Imagination and LEGO® Serious Play®

Johan originated the idea, co-developed the prototypes, and co-invented the method with Bart Victor at IMD in the mid-1990s. Teams build models with bricks, then think and decide through what they have made. LEGO® Serious Play® is now used worldwide, by thousands of organizations, for strategy, identity and leadership development.

Imagination is practical work rather than a flourish. Building surfaces the assumptions nobody has stated, the disagreements nobody has voiced, and the priorities everyone assumed were shared. Hands reach what words skirt.

When you have made something, you care what happens to it, and you can point at it. A model on the table puts a thought outside its author's head, where other people can examine it. It slows a conversation at the moment when slowing down is valuable, and it gives quieter members of a team a way into a discussion that fluent talkers otherwise dominate. None of that requires anyone to believe in play. It requires only that they build.

That premise has run through three decades of work. Johan co-founded the Imagination Lab Foundation with Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, third-generation owner of the LEGO Group, and built it into an independent research institute on strategy and imagination. The method's origins, and the way strategic workshops build an organization's readiness for change, have since been documented in peer-reviewed research. Johan has chaired the international conference at the LEGOLAND resort in Denmark since 2016.

The method has acquired a new relevance. As organizations delegate work to AI, the difficulty is no longer producing an answer. It is saying what the work is for and what would count as good. Specification has become the scarce skill, and specification is exactly what a team cannot do while talking past one another. A team that has built its intent can describe it. Imagination lets people clarify what they actually mean before anyone writes a prompt.