Building a Better Business Using the Lego Serious Play Method

Chapter 2The LEGO® Brick

In the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method, participants answer a series of questions that delve a bit deeper with each step. Each participant builds his or her own three-dimensional LEGO model in response to these questions by using specially selected LEGO bricks. These 3-D models serve as the basis for group discussion, knowledge sharing, problem solving, and decision making. Without the LEGO brick, there is no LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method.

The quintessential LEGO brick is the 4 × 2 red stud brick shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1 LEGO 4 × 2 Stud Brick

Eight of these bricks can be combined in 915,103,765 ways.

Children and adults have used this brick and millions of others to build models of their world for about 60 years. They've used them to create pieces of the real world they saw and the one they imagined. Additionally, plenty of parents have accidently stepped on these bricks over the years and let out a sound of sheer pain (perhaps even a profanity or two).

The LEGO brick's history begins in 1949, when company founder Ole Kirk Christiansen and his son Godtfred Kirk Christiansen modified British inventor Hilary Fisher Pag's “Self-Locking Building Bricks.” Pag's bricks had two rows of four studs that children could use to build small houses and other creations. The Christiansens' modification was quite minor, and they named their new brick the “Automatic Binding ...