The Problem with LEGO Serious Play
I have a thing against LEGO SERIOUS PLAY.
For those not in the know, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP; their capitlisation, not mine) was originally developed by Johan Roos and Bart Victor at IMD Lausanne as a system "to facilitate creativity and imagination for innovative dynamic business strategies" (McCusker, 2014, p.28). Promoted by Robert Rasmussen, Director of R&D at LEGO, it expanded from an experimental process into a corporate facilitation phenomenon (search LinkedIn for LEGO SERIOUS PLAY and you'll see what I mean). It draws on the principles of constructivism, constructionism, flow, hand-mind connection, and metaphor (Rasmussen Consulting, 2012) to solve business problems — and has more recently found its way into education too (McCusker, 2014).
LSP builds on Michael Schrage's concept of serious play (2000), which argues that rough, playful prototyping drives innovation better than aiming for a polished product. Serious play is, in short, play as a tool for workplace innovation — similar, incidentally, to Kent and Steward's (1992) earlier concept of plork, which observed that through playing, artists are in fact working. LSP takes this thinking and packages it as a branded, trademarked facilitation technique for the corporate world.
Here's the thing — I actually buy a lot of the theory behind LSP. I get that toys and playful activity can encourage creativity and divergent thinking; I understand how metaphor lets us surface complex issues; I'm sold on the constructivist idea that we build knowledge from experience (Piaget, 2001; McCusker, 2014). Some of this thinking has directly shaped my own research. So what is it about LSP that — to quote a random Scottish man who started talking to my mum in a park — "boils my piss"?
I have several issues with it: LEGO's grotesque environmental impact; the claiming of it's grounding philosophy as science (Rasmussen Consulating, 2012). But I think what gets me most is the implication that play needs to be called SERIOUSTM in order to be taken seriously. By adopting Schrage's serious play framing, LSP tacitly implies that other play is frivolous — but this way of doing things is worth your company's investment. In doing so, it perpetuates the idea that play is broadly surplus to requirements, unless deemed serious. The popularity of LSP strikes me as a sign that we have become afraid of the words play and playfulness. An example: a colleague was recently working on a project in Cornwall, supporting small businesses via creativity and outdoor activities. The project struggled to gain traction until the language shifted away from language similar to play, but toward corporate buzzwords. The content hadn't changed; only the framing.
I'm not having a dig at LSP facilitators who are just doing their jobs, or even really at LEGO itself, who have done what all companies do when they hit on something successful, and capitalised on it. I would too! I want to be really open about a potential hypocrisy here; if someone was going to pay me to run workshops where I could talk about the importance of practicing playfulness (plork), I would be delighted. In fact, I'm working on developing a workshop series right now (please do get in touch if you're interested). I'm very pro increasing our ability to be playful, and I know the benefits that can have at work. But I think I'm more interested in laying foundations for play and playfulness that take into account their affective, social, personal, interpersonal, caring and political implications. I'm more interested in supporting people to be playful than I am supporting businesses to be profitable.
What I'm against is a system that uses play to prioritise and extract business solutions without supporting a wider practice of playfulness throughout life; one that perpetuates messages about play and work being separate, and where businesses are positioned as gatekeepers of play, packaging it up and selling it back to us, complete with trademark and facilitation manual. And I'm really against the fact that whenever I talk to people about running playful workshops, almost literally across the board people start talking about using LEGO. LEGO has monopolised play, particularly play as a form of interpersonal communication, in a way that makes it almost inescapable now; the infinite possibilities of play - or, actually, perhaps our imaginations -suddenly seeming a little less infinite.
Final thought. I was recently sent a link to a TED–LEGO Foundation collaboration inviting me to "reimagine play" and join a movement transforming "how we think about play." To an extent, I agree. But it's not play that needs reimagining. It's our societal, economic, and systemic relationship to it. Maybe we don't need to reimagine play — maybe we need to reimagine a system that actually values playfulness for what it is.
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References
CONSULTING, R. 2012. The Science behind the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method. Available: http://seriousplayground.squarespace.com/storage/The%20Science%
20Behind%20the%20LEGO%20SERIOUS%20PLAY%20Method.pdf.
GROUP, T. L. 2026. *play@TED *[Online]. Available: https://play.ted.com/ [Accessed 12-03-2026 2026].
KENT, C. & STEWARD, J. 2008. *Learning by heart, *New York, Bantam Books.
MCCUSKER, S. 2014. Lego, Seriously: Thinking through building. International Journal of Knowledge, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2**,** 27-37.
PIAGET, J. 2001. *Play, dreams, and imitation in childhood, *London, UK, Routeledge.
SCHRAGE, M. 2000. *Serious play : how the world's best companies simulate to innovate, *Boston, mass., Harvard Business School Press.
VYGOTSKY, L. 1978. The role of play in development. In: COLE, M., JOHN-STEINER, V., SCRIBNER, S. & SOUBERMAN, E. (eds.) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.