Role play...hate the idea?

It's a common feeling.  Role play, which we prefer to call skills practice, is the ingredient most valued by our customers in their feedback.  It is also the most feared ingredient before they start.  Like swimming in the sea, jumping in is the worst part.

Professional actors

They bring a special sense of reality to skills practice, bringing a scenario to life, with an authenticity that can be quite startling.  The experience can feel very real, and intense, which is important for learning.

Relevant and personalised scenarios

We find this increases the relevance of the learning experience.  Scenarios can be prepared ahead, in your language and context, or entirely bespoke, meaning that the trainee sets the situation, the character and the objective.  In fact a course for 12 delegates, becomes 12 personalised learning experiences.

Immediate high quality feedback

Skills practice is more than just playing a character.  All our actors are also trained coaches, giving high quality feedback, needed to help a shift in behaviour.  The option of MP4 video playback is given, though never imposed.

Making it stick

This is the hardest challenge when adopting new behaviour.  A good skills practice will home in on the critical learning points and really work on them.  By stretching and repeating practice, new 'muscles' grow, and learning is better retained.

Words, voice and body

These all need to come together for our communication to have impact, something actors know all about.  As project managers we need to be influential, and in skills practice, we learn how we communicate, and how our unseen habits can trip us up.

Safe environment

Getting out of the comfort zone is part of the learning challenge, and so we provide a safe environment for skills practice.  Normally we work in small groups of 1:2 or 1:3, with fellow trainees helping with feedback, under an agreement of confidentiality.

Bringing group sessions to life

Actors are comfortable improvising in front of an audience and so can bring to life group sessions and events (big and small).  We call this forum theatre and it is a little like Covent Garden, where the actors carry the show, and the audience get to contribute, and even control what happens next!