History of LSP

Short Transcript

The LEGO Serious Play method was first conceived by professors Johan Roos and Bart Victor in mid-1990’ies at the IMD Business School in Switzerland. They experimented with LEGO bricks to make strategy workshops more dynamic.

They managed to promote this idea to Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, who was at the time the CEO of LEGO group. In mid-1990ies LEGO as business was in trouble. LEGO focused too much boys and construction. There were many competitors who came up with cheaper and more accessible toys. Bricks were not any more fun enough for kids.

What LEGO needed was a complete overhaul of their strategy. One part of this strategy shift was actually achieved using LEGO Serious Play in house to start thinking about their strategy differently. When the leaders of LEGO Company saw that the LSP method helped them in their strategy, they decided to develop this method further also allow companies elsewhere to use the same technique.

At the same time, professors Roos and Victor created in Switzerland a think tank that they called “Imagination Lab”, which in turn kicked off research into innovative tools for making strategies.

Fast forward 10 years, the result of those concurrent research and development endeavours was both in LEGO and at Imagination Lab:

  • More than 70 research articles and working papers, really solid research
  • 4 books that were addressing both practicing managers as well as management scholars and
  • Well-defined methodology that has a wide range of applications.

In 2009 LEGO decided to make LEGO Serious Play open source and since then the use of the method has skyrocketed. I am not going to cover the history nor research surrounding the LEGO Serious Play methodology in more detail at this stage. If you are interested I recommend you to check out some the links at the bottom of this video and stay tuned to the next video.

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