Students from across the LDE Thesis Labs came together for our annual Pressure Cooker Day: an intensive session designed to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue and collective knowledge-building. As in previous editions, the day was facilitated using the LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) method. This structured methodology uses physical model-building and collaborative storytelling to help participants engage with complex, abstract challenges in a concrete and communicable way.
A method for complex, interdisciplinary challenges
The LEGO® Serious Play® method was developed in the 1990s by management researchers Johan Roos and Bart Victor in collaboration with the LEGO Group, and has since been adopted widely in organizational, educational, and research settings. Its theoretical foundations draw on constructivism and constructionism: the understanding that people think and learn most effectively when actively building something, rather than passively receiving or articulating ideas.
This makes LSP particularly well-suited to the kind of work LDE Thesis Labs students are engaged in. Each student is grappling with a societal challenge that is by nature systemic, multi-layered, and resistant to straightforward description. At the same time, they are asked to do so alongside peers from different disciplinary backgrounds, each bringing distinct analytical frameworks, methods, and vocabularies. In this context, the ability to communicate across disciplinary boundaries is especially central to the research.
LSP addresses both of these challenges simultaneously. By externalizing ideas into physical models, participants are able to make abstract thinking visible and tangible, and to do so in a medium that does not privilege any particular disciplinary language. The model on the table becomes a shared reference point that can be questioned, built upon, and connected to the work of others. Crucially, the method ensures equal participation from everyone: there are no passive observers, and every perspective is given space. In this way, it transforms individual expertise into a genuinely collective conversation.
From individual perspectives to collective understanding
The Pressure Cooker Day was structured around four building phases, designed to move participants progressively from individual reflection to shared sensemaking. Students began by individually building a model representing the current system as it relates to their own thesis topic. Each student then narrated their model to the group, explaining what the different elements represented and how the system as they understood it functioned. This phase surfaced the diversity of perspectives in the room: students working across different themes and methodological approaches each brought a distinct lens to the shared challenge of understanding complex systems.
In the second phase, students integrated their individual models into a single shared landscape with the rest of their lab: a collective representation of the system that incorporated all disciplinary perspectives simultaneously. This is where the power of the physical medium became particularly apparent. Placing models next to and in relation to one another made visible the connections, overlaps, and tensions between different research perspectives in a way that verbal exchange alone rarely achieves.
The second half of the session shifted orientation from diagnosis to aspiration. Students individually built models of an ideal future state, each grounded in the perspective of their own research. These individual visions were then brought together into a shared construction, accompanied by a discussion of the transitions and conditions that would be required to get there. Throughout, the process of building served as a form of thinking: making implicit assumptions explicit, surfacing connections between research topics, and enabling a quality of joint sensemaking that more conventional workshop formats can struggle to generate.
Joint storytelling as a research practice
A recurring observation in LSP-facilitated sessions is that the focus of collective attention shifts from the people in the room to the objects on the table. Because participants speak through their models rather than about themselves, discussions can engage more directly with ideas and systemic dynamics. Storytelling and metaphor thus become the primary vehicles for knowledge-sharing, and what emerges is a genuinely shared understanding built through dialogue.
This is precisely the kind of collective intelligence that the LDE Thesis Labs programme is designed to cultivate. The challenges students work on cannot be adequately addressed from within a single discipline. They require the capacity to hold complexity, to listen across boundaries, and to build on the thinking of others. The Pressure Cooker Day, and the LEGO® Serious Play® method that structures it, creates the conditions for that capacity to develop.
Students will carry the insights and connections made during yesterday's session into their individual thesis work. The shared models built during the day serve as a touchstone for the collaborative strand of the programme that continues alongside their research. We look forward to seeing where they take it from here.
