owards 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 Group. The trademark applies to LEGO product line with dedicated Lego Serious Play kits.
Initially in 2001, the subsidiary of LEGO Company called Executive Discovery submitted the application to patent the methodology and the material product line. Later in 2006 Executive Discovery re-submitted the patent application. However, U.S. patent office never issued the official patent because by 2008 the application was abandoned by the applicant. Therefore, LEGO Serious Play methodology was never patent protected.
In 2010, the LEGO group made the methodology open source, releasing the LEGO Serious Play methodology under a Creative Commons community-based licence. The main LEGO Serious Play communities are: Association of Master Trainers, LSPConnect, Serious Play Pro, Global Federation of LSP Master Trainers.
In 2019, Playmobil released their competing material product Playmobil Pro that uses a similar set of plastic figurines and toys for story telling.
The research effort.
In 2000, the systematic research effort on LEGO Serious Play methodology focusing on the idea of playing seriously in organizations first started at the Swiss-based think tank Imagination Lab Foundation. The Imagination Lab's main task was researching the use of the method for strategy development in organizations. Their team of researchers wrote 3 books, 74 working and research papers, and 12 short articles. Imagination Lab ceased to exist in 2004 and created European Academy of Management iLab Foundation Award.
Since 2004, David Gauntlett published a number of books on combination of LEGO Serious Play in media studies. This approach makes use of metaphor and invites participants to build metaphorical models of their identities. The process of making something, and then reflecting upon it, is claimed to give a more nuanced insight into participants' feelings or experiences.
Since 2007, Louise Møller Haase (née Louise Møller Nielsen) from Aalborg University published her dissertation, subsequent books and articles on personal- and shared experiential concepts and product development and prototyping approaches focusing on LEGO Serious Play research projects at TC Electronic, The Red Cross, Daimler AG, and Copenhagen Living Lab.
In 2009, the LEGO Serious Play method was further developed for use in schools. Teachers are trained to use it with students from six years old. The method has also been adapted for use in higher education as a tool for teaching and learning, research, and ideation (Nolan 2009). Subsequently, IJMAR has published a special issue on Lego Serious Play applications.
By 2011, Loizos Heracleous from Warwick Business School and Claus D. Jacobs from the University of St. Gallen finished their 2-year research project on embodied metaphors, which elaborated on LEGO Serious Play action research at BASF and UNICEF.
The webatelier.net Lab of the Università della Svizzera italiana (University of Lugano, Switzerland) has further developed the methodology, releasing in 2011 URL (User Requirements with LEGO) under the Creative Commons licence.
Since 2014, Alison James from the University of Winchester and her research team have researched the use of LEGO Serious Play in various tertiary educational institutions.
Research on LEGO Serious Play methodology continues at various academic institutions. See the expanding list of publications below.
Critique.
LEGO Serious Play facilitators have vested business interests in promoting the use of the method. Therefore, most available case studies focus on success stories. No comparative studies using control groups have measured the effect and usefulness of LEGO Serious Play methodology in comparison with conventional workshops.
Some authors are critical of LEGO Serious Play methodology. Journalist Dan Lyons has suggested that LEGO Serious Play is merely toy therapy, which is useless, on par with New Age psychology. He suggests: "Lego workshops are just one example of the nonsense that is creeping into the workplace.... The problem isn’t just that these exercises are pointless and silly. For a lot of people, this stuff can be really stressful. For older workers — say, people over 50 — these workshops compound the fear they already have about being pushed out of their jobs. But younger workers hate them too. “It feels like you’ve joined a cult,” says a thirtysomething software programmer whose department spent a day doing a LEGO workshop. “The purpose seems to be to indoctrinate people to follow orders.”"With the continuous development of market mechanisms, promote rural market economy gradually developed, the social security system needs more urgent. At present, China's social security system in rural areas is in serious absence, the constraints of China's rural economic development, rural social security system is the most important rural social endowment insurance, and solve the rural social endowment insurance is the key to raising funds. This paper analyzes China's current rural social endowment insurance fund - raising and financing of rural social endowment insurance problems. Mode of financing of rural endowment insurance problems by funding source, funding levels, and the management of funds three aspects to analyze. From then on restricting China's rural social endowment insurance funding macroeconomic factors were analyzed, the first analysis of the overall economic situation, although China's rapid economic development, economic output has been greatly improved, but China's per capita amount is small, most of the not rich people, especially rural, slow development, the majority of the peasants no spare money to old age. And the rural economy, there is still the problem of unbalanced regional development. Meanwhile in the social structure of rural dual structure to implement our long-term development strategy, making China's social pension insurance system formation in binary divide and conquer situation, has been the country's strategic focus has been on urban development, resulting in long-term rural social endowment insurance Absence. The rapid development of the city also attracted a large number of farmers working in cities, large population movements but also for the rural social endowment insurance funding has brought new problems, migrant farmers, mostly young adults, thus showing the age structure of the rural population In old age, youth, women and children-oriented phenomenon, it is a serious constraint of rural social endowment insurance fund financing. And with the country's aging population, increasing pressure on pension, this phenomenon is more serious in rural areas, is not wealthy rural tremendous challenge. It also restricts the traditional concept of rural social endowment insurance fund raising, long-established family pension mode, easy to make people to foster a strong sense of family, and the community care model is considered emphasis on national and social responsibility of the individual, of course, require individuals to society, the country's obligations. This article also describes some of the foreign financing of rural social endowment insurance model, its development and national conditions, divided into developed and developing countries, a detailed description of national rural social endowment insurance funding model as well as its successes and shortcomings, and targeted to make a few can learn from experience. Finally, the financing of rural social endowment insurance modes optimized to make a few practical suggestions.This is a "New Middle East" -- but not in the way that we had hoped. When you leave the field empty of diplomacy now, with so many unstable characters roaming around -- like extremist Israeli settlers given to occasionally daubing "Muhammad is a Pig" on Muslim buildings in the West Bank and extremist Palestinians from groups like Islamic Jihad given to shooting Israeli civilians or lobbing mortars from Gaza onto Israeli towns -- you are really asking for trouble because many of the old firewalls are gone.
I agree with the general thought -- as someone who has been spit on by settlers in Hebron, I would agree that these are not refined people --, though not the comparison. Blasphemous graffiti is repulsive, but it is not the same thing as, you know, killing people. On the other hand, we have to recognize a latent threat posed by extremist settlers: A few are capable of murder, and one of my main worries -- which I wrote about here -- is that someone one day is going to do something apocalyptically bad, in order to subvert the peace process. Not a worry now, because there is no peace process. In any case, Islamic Jihad (and its friends in Hamas, and in Tehran) is in a different moral category than the settlers.
UPDATE: Loyal Goldblog reader Ron Gordon writes: "This already happened: Yigal Amir assassinated PM Rabin in 1995. And I do believe there was a peace process on back then, which has since been subverted." True. What I'm worried about is something that would be even more destructive than the Rabin assassination (see link to my Bloomberg View column on this subject, above). But the point remains: The settlement movement itself is not a terrorist movement, as