A warm welcome to 2012 to all our customers, (and potential customers!). As this is the season for resolutions, I can share with you that ours is to widen our circle of contacts by asking our customers to recommend their colleagues and associates to register on our website. In return we will reward our new contacts with some free resources and regular information which we hope they will find useful, and our existing clients with several incentives on purchasing our products. If you are visiting this site or blog for the first time, we hope you’ll consider registering by clicking HERE. We are fortunate to have a large number of customers who have been very positive about our products and our support for their work; and we are grateful that they are responding so well to help us achieve our 2012 goals.

We also plan a number of new product launches in 2012 both in the ‘physical world’ with RSVP Design and in the ‘App world’ via our sister organisation Mobile Learning Design. If there is a tool, activity or mobile device application you’d like to see developed for a training need, then please email your suggestions to graham@rsvpdesign.co.uk and we’ll consider it as part of our product development planning process.

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RSVP Design was delighted to establish a new distribution relationship in 2011 with Experience Corner, based in Warsaw, Poland. Experience Corner is the first on-line store in Poland offering interactive training tools from globally known brands, and following an invitation from colleagues at Experience Corner, last month I made my first visits to and Krakow and Warsaw to introduce some of our products to their customers. It is always exciting to travel to a new city and although I had just returned from a visit to the USA, I was looking forward to seeing Krakow and watching the reactions of the Polish audience to our products. Alicja and Joanna from Experience Corner met me on the first evening I arrived, but by then I had already had the chance to wander around the main square in Krakow and begin to sample what was clearly a popular and vibrant city!

Experience Corner have translated all the facilitator manuals as well as the delegate briefs for several of our learning tools, so I although I would have an interpreter with me during the events, her main role would simply be to help me understand what was being said in Polish as the groups worked with their own language version materials. The Krakow event was held on a large converted Dutch barge on the river, and I was pleased to see that Experience Corner, like RSVP Design, believes that the learning environment is important in making events memorable for participants! It was a wonderful old vessel, and I could have happily sailed along the river on what was a beautiful sunny day! The delegates were a mixture of internal training specialists and other training consultants, and were extremely enthusiastic in their participation. I used our Images of Organisations™ metaphor cards to open the session and to get pairs and triads discussing what their training challenges were, and I was delighted to see that Polish people have no problems in working with metaphor in this way. We then had a group play Colourblind® with a number of observers and again, not only were they enthusiastic, but very disciplined in their problem solving approaches, which helped them reach a successful conclusion fairly quickly. To show how RSVP Design would sequence activities we then introduced Simbols™ (using the Team Version) to show how we might build on similar behaviours using a different activity, and finished with Challenging Assumptions™ – again it was comforting to see Polish people make exactly the same assumptions in this exercise as other Nationalities we have tried it with around the world!

The following day (well, very early in the morning!) we took the train to Warsaw where I presented to a larger group (some 45 people) in probably my most unusual training venue ever – the deep end of an old swimming pool (thankfully undergoing a conversion to an arts venue!). I was interested to see if our dinner discussion the night before about Polish stereotypical group behaviour suggested by my hosts as being  ‘a lot of heated discussion, but when agreement is reached there will be a uniform acceptance of the new direction – perhaps to the detriment of thinking about alternative strategies’. During this larger session I decided to use Webmaster® to see if these behavioural stereotypes would play out. Whether by coincidence or as a reflection of these stereotypes I did indeed witness a lot of heated discussion after the initial problem-solving portion of Webmaster® (creating the first construction). I observed lots of discussion with many overlapping conversations, and several people taking a lead as to how they though they could best achieve the team performance increase required (i.e. complete the whole construction in under 2 minutes, from an original build time of 25 minutes). None of the available exercise time was used for further practice or rehearsal purposes – it was all used for ‘discussion’. Eventually as the time limit began to expire (somehow!) the group agreed on a strategy and every one of the 30 strong group delivered on that strategy and managed to achieve the objective! There was a lot of discussion following this activity (most of which I was unable to understand!), and I get the sense that Webmaster® could become a popular activity in Poland!

