Imagination and LEGO® Serious Play®

People think with their hands. The idea sounds soft until you watch a leadership team that has argued in circles for an hour reach clarity in twenty minutes once they start to build. In the mid-1990s, Bart Victor and I built a method on this premise. LEGO® Serious Play® has teams construct models with bricks, then think and decide through what they have made. Thousands of organizations now use it for strategy, identity, and the problems that talk alone leaves unresolved.

Imagination is practical work, not a flourish. A team that builds its strategy sees the assumptions it would otherwise leave buried. It surfaces the quiet disagreement, the half-shared definition, the priority no one had said out loud. Hands reach what words skirt. That is the durable value of the method, and it is why hands-on strategy has run through my work for three decades, from the Imagination Lab to the boardroom.

The method reads differently in 2026. As organizations hand real work to AI, they keep meeting the same wall: saying clearly and deeply what the work is, what they value, what good looks like, who they serve. The technology is the easy part. The specification is the hard part. A method built to surface identity and guiding principles turns out to be a method for specifying the work we now ask machines to do.

Imagination, then, is how a team says what it actually wants before a prompt ever could. The materials here trace the method from its origin to its second life, including recent work with Bart Victor on what it offers an age of intelligent machines.

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