Lego Serious Play

Lego Serious Play is a facilitation methodology developed at the Lego Group. Since 2010 it is available under an open source community-based model. Its goal is improving creative thinking and communication. People build with Lego bricks three-dimensional models of their ideas and tell stories about their models. Hence the name "serious play".

Johan Roos and Bart Victor created the "Serious Play" concept and process in the mid-1990s as a way to enable managers to describe, create and challenge their views on their business. Dr. Roos is now Chief Academic Officer at Hult International Business School and Dr. Bart Victor is Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership at Vanderbilt University. They created Serious Play while they were both professors at IMD in Switzerland.

The conceptual foundation of Serious Play combines ideas from constructivism (Piaget 1951), 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. It also relies on action research.

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 the Lego Group. 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 a New 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 Lego Serious Play concept.

The development of the Lego Serious Play product line in the Lego Group involved several teams and more than 20 iterations. Work at the Lego Group began with the owner Mr. Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Initially he was hesitant but presented with the early findings he became convinced that Roos and Victor's ideas had business value and decided to encourage and sponsor a commercial application under the auspices of the Lego Group. As the method developed in real-time sessions with various companies, results were robust and reproducible.

In 1999, the Lego Group submitted an application to protect the Serious Play trademark. While the Lego Serious Play methodology is currently open source, its trademark is still owned and protected by the Lego Group. The trademark applies to the Lego product line with dedicated Lego Serious Play kits.

Initially in 2001, a subsidiary of the Lego Group called Executive Discovery submitted the application to patent the methodology and the material product line. Later in 2006 Executive Discovery re-submitted the patent application. However, U.S. patent office never issued the official patent because by 2008 the application was abandoned by the applicant. Therefore, the Lego Serious Play methodology was never patent protected.

In 2010, the Lego Group made the methodology open source, releasing the Lego Serious Play methodology under a Creative Commons community-based licence. The main Lego Serious Play communities are: Association of Master Trainers, LSPConnect, Serious Play Pro, Global Federation of LSP Master Trainers.