Perfect for bringing together team or as an away day experience, the Nursery’s Introduction to Improvisation class is experiential learning at its best. Both challenging and fun, this class will build, up-skill and test your team by giving them the skills to create stories together, modelling mutual support and cooperation through laughter. You don’t have to have any acting experience, or even be funny; the Nursery’s team are experts at making even the most nervous of participants feel comfortable and unlocking their inner creative genius.

Over the course of the session, your team will be introduced to the core principles of improvisation and have the opportunity to practice in a positive, supportive atmosphere. Working mostly in groups of 2-4, participants will reflect on their own habits and opportunities for growth, while all the while laughing and bonding with the others in the room.

This class is equally effective for those who have been working together for a long time as it is for new teams.

Time: 1-3 hrs

Content:

• Core improvisational principles (group support, accept and build)
• The mindset of presence and playfulness
• How to accept, embrace and learn from your mistakes

Great meetings are rare. Too often we avoid decisions, go around in circles and take far too long as we do it, filling up our diaries with time that could be better be spent doing work, rather than talking about it.

In this workshop, you will learn to channel the energy and expertise of participants to create powerful interactions which could have only happened face to face. We will give you both the theoretical background and the lived experience of productive, efficient communication that really makes meeting matter, as well as an introduction to the six secrets of successful meetings. You’ll never be bored in a meeting again.

In a 24/7/365 world, stress is ubiquitous even when everything is going to plan. The constant stream of apparently urgent information, stimulation and decisions to deal with make it hard to take it all in and even harder to make good decisions. When the pressure goes up, your brain shuts down. And we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous), even when we have a clear direction and goals, we need to be flexible, agile and yet still delivery results.

In this workshop, you will be introduced to some of the psychological and creative techniques used by improvisers and other performers when they step onstage in front of an audience. Participants will learn to take conscious control over themselves in pressurised scenarios, noticing everything, rebranding stress as excitement and thriving under pressure.

Participants will also learn to understand the science of stress and adrenaline, helping them to understand how and why these reactions happen and ways to deal with them through bot immediate hacks and longer term strategies. Armed with this knowledge, they will be put through a series of artificially pressurised environments, from fast happy-fail games to performance-style situations, learning to stay present, engaged and productive where before they would have shut down.

How often do you find companies and teams where the employees are pitted unhelpfully against each other rather than uniting to beat the competition and serve the customers? How often do companies find that in mergers or re-organisations that teams don’t gel, but feel like ‘Them and us’?

In this workshop, participants will learn the deep listening and cooperation techniques that enable them to better understand their colleagues and teams, encouraging diversity of thought and approach in a way that leverages the full value of the workforce.

For the organisation to both serve its customer well and be a great place to work smoothly inside, we need to harness diversity to act as one team. When we build this diversity into organisations, it widens our definitions of normal, includes more people in the process and therefore helps us make better, smarter decisions, creating belonging, a shared sense of purpose and working together to build a new narrative.

In our half day workshop, we will use business techniques, psychology and improv activities to help teams gain insight into how to feel more ‘Us and Us’ than ‘Them and Us’.

Most teaching of listening is in fact teaching people to pretend to listen: nod, make eye contact and use some of the speaker’s words when you reply. Useful, but nowhere near as useful as embracing the power and depth of genuine listening.

In this workshop, participants will gain an understanding of the deep habits of thought that make sure it is really happening. How do we listen to engage, rather than compete? How does listening drive cooperation? And how can we use our listening to inspire others?

The skills learnt in this workshop will help to ensure that all team members feel heard and valued, creating an atmosphere of trust and cooperation that maximises the value and happiness of a team.

Content:

• The habits and attitudes of deep listening
• Noticing who is talking, when and how much
• Varieties in ways of thinking and how to access them