Although this was a very short trip I saw enough to know that I want to go back and experience more Polish cooking, Polish beer, Polish socialising and Polish customers, and I look forward to a successful partnership between Experience Corner and RSVP Design.

Graham Cook

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Next week RSVP Design (or at least the bespoke learning-design part of the company) moves into Pilot Programme mode. We’ll be phones off, mail off and 100% focused on delivering a new programme and simultaneously examining the potential effectiveness of that programme against the agreed learning outcomes. It’s always a fraught and exhausting time, not least when you consider that we’re our own worst critics and any perceived design flaws will always be spotted and noted for later attention.

And there will be flaws….

There are always flaws…..

That’s why we try very hard to manage client expectations around piloting processes, in particular explaining how we think of piloting and what its place in a design process is: and very often this comes as quite a challenge to client preconceptions.

We like to pilot early, and pilot dirty.

That is to say we try out the programme content and approach long before the learning materials are polished and ready for general release to groups of consumers. That way we can spot any problems with the major determinants of success e.g. programme structure, cultural compatibility with the client organisation, intellectual/practical pitch and mix, distribution of content against allotted time etc. This allows us to be absolutely safe in the knowledge that the learning design is right, so that the subsequent layers of instructional design and materials production are applied to a firm foundation.

OK we know that this doesn’t always make us look too good.

And we recognise that it places some strain on the trust that our clients have in us.

But our approach is based on one very clear, but often contentious principle:

The most important learning that comes out of a piloting process is the learning that is derived by the design/delivery team.

Of course we’re experienced enough to recognise the fundamental issue that this creates for clients and we try our utmost to work with them to manage this issue: but the fact remains that we have to negotiate what can be a sensitive area for many learning and development professionals:

How do we assemble a representative group of learners to experience new materials, and to offer us their constructive feedback, when what they will experience is unashamedly a ‘work-in-progress’?

And obviously this dilemma will be that much the greater as we climb higher up the corporate ladder – the more senior the population the less tolerant they will be of the draft materials they are asked to experience.

Well no…. that isn’t my experience.

I’ve found that if a piece of learning is strategically and tactically important to a company it should be relatively easy to identify an executive sponsor, (and if it’s not why are they doing it?). Once you have that sponsor onboard, and they invite the attendees to pilot that learning, there’s a much greater sense that the investment of time and energy in the pilot is for the good of the company, and therefore much easier to gain buy-in. Any difficulties I can recall from my many years in this business are situations where I’ve tried to pilot materials with groups of status-conscious middle managers who see the process as a great opportunity to further their political ambitions in front of their peers. But if they have been invited by a senior executive, who recognises the pilot as sufficiently important to warrant their personal participation, then it usually produces a much more constructive climate around the piloting process.

So next time you’re involved, in any capacity, in the process of piloting a new piece of learning, ask the questions that will allow you, and others, to understand exactly what the purpose of this pilot is, and what you are expected to contribute. After all, pilots come in a range of uniforms!

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Corporate Universities are, almost exclusively, found as appendages of big corporations. In the USA the HR-driven corporate university has represented to a very high degree the choice of large organisations that need to process a large number of employees through diverse learning experiences. Over the past 20 years I’ve worked with many of these institutions, developing new learning content, introducing experiential methods and working alongside faculty to better target specific learning outcomes. I’m currently mid-way through an extended project with the CU of a major food and beverage multinational, creating experiential practice-fields for the leadership models they are introducing.

A brief down-time in this project recently led me to consider what characterises the way that CU’s approach the business of learning, the “What’s good and what’s not?” of Corporate Universities.

Top of the “what’s good?” list is the way that CU’s live and breathe their corporate culture. Learning happens in an environment which always feels like the concentrated essence of their corporate culture, an immersive learning environment that lives and breathes company ways of working. As an outsider it’s always a little daunting to first step into these unique environments, a state that I can describe in this way:

I’ve been invited here because of what I know i.e. I’m an expert, but this whole experience places an emphasis on what I don’t know i.e. I’m an alien in this place.

