Legos and Bones

Certified Lego consultants now offer “Serious Play” to corporations interested in making their tired bones come to life.

Serious play.

That’s what a number of executives are doing these days, and it has nothing to do with their golf games. Instead, they’re playing at work, in an attempt to pull their corporations out of slumps and scandals. They’re being assisted in this exercise by Lego, the Danish maker of colored plastic building blocks.

What Lego consultants provide, for a fee of $7,000, is a two-day workshop in which plastic bricks are used to build “metaphorical abstractions” of various business challenges.

Yes, metaphorical abstractions. These are Lego creations that capture a problem or a situation, and illustrate it in a clear and creative way.

For example, if your boss is crushing the spirits of everyone in your company, maybe your Lego creation would be an enormous boss figure smashing a collection of tiny people.

That’s a picture of what is happening in your workplace.

It’s a simple picture, yes — but since the workshop costs $7,000, it has to be...