LEGO turns bricks into a strategy tool: executives build their answers in play

In the mid-1990s, IMD professors Johan Roos and Bart Victor kept watching strategy retreats put objective numbers first and managers' own intuitions in the background, or disregard them entirely. With LEGO Group CEO and owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, they set out to replace tired strategy workshops with a higher-energy method that drew out deeper insight.

Let managers answer strategy questions by building: each person constructs their view in LEGO bricks, surfacing intuitions and stories slide decks leave out.

The method made participants build three-dimensional LEGO models of business issues and challenges, then explain them to the group, so hands led thinking — what practitioners call hand knowledge. LEGO ran it with its top 300 leaders, then sponsored Executive Discovery to productize the method; the first application, Real-Time Strategy, became a consulting tool used by DaimlerChrysler, Roche, SABMiller, Tupperware, Nokia and Orange.

The method outgrew the toy company: thousands of professionals now call themselves LEGO Serious Play facilitators, hundreds of thousands of people in organizations have used it, and training and facilitation grew into a multi-million-dollar business including LEGO's own dedicated sets.

In 1996, professors Johan Roos and Bart Victor of IMD in Switzerland were looking for a replacement for conventional strategy workshops. They kept seeing the same flaw: hard numbers and objective analysis dominated the room while managers' own subjective views stayed in the background — exactly the intuitions a strategy conversation needs. LEGO Group CEO and owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen joined them in exploring alternative ways for leadership teams to think about the business.

Their answer became LEGO Serious Play: participants answer a strategy question by building a three-dimensional model with LEGO bricks — a company, a market landscape, a challenge — and then tell the story of what they built. Building first, explaining second gives intuition a form words cannot, a principle practitioners later called hand knowledge. The founders drew on research on identity, complex adaptive systems, collective mind and imagination to shape the questions.

LEGO tested the method on its own top 300 leaders, then backed a dedicated company, Executive Discovery, to develop and sell it. Bart Victor led the productization with LEGO's Robert Rasmussen and Vanderbilt professor Dave Owens; the first commercial application was named Real-Time Strategy. As a consulting method it spread to companies including DaimlerChrysler, Roche, SABMiller, Tupperware, Nokia and Orange.

By 2018 the originators counted thousands of self-described LEGO Serious Play facilitators and hundreds of thousands of people in organizations who had benefited, and the method had become a multi-million-dollar business. In 2010 LEGO released the method as open source, letting a worldwide community of practitioners carry it forward.

Building in three dimensions forces every participant to commit to a concrete position instead of nodding at someone else's slide.

The story told around each model surfaces subjective views, identity and emotion that analytical frameworks quietly exclude.

A toy removes the status cues of a boardroom: senior and junior voices build the same kind of object and get the same hearing.

LEGO could test the method on itself at scale before selling it, so the product was a practiced process rather than a theory.

A meeting tool wins when it makes the invisible sayable: building and narrating your own model draws out intuition, identity and disagreement that verbal brainstorming politely skips.

After two decades of practice, LEGO Serious Play has its own research lineage — the Imagination Lab, founded by Roos and Kristiansen, produced 74 research papers between 2001 and 2006 — and a worldwide community. LEGO made the method open source in 2010, so no license gates who may facilitate it; the company instead sells dedicated sets and training. The originators' 2018 account records thousands of facilitators and hundreds of thousands of participants, with the method used in strategy, team development, coaching and education.