Un-Boring Strategy: 3 Evidence-Backed Ways to Make Strategy Less Like a Trip to the Dentist

Are your team disengaged and slightly passive-aggressive? Sorry to say, it might be you. Be honest, are you actually boring yourself right now?

Welcome to our Un-Boring Leadership Series, where we explore what leaders are doing to make life more tolerable for themselves and their teams. The truth is that serious work doesn’t have to be serious. In fact, a dash of playful humour has been shown to significantly improve workplace morale, psychological safety, and creativity. Humour operates not just as entertainment, but as a cognitive and social mechanism, enhancing creativity, enabling divergent thinking, and strengthening team cohesion.

Given that it’s strategy season in many places, we thought we’d start there. In the first of our Un-Boring Leadership Series, we explore 3 evidence-backed ways to make strategy development seem less like a trip to the dentist.

 1. Build Strategy, Instead of PowerPointing It

One of the most powerful ways to unlock strategic insight is to get people to build it literally.

LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) enables adults to express complex, abstract concepts (like strategy) in ways that engage both cognition and emotion. It draws on constructionist learning theory [8] and aligns with research on embodied cognition, showing that physical interaction deepens thinking and creativity [9,24].

More recent work highlights that visualisation, metaphor, and hands-on modelling improve shared understanding and collaboration in complex environments [14,22].

Crucially, this approach introduces an element of structured playfulness, which research shows increases engagement, reduces inhibition, and enhances creative output by lowering social and cognitive barriers [3,5].

Why it works:

•  – Reduces hierarchical bias and increases equal participation
•  – Surfaces tacit knowledge—critical in strategy work [18]
•  – Enhances psychological safety and voice behaviour [13]
•  – Activates playful, exploratory thinking—linked to creativity and learning [3,6]
•  – Improves collective sensemaking in uncertain environments

In strategy contexts, LSP allows teams to:

•  – Model current organisational reality
•  – Explore future strategic possibilities
•  – Identify risks, constraints, and enablers
•  – Co-create a shared strategic narrative

The result is not just a strategy – it’s a shared mental model, strongly linked to team performance and execution effectiveness [16].

2. Institutionalise Constructive Dissent

High-performing teams don’t aim for consensus, they design for productive disagreement.

Research shows that teams engaging in task conflict outperform those that avoid disagreement provided psychological safety is present [11,13].

Here’s where playfulness matters more than most leaders realise:

👉 Humour and lightness reduce the interpersonal risk of speaking up, making dissent feel safer and more socially acceptable [1,5,7]. In high-reliability environments like aviation, healthcare, military operations, structured dissent is deliberately embedded to prevent catastrophic failure [23].

To involve your team meaningfully in strategy, create mechanisms for challenge:

•  – Structured red teaming and assumption testing
•  – “Disagree and commit” practices
•  – Pre-mortems to identify failure pathways [15]
•  – Formalised challenge roles in decision forums

Research also shows that leader inclusiveness predicts speaking-up behaviour, improving decision quality [17].

What humour adds:

•  – Reduces defensiveness during debate
•  – Signals permission to challenge authority
•  – Maintains relational trust during disagreement

When leaders combine challenge with lightness, strategy conversations become more robust and far more engaging.

3. Turn Strategy Into a Living Experiment

Most strategies are treated as fixed plans. The best ones behave like evolving experiments. Contemporary research emphasises adaptive strategy and continuous learning over static planning [10,20]. In uncertain environments, advantage comes not from predicting the future but from learning faster than competitors. Playfulness plays a surprisingly critical role here:

👉 A playful mindset encourages curiosity, experimentation, and reframing failure as learning, all of which are essential for innovation [4,6].

Instead of asking your team to “align to the strategy,” invite them to test it. Shift from:

•  – Certainty → Curiosity
•  – Planning → Experimentation
•  – Control → Learning

Practical ways:

•  – Frame strategy as a set of hypotheses
•  – Run distributed, small-scale experiments
•  – Build rapid feedback loops
•  – Share learning organisation-wide

Research shows that teams given autonomy to experiment demonstrate higher engagement, faster learning, and stronger performance outcomes [12,21]. This transforms strategy from a document into a living system of inquiry and gives teams a role not just in execution, but in discovery.

🚀 The Leadership Shift

Involving your team in strategy is not about inclusion for its own sake. It reflects a deeper shift:

Strategy is no longer something leaders create and deploy – it is something organisations continuously co-create. Research on collective intelligence shows that diverse, participative groups outperform individuals in complex problem-solving [19, 26]. And, critically:

👉 The conditions that enable this including psychological safety, cognitive flexibility, and engagement, are all strengthened by appropriate humour and playfulness [1–4,6]

Get certified in Lego® Serious Play® or the NASA 4-Dimensional Leadership Program?

Our course details can be accessed here. If you have any questions reach out to us by email at info@crazymightwork.com

References

[1] Cooper, C. D., Kong, D. T., & Crossley, C. D. (2018). Leader humor as an interpersonal resource: Integrating three theoretical perspectives. Academy of Management Journal, 61(2), 769–796.

[2] Kong, D. T., & Zhao, H. (2024). Leader humor and employee creativity: The mediating role of psychological safety and creative self-efficacy. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication.

[3] Martin, R. A. (2007). The psychology of humor: An integrative approach. Elsevier Academic Press.

[4] Amabile, T. M., Barsade, S. G., Mueller, J. S., & Staw, B. M. (2005). Affect and creativity at work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(3), 367–403.

[5] Romero, E. J., & Cruthirds, K. W. (2006). The use of humor in the workplace. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(2), 58–69.

[6] Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226.

[7] Pundt, A., & Herrmann, F. (2015). Affiliative and aggressive humour in leadership and their relationship to employee well-being and creativity. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 88(1), 108–125.

[8] Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic Books.

[9] Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology.

[10] Birkinshaw, J. (2020). Fast/Forward: Make your company fit for the future.

[11] De Dreu, C. K. W., & Weingart, L. R. (2023). Task conflict and team performance.

[12] Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization.

[13] Edmondson, A. C., & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: The history and future.

[14] Gauntlett, D. (2018). Making is connecting (2nd ed.).

[15] Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review.

[16] Mathieu, J. E., et al. (2017). Team effectiveness and shared mental models. Journal of Applied Psychology.

[17] Nembhard, I. M., & Edmondson, A. C. (2019). Leader inclusiveness and speaking up.

[18] Nonaka, I., & Toyama, R. (2015). The knowledge-creating theory revisited.

[19] Page, S. E. (2017). The diversity bonus.

[20] Reeves, M., Haanaes, K., & Sinha, J. (2015). Your strategy needs a strategy.

[21] Rigby, D., Sutherland, J., & Takeuchi, H. (2016). Embracing agile. Harvard Business Review.

[22] Roos, J., & Victor, B. (2018). How LEGO Serious Play works.

[23] Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2016). Organizing for high reliability.

[24] Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition.

[26] Woolley, A. W., et al. (2015). Collective intelligence in teams. Science.