Imbalance at Lego: Muscles, Microbes, and Management

“Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.”- Rumi

I’ve been suffering with shoulder and neck pain for years. Occasionally, it gets so bad I go to a physiotherapist. They treat the symptoms, I take some anti-inflammatories, it eases for a while…but the dull pain always comes back.

Recently, I decided to take matters into my own hands — literally.

I researched the shoulder more deeply and realised that while there are many supporting muscles, most people only train the big movers with one or two exercises. The smaller stabilisers get ignored.

Three weeks into a new programme, my pain has eased dramatically. The problem wasn’t that my shoulders were weak. The problem was muscular imbalance. Larger muscles were overcompensating and doing all the work.

It struck me how often imbalance is the root cause of dysfunction. You can’t overdevelop one side while ignoring the other — whether in a body, a microbiome, or a business. Take for example what Steven Gundry shared on a recent episode of The Innovation Show , where we see this same truth play out in our microbiome.

Microbes Out of Balance

A healthy gut thrives on diversity — hundreds of species in balance. But microbes are opportunistic. When conditions shift (through diet, antibiotics, or toxins), one strain can seize the advantage.

A dominant strain can “exploit” every resource, crowding out opportinity for others.

In this state, a normally harmless bacteria can become a saboteur: sending false signals to the brain, hijacking appetite, and even tricking us into craving the sugary foods it thrives on.

Gut resilience comes not from dominance, but from equilibrium no single species dominating the rest.

And that brings me to the main thesis of this week's Thursday Thought. Many organisations are not lacking innovators or change makers, so much that they are dominated by the executors, the doers rather than thinkers. As a result, there is an imbalance and organisations become inhospitable environments for innovation.

Organisations Out of Balance

“Organisations, by their very nature are designed to promote order and routine. They are inhospitable environments for innovation.” - Theodore Levitt

Established organisations are built for repeatability, reliability, and risk avoidance. That structure was valuable when environments were stable. Today, it can be fatal.

Management often defaults to study, plan, decide, execute. While effective in predictable markets, this model collapses under uncertainty. It produces analysis paralysis.

Clayton Christensen warned:

“Companies whose investment processes demand quantification of market sizes and financial returns before they can enter a market get paralysed… They demand market data when none exists.”

Or as General Stan McChrystal put it:

“All the efficiency in the world has no value if it remains static in a volatile world.”

Exploit and Explore

James March, the scholar who introduced this duality as exploit and explore (work furthered by Michael Tushman , Charles O'Reilly and Andrew Binns and Alexander Osterwalder and Both/And thinking by  Wendy K. Smith and Marianne Lewis ):

• Exploitation = refinement, efficiency, execution.
• Exploration = search, risk-taking, discovery, innovation.

March’s warning was clear:

“Adaptive systems that engage in exploration to the exclusion of exploitation… suffer the costs of experimentation without many benefits. Conversely, systems that engage in exploitation to the exclusion of exploration… become trapped in suboptimal equilibria.”

Balance between the two is essential for long-term survival.

Few companies show this lesson more clearly than LEGO.

LEGO: A Case of Imbalance

Too Much Exploit: perfectionism, rigidity, and insularity in the 1990s.

Founded in 1932, LEGO thrived for decades on meticulous quality control. Leaders debated for nearly a decade before adding a single new brick colour. When Lucasfilm first proposed a Star Wars partnership, one vice president snapped: “Over my dead body will LEGO ever introduce Star Wars.”

This perfectionist mindset worked for 60 years. By the early 1990s, LEGO commanded 80% of the global construction toy market and was crowned “Toy of the Century.”

But the same strengths soon calcified into rigidity and too much "exploit". By the late 1990s, digital and electronic toys were reshaping the market while LEGO remained insular and slow. Sales plateaued and the very culture that had driven its rise — painstaking caution, slow desicion-making, obsessive quality, and reluctance to partner — left LEGO stagnant and flat-footed.

Too Much Explore: the “creativity above all else” mantra in the early 2000s.

An outsider CEO, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, refocused on the core brick. He halved the number of unique parts, sold off non-core ventures like theme parks, and carefully layered back exploration through partnerships with Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Marvel.

With efficiency and creativity finally held in balance, LEGO recovered. Today it is worth over $10 billion.

Friends of the Innovation Show, Michael Tushman and Charles O’Reilly captured the exploit/explore solution nicely:

“To flourish over the long run, most companies need to maintain a variety of innovation efforts. They must constantly pursue incremental innovations, small improvements in their existing products and operations that let them operate more efficiently and deliver ever greater value to customers. Companies also have to make architectural innovations, applying technological or process advances to fundamentally change some component or element of their business.”

Like any successful organisation, effective leaders recognise that an excessive focus on exploitation of current advantages can lead to missed opportunities, while too much exploration without consolidation can lead to overextension and vulnerability.

Like my shoulder, like our gut, like LEGO: imbalance is costly. Resilience — in bodies, ecosystems, and organisations — comes not from dominance, but from balance.

As Rumi reminds us, life — like business — “is a balance of holding on and letting go.”

Speaking of the challenge highlighted by Tushman and O’Reilly — making architectural innovations that apply technological or process advances to fundamentally change elements of a business — we explore the fascinating case of Figma and Adobe in the latest episode of The Innovation Show with  Sangeet Paul Choudary

Tushman and O'Reilly

Alexander Osterwalder

Andrew Binns

And Wendy K. Smith

And Steven Gundry