Workshop
01What it is about
Working together is a discipline of its own, and teams that have it get further faster. You know the moment: someone says something unusual in a meeting, three people look at their screens, and the idea is dead before it was thought through. Not out of malice. There is simply no practice at picking each other up on the spot. That is exactly what can be trained. We combine exercises from improvised theatre with elements of design thinking — no prior experience needed, and nobody has to become an actor.
In this workshop you learn to listen to each other, to build on an idea instead of weighing it up, and to be wrong now and then without it getting awkward.
02Why
Most team building events last a few days. You laughed together, you go back to your desk, and everything runs as it did before. Improvisation works differently because it works through the body and not only the head. Our brains barely tell the played apart from the lived. Once people have relied on each other, they do it more easily again at work.
03How the day runs
At heart it is about meeting each other with every sense and reacting on the spot. We start with simple exercises where nobody has to perform.
The exercises turn into short role plays and small scenes. A protected space opens up where the pleasure of playing has room again. Anything may happen, the absurd included, and nothing has to.
Every offer is taken up and made bigger together, generously and with real regard. You notice how much is possible when nobody puts the brakes on, and where your limits are.
Short stretches of theory and shared reflection put the experience in order. What did you learn about yourselves and about each other, and what of it goes back to work with you?
04Skills
You train with us on how you work as a group, from the first reaction to the shared result.
How to actually take in what the other person is offering instead of preparing your own answer.
How a first thought becomes something shared before anyone talks it to death.
How to react when things go differently than planned, without seizing up.
How to turn nervous energy into drive, and how that becomes composure over time.
How to sense when to take a scene over and when to leave someone else the room.
How a slip or a blank becomes the punchline rather than an awkward moment.
How to shape the roles you hold at work deliberately, instead of being shaped by them.
How something lived through together becomes a footing that holds after the workshop.
05Info
The workshop is for anyone who wants more than a team building event whose effect has worn off in a week. For newly assembled teams as much as for settled ones where the routines have hardened. Leadership circle, department, agency or small firm — we fit the content to you. Nobody needs any acting experience.
Inhouse training built around your company, at your place or ours in Cologne
With Anna Möbus, actor and coach, or Jörn Groneck, coach of many years, actor and director
Flexible, by arrangement
Half a day to three days, daytime or evening
Up to 5 people per group. Larger groups on request
06The coaches
Which of the two leads the workshop depends on the date and the group.
Anna Möbus is an actor for theatre, film and advertising, and works as a coach and acting teacher. She has run workshops with companies and public institutions for many years. Among other things she sits on the Handelsblatt jury that assesses the rhetoric of DAX chief executives each year. Her considered, warm manner tends to go down very well with workshop groups.
Jörn Groneck coaches with more than ten years of experience in coaching, staging, storytelling, editing and directing actors, for international clients across cinema, television, advertising and sport.
07What people said
The workshop was a real success for us: we got an astonishing amount done in a short window, the methods were varied and kept moving, and it went well beyond what we expected. From the planning through to the day itself, everything fitted.
Jörn got the mix of theory and practice right. And the group was glad to follow him.
This is what good leadership looks like. Jörn gave us room and still held his line. He did not let things drift and then ask us to catch up — he created a climate of working together that motivated all of us enormously.