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

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.