The History of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY

By Robert Rasmussen
The first version of the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY product was launched in late 2001. The idea however
started several years earlier.

In 1995 the owner and CEO of the LEGO Company, Kjeld Kristiansen was dissatisfied with the results of company’s strategy-making sesseions. While his business was about imagination, the results from these sessions were decidedly unimaginative. At the same time, two professors from IMD business school in Lausanne, Johan Roos and Bart Victor were also noting the poor results from traditional strategy development techniques.

When these parties connected in 1996, they noted their similar dilemmas as well as shared values around people as the key to company success and strategy as something you live as opposed to something stored away in a document. Kjeld agreed to fund research on this problem by creating a separate LEGO subsidiary called Executive Discovery. Over time, the business school professors hit upon the use of building with LEGO bricks as means for tapping into unconscious knowledge that each individual possesses. However, they still had not figured out how to bring their academic interests into the mix of better strategy-making concepts like identity, metaphor, landscape, and simple guiding principles.

In my role as director of product development for the educational market at LEGO, I was brought into the project in 1999 to more systematically investigate the feasibility of using LEGO bricks for strategy development. Once we realized that these strategy concepts could be more than just theory, our work moved into developing the process itself and to make the results reproducible and the methodology robust.

In working with my own team at the LEGO Company and with test bed companies outside of the LEGO Company over the course of several years, there were more than twenty iterations of the formal process. As well as being a testament to the rigor with which LSP has been tested, we’ve learned a lot. We also discovered a pattern of working with the bricks that produced consistent results across different groups - an etiquette of sorts on how to facilitate LSP successfully.

One of the themes that emerged from our work with test bed companies was helping groups see the entire human system they are a part of in order to be better prepared for the future. By having a complete picture of the current system, including team roles, relationships, and culture, and by testing the system with specific scenarios, team members gain more confidence, insight, and commitment in dealing with future events.

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