or agreements among the players, uncoerced by authority figures, and drawing on elements of fantasy and creative imagination.

• Constructionism
  Constructionist learning
  Constructionist learning is inspired by the constructivist theory that individual learners construct mental models to understand the world around them. However, constructionism holds that learning can happen most effectively when people are also active in making tangible objects in the real world...
  
   - Based on the ideas of Seymour Papert
  Seymour Papert
  Seymour Papert is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language....
  
  , which built in turn on the Constructivist
  Constructivism (learning theory)
  Constructivism is a theory of knowledge that argues that humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas. During infancy, it was an interaction between human experiences and their reflexes or behavior-patterns. Piaget called these systems of...
  
   theories of Papert's colleague Jean Piaget
  Jean Piaget
  Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
  
  . Papert argued that learning happens especially well when people are engaged in constructing a product, something external to themselves such as a sand castle, a machine, a computer program or a book.

• Imagination
  Imagination
  Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...
  
   - Throughout history, the term "imagination" has been given many different cultural and linguistic connotations. While all share the basic idea that humans have a unique ability to "form images" or to "imagine" something, the variety of uses of the term "imagination" implies not one, but at least three meanings: to describe something, to create something, to challenge something. From the point of view of Lego Serious Play, it is the interplay between these three kinds of imagination that make up strategic imagination – the source of original strategies in companies.

Academic Publications

• Cantoni L., Marchiori E., Faré M., Botturi L., Bolchini D. (2009). 'A systematic methodology to use Lego bricks in web communication design.' In Proceedings of the 27th ACM international Conference on Design of Communication (Bloomington, Indiana, USA, October 05 - 07, 2009). SIGDOC ‘09. ACM, New York, NY: 187-192.

• Cantoni L., Botturi L., Faré M., Bolchini D. (2009). 'Playful Holistic Support to HCI Requirements using Lego Bricks'. In M. Kurosu (ed.), Human Centered Design, HCII 2009, LNCS 5619, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg: 844-853.

• Statler, M., Roos, J., and B. Victor, 2009, ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’: Taking Play Seriously in Organizations,’ Journal of Change Management , 9(1): 87-107.

• Statler, J., Jacobs, J. and J. Roos, 2008, ‘Performing Strategy: Analogical Reasoning as Strategic Practice’, Scandinavian Journal of Management, 24: 133–144

• Roos, J., ‘Transformative Management Education,’ 2008, in Teaching and Learning at Business Schools: Transforming the Delivery of Business Education, Bild, M., Mårtensson, P. and K. Nilsson (eds.), Gower: 63-76.

• Oliver, D., and J. Roos, 2007, ‘Constructing Organizational Identity,’ British Journal of Management
  British Journal of Management
  The British Journal of Management is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal, which was established by David T. Otley in 1990, and is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the British Academy of Management. The journal covers all main fields of management studies: from business ethics and...
  
  , 18(4): 342-358.

• Roos, J., 2006, Thinking From Within: A Hands-On Strategy Practice, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (ISBN 1-4039-8670-3).

• Roos, J., and R. Said, 2005, ‘Generating Managerial Commitment and Responsibility,’ European Management Review, 2: 48 - 58.

• Oliver, D. and J. Roos, 2005, ‘Decision Making in High Velocity Environments: The Importance of Guiding Principles,’ Organization Studies, 26(6): 889-913.

• Bürgi, P., and Jacobs, C., and J. Roos, 2005, ‘From Metaphor to Practice in the Crafting of Strategy,’ Journal of Management Inquiry, 14(1): 78-94.

• Roos, J, Victor, B., and M. Statler, 2004, ‘Playing Seriously with Strategy,’ Long-Range Planning, 37(6): 549-568.

• Roos, J., 2004, ‘Sparking Strategic Imagination,’ Sloan Management Review, 2004, 46(1): 96.

• Grey. F., and J. Roos, ‘Playing Seriously with Strategy,’ Physics World, 2005, 18(2): 18-19.

• Bürgi, P., and J. Roos, 2003, ‘Images of Strategy,’ European Management Journal, 2003, 21(1): 69-78.

• Oliver, D., and J. Roos, 2000, Striking a Balance: Complexity and Knowledge Landscapes, McGraw-Hill, Maidenhead (ISBN 0 07709 556-1).

• Roos, J., and B. Victor, 1999, Towards a Model of Strategy Making as Serious Play,’ European Management Journal, 17(4): 348-355.

• Roos, J., and D. Oliver, 1999, ‘From Fitness Landscapes to Knowledge Landscapes’, Systemic Practice and Action Research, 12(3): 279-293.

• Lissack, M., and J. Roos, 1999, The Next Common Sense: Mastering Corporate Complexity through Coherence, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London (ISBN 1 85788 240-7). Translated into Japanese (2001) and Estonian (2002).

• Roos, J., and B. Victor, ‘In Search Of Original Strategies: How About Some Serious Play?’ IMD Perspectives for Managers, 1998, (26) 15.

• von Krogh, G., and J. Roos, 1995, Organizational Epistemology, Macmillan, Oxford (ISBN 0-312-12498-8).

• Holland, J., 1995, Hidden order: How adaptation builds complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

• von Krogh, G., Roos, J., and K. Slocum, 1994, ‘An Essay on Corporate Epistemology’, Strategic Management Journal, Special Issue on ‘Rethinking Strategy - The Search for New Strategy Paradigms’, 15: 53-71.

• Harel, I. and Papert, S. 1991, eds. Constructionism, Ablex Publishing Corporation, Piaget, Norwood, NJ.

• Piaget, J, 1951, The Child’s Conception of the World, Routledge, London.