The “serious play” story began in 1996 when Institute for Management Development (IMD) professors Johan Roos and Bart Victor created the “serious play” concept and process as a way to enable managers to describe, create and challenge their views of their business. LEGO joined the story during an IMD program for the top 300 leaders in the LEGO® Company.
Roos and Victor presented their early ideas in a short article published by IMD in 1998 entitled “In Search for Original Strategies: How About Some Serious Play?”
Presented with the findings of the work at IMD, LEGO® CEO Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen sponsored a company under the auspices of LEGO® called Executive Discovery.
Bart Victor led the product development and commercialisation process of Serious Play at Executive Discovery. He invited Robert Rasmussen from LEGO® and Professor Dave Owens from Vanderbilt University to help bring the first product to market. The first “LEGO® Serious Play®” application was called Real-Time Strategy.
LEGO® Serious Play® was developed into a consulting method used by companies including Daimler Chrysler, Roche, SABMiller, Tupperware, Nokia and Orange.
At the same time, Johan Roos and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen established the research effort at the aptly named ‘Imagination Lab’, a Swiss think tank that between 2001-2006 produced 74 research papers, many journal articles and 4 books.
The result of 15 years development?
A powerful method to solve problems, explore ideas and achieve objectives based on management theory using a toy.
In 2010 LEGO made the method open source. This decision created a community of practice and today, unleashed, today we find the method thriving in a wide range of applications.
The story in the inventors’ own words
In 2018 Johan Roos and Bart Victor published their own account of how the method began, partly to settle the conflicting versions they had seen circulating. It is open access and well worth reading in full. Here is what stands out for anyone who facilitates the method today.
It started with a problem in strategy, not with the bricks
In the mid-1990s, as professors at IMD in Lausanne, they kept seeing strategy conversations dominated by hard numbers, while managers’ own judgement and intuition were pushed to the side. They set out to find something with more energy and deeper insight than the usual strategy retreat.
Before any bricks were involved, they drew on ideas from outside mainstream strategy: that what you see depends on who you are, so identity comes first; complex adaptive systems, with their landscapes, emergence and simple guiding principles; the idea of a "collective mind" that pays careful attention to how everything connects; three kinds of imagination (describing, creating and challenging); and the power of story. They called the result "real-time strategy".
The LEGO Group was the first test bed
In 1996 Johan was asked to design a strategy programme for the top 300 managers of the LEGO Group. Despite the bowls of bricks in every meeting room, those managers were as wary of anything that looked like play as managers anywhere else. Johan and Bart asked them to build and tell stories anyway, and saw engagement and the depth of conversation rise straight away.
In January 1997 Johan sketched the first tool on the back of an envelope. Its code name was the "LEGO M-Tool"; he later proposed the name Serious Play. Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, then the company’s owner and CEO, was taken aback at first by the idea of adults building with bricks, but became a supporter. Over the following months hundreds of managers tried it, including the leadership team of Tetra Pak.
What the early experiments taught them
By August 1998 they had five conclusions, and every one still holds in the training room:
- People are excited by the idea but anxious about how colleagues will see them "playing".
- Warming up is vital: skills building has to set the tone, because simply handing people bricks is intimidating.
- The choice of materials matters: sorted, and neither too much nor too little.
- The atmosphere must feel safe, playful and comfortable.
- The process is delicate, so a skilled facilitator is essential.
Their real-time strategy process then settled into four moves: build your identity, create the landscape of agents and connections, pay close attention to how those agents interact, and agree simple guiding principles. Anyone who has built a system model on our 4 Day Advanced course will recognise that sequence.
Read the original papers
- Roos, J. and Victor, B. (2018), "How It All Began: The Origins of LEGO® Serious Play®", International Journal of Management and Applied Research, 5(4), 326-343. Free to read: doi.org/10.18646/2056.54.18-025
- Roos, J. and Victor, B. (1999), "Towards a New Model of Strategy-making as Serious Play", European Management Journal, 17(4), 348-355. doi.org/10.1016/S0263-2373(99)00015-8
- Roos, J., Victor, B. and Statler, M. (2004), "Playing Seriously with Strategy", Long Range Planning, 37(6), 549-568. doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2004.09.005
For the ideas the method draws on, from Piaget and Papert to flow and metaphor, read the research and theory behind the LEGO® Serious Play® method.
