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The aim of this viewpoint article is to offer a reflection on the author's personal understanding and experience of using the Lego® Serious Play® methodology to help teams address core strategy and creativity challenges within their organizations.

This is a viewpoint paper.

By using metaphors, imagination and story‐making to facilitate a better understanding of core strategic challenges and defining moments in the life of organizations and teams, LSP also satiates the current organizational thirst for stories and meaning.

The rewards of serious play are tangible and plentiful.

This article seeks to provide a theoretical framework for facilitating talent management decisions in the music industry.

Strategic decision‐making theory and the resource‐based view of strategy are used to identify the talent‐selection process as a core capability in the entertainment industry. Their original combination leads to the introduction of a framework aimed at facilitating the selection and development of core competencies and capabilities in music companies, and thus at increasing their likelihood of creating and sustaining a competitive advantage based on their artist selection processes.

The integration of both theories in the music sector leads to the need for the organisation's ability to “improvise” and develop “skilled decision makers”. The industry is identified as an atypical high velocity environment, in which incremental approaches may not be sufficient to adopt by managers, because artist investments usually represent long‐term commitments for the firm. Three different existing types of talent valuation techniques are identified, which can be facilitated by complementing resource‐based and decision‐making perspectives.

The paper does not discuss differences in the types of music organisations such as publishers, record companies, labels etc. Moreover, it focuses on popular music in general only. Empirical testing of the proposed findings is needed to further validate the capability framework.

The framework provides a managerial guideline for implementing decision models in the music industry and increasing the success rate of artist selection.

The paper uses the specific context of the music industry to introduce a methodology of how organisational decision processes may eventually lead to a sustainable competitive advantage. It provides a starting point for linking resource‐based and strategic decision‐making theory, since it indicates how decision models should be developed from a core capability perspective.

The aim of this paper is to respond to the acknowledged dearth of academic discourse on assessment strategies for entrepreneurship education. Using established approaches from design education as its fulcrum, it proposes a generic framework for assessment of “creativity” in an entrepreneurial context.

This primarily constructivist investigation is considered in the context of recent UK discussions, empirical evidence, literature reviews and government policies. It includes the UK's Quality Assurance Agency – Benchmark Statement for the UK's creative industries and maps the approaches onto entrepreneurship education.

As assessment of ideas generation, innovation and opportunity recognition are, “Central to developing and learning entrepreneurial behaviours”. There are clear parallels between the pedagogic approaches from “design” disciplines and the learning outcomes advocated in generic curriculum development “for” entrepreneurship.

Business school approaches and their associated challenges dominate the entrepreneurship research agenda. Interdisciplinary research, in particular collaborations between the Business and the Creative disciplines, offers opportunities for constructive alignment.

With no intention of “reinventing the wheel”, more adapting and refining it, the paper's primary intention is to offer a springboard of thought from which creative capacity in enterprise education might be enhanced and assessed.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate surrounding issues of assessment and offers insights into established approaches that have evolved beyond the traditional enterprise education environment, one where credit‐bearing curricula have managed and assessed the creative process effectively.

Why is it that highly trained and seasoned executives fail? On the surface, this doesn’t make sense because they are very successful; yet research in the organization sciences provides no shortage of evidence to prove just that. From the classic Mann Gulch fire disaster of Weick’s famous collapse of sensemaking study, to studies of myopia of learning, escalation of commitment, threat-rigidity, dominant logic, the architecture of simplicity, the Icarus Paradox, to core competencies turning into core rigidities, and navigating new competitive markets using “old” cognitive maps, and many more such examples point to a ubiquitous phenomenon where highly trained and experienced professionals find themselves “stuck” in the heat of battle, unable to move and progress. On the one hand, for some, there is a desperate need for change, but are unable to do so, due to their trained incapacities. On the other hand, some simply cannot see the need for change, and continue with their “business as usual” mentality. For both, their visions of the world shrink, they have a tendency to cling onto their past habitual practices and oversimplify the complexity of the situation. In moments like these: DROP YOUR TOOLS and UNLEARN! This book chapter introduces a framework (grounded in clinical psychology) that has had consistent success in helping seasoned executives and key decision-makers open up the alternatives whenever they find themselves stuck with complexity.

In times of organizational thirst for employee engagement and meaning through designing corporate stories, the aim of this article is to explore and identify key sources (engines) of engagement during LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) corporate learning pre-pandemic events of various types and size in Poland.

This is a conceptual paper. The research was conducted using participant observation from the perspective of a certified facilitator of the method. This position ensures a prime access to the organizational events. Eight training sessions (four LSP and four non-LSP workshops) have been analysed using thematic analysis. The structure of thematic codes has been conceptualized and reflected as the EPIC framework.

The findings include (1) the importance of the experience of emerging realities as a key generator of engagement, (2) the significance of social collaboration and peer-to-peer interactions (experience of collective intelligence), (3) the observable rise in engagement and willingness to contribute when real business situations, especially labelled as “strategic issues” are discussed and (4) the role of image-capturing (“snapshot experience”) in creation of an engaging learning experience.

The limitations refer to the potential conflict of interests as the researcher is also the facilitator of the workshop. To ensure the neutral point of view of the researcher, the sessions have been recorded to enable transparency of the observation and non-biased logic of key findings. The “learning experience” research is also culture- and context-sensitive, thus it may be problematic to replicate the research procedure in different countries, however, the EPIC model can be treated as a universal framework to explore and identify the engines of engagement.

The concept of this paper is designed from the practical point of view. The findings are adaptable to the corporate practices aimed at empowering employees and are compatible with management models such as agile, human enablement and human-centred design in organizations.

Serious play methods of learning and experiencing are said to be of the highest importance when finding new ways of organizational learning in the pandemic situation and work from home as a standard learning environment.

The contribution of this paper is visible in the conceptualization of the moments that shape an engaging experience. This is also the first academic paper presenting the perspective of a certified facilitator of LSP from Central and Eastern Europe region.