At this point I know I’m going to have to bring my ‘A-game’ to this job.

The result of this situation is that the learning that happens in a CU needs little translation or adaptation to be applicable in the operational part of the business. It was conceived, developed, delivered and evaluated in an environment that is totally geared towards the business of the parent company. People leave knowing what they have to do to deliver what their company wants them to deliver.

What this means for my work is that I will be given very clear design direction – I’ll be told very clearly what learning outcomes are needed, and given very strong feedback around whether my designs are a good fit with ‘how we do business’. As a designer I enjoy the challenge of very quickly assimilating the corporate culture and language, and producing seamlessly compatible designs – “going chameleon” I call it.

The flip side of this is that the walls (physical and metaphorical) around many Corporate Universities are pretty high and not easily breached by new thinking and new ideas. Let me say up-front that this is a generalisation, I work with some institutions that are extremely innovative and open to best-practice thinking. Indeed I can cite instances where particular CU’s actually lead the field in innovative learning practice: but for many their approach to corporate education demonstrates all the negative effects of “limited gene-pool learning”.

At RSVP Design we specialise in learning innovation, and that is, in most cases, why clients buy our services. We bring new ideas, new approaches, new thinking. And that makes it pretty disappointing when we can see where our approaches would breathe fresh life into some dated and tired situation, only to be told “that won’t work here” or “that’s not how we do things”. These situations, (and work with CU’s often produce them), are typified by a strange paradox:

“We’ve asked you to use your unique expertise to design something that we can’t, but we can’t accept your design because it’s different to what we do.”

I’m happy to say that my current work hasn’t encountered this paradox, it’s going well and the pilot programmes suggest we’re ready to deliver something special. The culture in the CU is strong, but open to well-informed, well-presented influence, just about the ideal situation.

Now if all Corporate Universities could hit that happy medium………

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An interesting feature of the learning design that I’ve been working on this month has been the fact that, in two separate instances, the clients have been unable to define the size of the groups to whom the learning will be delivered. I’m not talking here about a range of e.g. between 20 and 40 people (a common enough situation, particularly in corporate learning settings) but mind-bendingly large ranges – in one case this month we’re talking about “lower limit 12, upper limit 1500”!

So how do you set about designing a learning environment, with defined learning outcomes, when there is no way of knowing whether this is intimate, high-ratio group work or large-scale conference activity? In some ways the learning design is relatively easy – (the difficulty lies in getting the people who will deliver the learning prepared for the very different demands of the two environments) The secret is to design the learning materials in a modular format, so that each table of 10 or 12 in the conference setting becomes its own little learning environment.

I think of it as a fractal structure where every table-sized micro environment exactly reproduces the overall structure and content of the hall-sized macro environment.

One obvious difference in working at this larger scale is that there just isn’t going to be a skilled facilitator at every table – the cost in recruiting and/or training them would be prohibitive unless you’re going to run the conference event multiple times. But if we take this as one of the design parameters we’re working with, and our response is high-quality, self-directed learning, controlled and managed by a well equipped facilitator working from a stage, then we shouldn’t have to accept any diminution of what we expect people to learn, nor indeed any compromises in their experience of the learning event.

If the learning direction from the stage is well designed and scripted, and the learning activity is relevant and engaging, then what’s missing is the feedback that allows the central co-ordinator to monitor whether the table groups are understanding and assimilating the learning content. Traditionally this function has been the role of both the central co-ordinator who needs to ‘get mobile’ around the tables, and a support team who observe, monitor and possibly intervene to ensure that the desired learning is happening. It’s a system that is widely used because of it’s efficiency, but has a number of obvious flaws, not least of which is that the delivery team can’t be everywhere at once. The more challenging the learning the more demands are placed on this team, with the result that the learning objectives are diluted in advance to ensure that everybody keeps pace. The ultimate result of this has been that well intentioned learning events become a series of bland presentations from the ‘face(s) on the stage’.

