Your Basket (0 items)A Brief History
LEGO® Serious Play®, or the LEGO-M-Tool(1) as it was first called was invented in 1997, by Professors Johan Roos and Bart Victor at IMD Business School in Switzerland. It emerged as a result of considerable thinking and research that Roos & Victor had undertaken as way for ‘strategy making’ to be a more human centric, imaginative and creative endeavour.
The original application they invented to codify this process it was called ‘Real Time Strategy’, which invited participants to build a physical representation of their identity, landscape of agents and then to heed interactions between agents before then articulating a set of simple guiding principles to deal with potential change scenarios.
Though Complex Adaptive System (CAS) theory was part of the body of knowledge they used to develop the method, (along with many other theoretical concepts that I have summarised in a paper (2) called the Research and Theory underpinning LEGO® Serious Play®) they didn’t frame the method as a ‘System Thinking’ tool.
Real Time Strategy – Is it what Clients Want?
As professional facilitators, with now over 10 years of practice using LEGO® Serious Play®, and having written four books about the method we have come to believe that though the Real Time Strategy process as originally conceived can provide an illuminating experience for participants, it is rarely fit for purpose to meet modern organisations need for more commonly held business ideas such as vision, strategic and operational objectives, culture and values and behaviours.
Indeed those organisations teaching Real Time Strategy, in our opinion, are not utilising the systems thinking power or potential that LEGO® Serious Play® has with more modern, more robustly tested applications that are based on Systems Thinking.
Upgrading LEGO® Serious Play® to a Systems Thinking Method
In the last year we have made a considerable number of upgrades to LEGO® Serious Play®, critically by designing new build level three (system) applications that meet the kind of requests and objectives our clients ask of us as professional facilitators.
Applications including systems thinking for
- Vision and Strategy,
- A systemic approach to organisational culture,
- Understanding the impact of values and behaviours in an organisational system,
- A systemic approach to understanding the impact on employee engagement,
- Identifying leverage points of where to act, or intervene in a super complex system (such as the tax system) to disrupt the system towards greater customer centricity.
We note that we rarely see evidence on social media any evidence of real time strategy based workshops, which indicates to us that whilst it remains the backbone of some organisations approach to training the method, it is really something that clients in the real world are asking for, or will adopt.
In our own practice as professional facilitators we are seeing a significant increase in demand of our system thinking workshops, which indicates to us our developments of the build level three systems thinking applications I want to real world clients are actually needing and wanting.
A Substantially Updated Approach
We have made a significant set of updates to our build level three training, and we have plans this year to make these new applications and thinking more accessible to SERIOUSWORK graduates, and the wider community.
What to you think? Drop us a note though our community platform on Circle, or via LinkedIn if you have views on this article!
See our schedule of Advanced System Thinking classes.
References
- How It all Began. Roos and Victor. https://www.ijmar.org/v5n4/18-025.html
- Research and Theory underpinning LEGO® Serious Play®. https://seriouswork.circle.so/c/lego-serious-play-workshop-resources/research-and-theory-underpinning-lego-serious-play
