LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a facilitation methodology developed at The Lego Group. Since 2010 it is available under an open source community-based model. Its goal is improving creative thinking and communication. People build with Lego bricks 3-dimensional models of their ideas and tell stories about their models. Hence the name "serious play". Origins Johan Roos and Bart Victor created the "Serious Play" concept and process in the mid-1990s as a way to enable managers to describe, create and challenge their views on their business. Dr. Roos is now Chief Academic Officer at Hult International Business School and Dr. Bart Victor is Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership at Vanderbilt University. They created Serious Play while they were both professors at IMD in Switzerland. The conceptual foundation of Serious Play combines ideas from constructivism (Piaget 1951), constructionism (Harel and Papert 1991), complex adaptive system theory (Holland 1995) and autopoietic corporate epistemology (von Krogh and Roos 1994; 1995) applied to the context of management and organizations. It also relies on action research. The empirical foundation of the concept of Serious Play stems from Roos and Victor's experiments with leadership teams in Tetra Pak, Hydro Aluminium and TFL and during an IMD program for the top 300 leaders in the Lego Group. They presented their early ideas in a short article published by IMD in 1998 entitled "In Search for Original Strategies: How About Some Serious Play?" and in the 1999 article "Towards a New Model of Strategy-making as Serious Play" published by European Management Journal. In 2004 the journal Long-Range Planning published their article "Playing Seriously with Strategy" (with Matt Statler), which serves as the foundation for LEGO Serious Play concept. From experiment to open source product The development of the LEGO Serious Play product line in LEGO Company involved several teams and more than 20 iterations. Work at LEGO Company began with the owner Mr. Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen. Initially he was hesitant but presented with the early findings he became convinced that Roos and Victor's ideas had business value and decided to encourage and sponsor a commercial application under the auspices of the LEGO Company. As the method developed in real-time sessions with various companies, results were robust and reproducible. In 1999, LEGO Group submitted the application to protect Serious Play trademark. While the LEGO Serious Play methodology is currently open source, its trademark is still owned and protected by LEGO