© Patrizia Bertini
In the past few years, the number of articles published around Lego Serious Play is hugely increased.
The initial theories developed in the mid ’90s, 20 years ago, by Johan Ross and Bart Viktor and put into its current shape by Robert Rasmussen, are today converging and mingling with new trends and emerging needs.
What was supposed to simply be a language, communication tool, problem solving methodology, based on the belief that everyone can contribute to the discussion, the decisions, and the outcome, it has become a tool for exploring, both a crinkly and torn treasure map to be completed with the imagination of the facilitator and the participants, and a hammer to deconstruct and construct new opportunities.
My passion for the method comes exactly from its plasticity and its endless potential to evolve, to include different approaches, in its ability to provide sound and effective answers to the more diverse questions.
Over the time, a number of cognitive disciplines, such as embodied cognition, have proved the foundation of the method and reinforced its status in the scientific community, increasing the interests towards an approach that as playful as it might seem, it’s a complex approach.
Embodied cognition, metaphors, storytelling, imagination, creativity, collective intelligence, co-creation, constructionism, concrete thinking, design thinking, systems thinking, management, strategic thinking, social dynamics, organisational theory, group psychology… all these disciplines converge into a method that sounds anything but complex, scaring, or intimidating as the discplines in which the method itself is grounded.
The method is light, is the materialisation of new ways of running conversations, it’s a new approach to innovation – an innovative way to generate innovative idea, to engage and empower participants. And through the empowerment and the participation, the method disappears, it becomes invisible, and what’s left is the experience, the flow that all participants experience and share while a new collective conscience emerges and individual ideas become one, taking the individual from its isolation into a new dimension where individualities disappear and what is left is a new, powerful, and creative collective mind that talks through stories, metaphors, imagination. A collective mind that sees beyond bricks and shapes to reinvent the reality that is locked behind the doors of the room and that do to so, unlocks the power of creative thinking and imagination.
LegoViews 
Leave a Reply