However, consider this: technology now enables us to ensure that every person at every table in the conference hall is learning effectively. We can individually monitor learning progress and get virtually instant feedback about how the learning content is being received and assimilated. It’s easily possible for each table to vote, input data, comment on issues, and decide outcomes or flag up progress in a way that makes them active participants in a collective act of learning. The conference design is oriented around feedback loops where tables share their thoughts and observations across the whole event using iPad’s or other tablet devices. These loops are defined in both time and content as conference wide exchanges that move the focus away from the stage and towards the learning that is being generated by the participants themselves.

And where do we find the budget to invest in a mobile device for each table? It may be worth asking whether the thousands you paid to have the last guru / speaker promote their latest book to your employees gave you a great return? Or whether you could have (for the same investment) pre-loaded a video of their presentation onto a hundred iPads and got your people really interacting with the content in a way that generated real, local learning and tangible results?

From there it’s a small step to asking whether your people actually need to be in the same physical space to engage in this learning…………?

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As part of our commitment to bringing the concept of Learning Power to businesses, public and third sector adult learning groups, we worked in partnership with NHS Dumfries and Galloway to offer a two-day programme for L+D professionals on July 13 and 14 2011.

Day 1 was an introduction to ELLI and the 7 Dimensions of Learning and was attended by seven participants, from within the NHS, the Scottish Police and Brathay: organisations with a commitment to developing people through the provision of high quality learning.

Day 2 was an optional ‘ELLI Champions’ training day, designed to ensure that those who wish to use the profiling tool within their own programmes have achieved the required level of understanding and competence to represent and administer the tool correctly and in line with the intentions of ViTaL Partnerships, who retain the ownership of the profile and associated research material.

As we have experienced in previous workshops, there was a very positive response from all the participants about the potential value of ELLI across a broad range of applications: in personal coaching and development, in career coaching and in performance management and goal setting.

Participants felt strongly that the ELLI profile is, as it has always been described, of particular value when it forms part of a supportive yet challenging coaching or mentoring relationship. Particularly during Day 2 there was a focus on the principles of effective coaching and the need to use the profile as a trigger for high quality developmental conversations with individual learners.

However, there was also strong agreement that simply understanding the 7 Dimensions, and their implications for the design and delivery of learning experiences, was of enormous value to those professionals who are responsible for the selection or creation of learning activities, programmes and events, as well as the ‘curriculum’ around formal training inputs and mandatory training.

Ann introduced a number of short, example activities on Day 1 to illustrate how, once a need to develop one or more dimensions had been identified, experiential learning methodology can support skills development. Specific example of this included short exercises in connecting apparently random images (Meaning Making), a group puzzle that could only be solved by generating multiple questions (Critical Curiosity) and the use of a visual mapping tool to review past learning and plan for the future (Strategic Awareness).

On Day 2, participants rehearsed their own coaching skills, observing each other and offering and receiving feedback. This process helped them to explore the ‘layers’ that ELLI unlocks: learners’ thoughts and feelings about learning in general, themselves as learners, their motivation and learning needs. Following this, they began to explore how and where ELLI could be integrated into their own work. Examples included an organisational induction process (with recommendations about how to make this much more learner-centred and participative), working with operational managers to help to ensure that appraisal and performance management discussions were more focused on learning and the value of integrating the Learning Power principles into Action Learning sets.

Whilst we recognise that there is still work to do in creating materials and ’seamless’ access to ELLI profiles, the programme re-confirmed RSVP Design’s belief that this is a simple and powerful model that should become core knowledge for every L+D professional.

Specific thanks go to Sandie Wilkie and Louise Hughes of NHS Dumfries and Galloway for their support in setting up the programme and providing the venue and logistical arrangements.

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Here at RSVP we’ve recently had a lot of contact with the Center for Creative Leadership. We’re developing, via our Mobile Learning Design (MLD) persona, Apps that allow CCL’s famous body of research and practice to be accessed via mobile communication devices.
As part of my research I’ve been doing some archeology in the past-papers and other written materials that have come out of CCL over the past 20 years – and I’ve turned up a gem that, I think, is well worth revisiting.

