Lego Serious Play

Dr. Roos is now Chief Academic Officer at Hult International Business School[3] and Dr. Bart Victor is Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership at Vanderbilt University.

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.

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?"

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.

[6] Initially in 2001, a subsidiary of the Lego Group called Executive Discovery submitted the application to patent the methodology and the material product line.

[18] Since 2007, Louise Møller Haase (née Louise Møller Nielsen) from Aalborg University published her dissertation, subsequent books and articles on personal- and shared experiential concepts and product development and prototyping approaches focusing on Legi Serious Play research projects at TC Electronic, the Red Cross, Daimler AG, and Copenhagen Living Lab.

Subsequently, the International Journal of Management and Applied Research has published a special issue on Lego Serious Play applications.

[21] 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.

Journalist Dan Lyons has suggested that LEGO Serious Play is merely toy therapy, which is useless, on par with New Age psychology.

“It feels like you’ve joined a cult,” says a thirtysomething software programmer whose department spent a day doing a LEGO workshop.