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Lego Serious Play, an official product of the Lego Group, is a form of business consultancy fostering creative thinking, in which team members build metaphors of their organisational identities and experiences using Lego bricks. Participants work through imaginary scenarios using visual three-dimensional Lego constructions, imaginatively exploring possibilities in a 'serious' form of 'play'.

The Lego Serious Play website describes the method as "a passionate and practical process for building confidence, commitment and insight". The approach is based on research which suggests that hands-on, "minds-on" learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities. It is claimed that participants come away with skills to communicate more effectively, to engage their imaginations more readily, and to approach their work with increased confidence, commitment and insight.

Around 1996, two professors at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland – Johan Roos and Bart Victor – were looking for alternatives to the conventional outcomes of strategic planning. At the time, they were working with the chairman of the Lego Company, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, and discovered that they shared an understanding about the value of employees and the concept of evolving, adaptive strategy. Kristiansen needed a robust strategy process for his company, and invited Victor and Roos to develop this process. With the addition of Robert Rasmussen the creation of team that started LEGO SERIOUS PLAY was complete. Roos brought in the strategy background, Victor the organisational behaviour, and Robert Rasmussen the learning and development theories. Together they discovered that the solutions for Lego Company could be found within Lego itself - The LEGO bricks was the ideal tool for working through organisational problems. The result was the first application of Lego Serious Play, Real Time Strategy. In the following years, Lego Serious Play has been developed into a successful consulting method, used by a number of companies in a wide range of markets, including Daimler Chrysler, Roche Pharmaceutical, SABMiller, Tupperware, Nokia and Orange. It has also been effective in non-profit/NGO groups (e.g., SOS Children's Villages), as well as in government (e.g. Danish Patent and Trademark Office).

A booklet entitled The Science of Lego Serious Play sets out some of the basic research on which the approach is based. This research can be divided into three themes:

• Play - Play is defined as a limited, structured and voluntary activity that involves the imaginary. That is, it is an activity limited in time and space, structured by rules, conventions or agreements among the players, uncoerced by authority figures, and drawing on elements of fantasy and creative imagination.

• Constructionism - Based on the ideas of Seymour Papert, which built in turn on the Constructivist theories of Papert's colleague Jean Piaget. Papert argued that learning happens especially well when people are engaged in constructing a product, something external to themselves such as a sand castle, a machine, a computer program or a book.

• Imagination - Throughout history, the term "imagination" has been given many different cultural and linguistic connotations. While all share the basic idea that humans have a unique ability to "form images" or to "imagine" something, the variety of uses of the term "imagination" implies not one, but at least three meanings: to describe something, to create something, to challenge something. From the point of view of Lego Serious Play, it is the interplay between these three kinds of imagination that make up strategic imagination – the source of original strategies in companies.

The method is being studied further by British academic David Gauntlett, who is exploring the use of Lego Serious Play as a tool in sociology and social research. See the ArtLab website for more information.

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