Lego Serious Play in action (Photographs: David Gauntlett)

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 Group is a family-owned company, based in Billund, Denmark and best known for the manufacture of LEGO-brand toys. ... Management consulting is the process of helping companies to improve or transform themselves. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... In language, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope where a comparison is made between two seemingly unrelated subjects. ... LEGO Group logo Lego sets feature a large variety of themed people (called “minifigures”), including the Space, Castle, and City figures above. ...

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. Communication is the process of exchanging information usually via a common system of symbols. ... Imagination is, in general, the power or process of producing mental images and ideas. ... In political science confidence refers to a governments support in the legislature. ...

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Foundational research

The booklet and website entitled The Science of Lego Serious Play sets out some of the basic research on which the approach is based. This 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 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.

Dr. Seymour Papert (born March 1, 1928 Pretoria, South Africa) is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. ... Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist, famous for working out a sequence of stages of cognitive development, and notable for his idea that children (and indeed adults) are continually generating theories about the external world (which are kept or dismissed depending on whether...

Further research

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. David Gauntlett (b. ... Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... Social research refers to research conducted by social scientists (primarily within sociology, but also within other disciplines such as social policy, human geography, social anthropology and education). ...