In September 2024, I spent a day with the Data Science Practice at Oxera, a leading economics consultancy. Twenty-four people. One shared challenge: to develop a robust vision of their practice’s contribution to the wider organisation.
The team used LEGO® Serious Play® to build individual models of what success would look like two years out. Not blue-sky fantasy, but pragmatic ‘future perfect’ thinking. The diversity of what emerged was striking: different roles, different pictures, different assumptions about what the practice was really for.
From there, we moved through the five-stage SeriousWork Systems Thinking Model©. The team identified over 40 agents affecting their work: AI developments, internal culture, client expectations, competing priorities, technical capability, regulatory environment. Each one made visible what had previously been felt but unnamed.
Then came Re-Vision©.
This is the technique I’ve developed to test whether a vision is genuinely robust. After building and examining their system model, the team asked: given everything we now understand about the forces shaping our work, what needs to change in our vision? Substantial changes emerged. Elements added, modified, repositioned. The refined version was richer, more coherent, more strategically grounded.
As the team put it: ‘We think more sophisticatedly now.’
Not ‘we got it wrong’. We think more sophisticatedly now. That shift, from aspiration to hard-won strategic clarity, is what systems thinking makes possible. And LEGO® Serious Play® is what makes systems thinking tangible enough to actually do in a room with 24 people in a single day.
The four human intelligences were all present in the work: individual meaning-making during the builds, relational intelligence across the tables, collective intelligence in mapping agents and connections, systems intelligence in identifying where to act. What the Oxera case also revealed is how much further that intelligence can develop when the three methodologies, LEGO® Serious Play®, Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline, and David Bohm’s Dialogue, are deliberately integrated rather than working alongside each other.
That integration is what my new book, The Systems Synergy is about.
If you lead teams navigating genuine complexity, or you’re a practitioner who wants to understand what systems thinking looks like when it’s working at full depth, the book takes you inside the framework and the cases that shaped it.