The piece in question is an essay that was first published in 1997 and revived as a blog in 2008 entitled Leadership in Permanent Whitewater: Playing with the Metaphor
http://lmeccl.blogspot.com/2008/07/leadership-in-permanent-whitewater.html
I can’t stress enough just how much I relate to the messages that are embedded in this essay, but it’s the powerful metaphor of organisations as whitewater rivers and leaders as intrepid kayakers that has a particular attraction for me. Not just because I’ve run a few rivers in my time – but because the metaphor is, if anything, more appropriate here in 2011 than it was back in 1997.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1997 but just listen to three of the ideas forwarded by the author Chuck J. Palus in the essay:

a) Chaos in organizations is not random.
b) Play is essential within organizations if people are to develop an eye for patterns within chaos.
c) Fundamental innovation can come from serious play at the fringes of organizations.

These ideas are totally aligned with my beliefs about the learning that organisations need if they are to survive and thrive in waters that are infinitely more challenging than they were 14 years ago. But I have to ask why, if these ideas are so valuable, is it so hard to access them? Why do they gather dust in archives and collections of past-papers? I think that the answer lies in the possibilities offered by the increasing range of new media through which ideas can now be brought to the world.

The original essay was published in a 1997 journal, the essay was revived in a 2008 blog, I’m linking back to it in a 2011 blog – I wonder which has been read by (and hopefully influenced) the most people?

I’d be interested in your thoughts – you’re obviously reading this blog, but did you see the essay first time round? Did you read the 2008 blog? Was it worth me bringing it to current attention? What other gems have you found in the archives and how did you try to breathe new life into them?

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I read a really interesting BBC article describing how there is strong evidence that universally praising children can de detrimental to their growth, and encourages a ‘fixed mindset’ rather than believing they have the capacity to grow and learn (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13128701 ) . Of course the ELLI research ( see http://rsvpdesign.co.uk/trainer-training/ ) supports this article (both for children and adults) and we are heartened by the almost universal interest in ELLI from any organisation we speak to. There is also good research from other areas that children who value the idea of ‘I am someone who can learn’, and that ‘I can learn from mistakes’, are motivated to ‘grow and learn’ and ‘resilient’ when it comes to challenging learning situations. These type of children grow into valuable employees. I know some educational colleagues who wish they had praised their own children more for effort when they were younger, and now choose to celebrate ‘failure’ as a learning opportunity, even as their children have grown up.

It has prompted me to continue to think about how organisations can generate the same motivation to learn as the people who have all the successful and well researched characteristics of effective learners. I’m convinced that this motivation has to come from an organisational culture that respects individuals as capable of learning and change, and that their leaders should behave in a way that is consistent with that. This would mean abolishing ‘lists of approved training courses’, educating managers and individuals about the science behind effective learning, paying more attention to informal learning than formal learning, re-writing the charter for L&D & OD (or even seeking to phase them out, and give their responsibilites to line managers), and using ‘learning language’ in business contexts so it is seen as being fundamentally critical to achieving any organisational mission or goal. In fact research seems to suggest that’s what organisations who ‘thrive’ actually do – now we just need some good tools to help organisations achieve this …

RSVP Design has created a new joint venture – Mobile Learning Design – and we hope to create some tools that take advantage of the personal nature of mobile devices (smartphones, tablets etc.) to provide formal and informal learning support when people need it, rather than when it is offered. Please get in touch with us if this subject is of interest!

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As the spring weather moves towards summer my runs on the mountains and moors of NW England become longer, and I can once more indulge myself in extended and deeply-reflective hours of solitary endeavour. These long runs allow me to follow chains of thought that are difficult to maintain through the complexities of a busy work-life, let alone the happy chaos of home and family! Last weekend I found myself on the familiar terrain of a green ribbon of sheep-cropped turf crossing a sun warmed limestone plateau, perfect for fast miles and expansive thinking.

What occupied my mind was the way in which my work as a designer of learning has changed in a relatively short time, and how these changes might be interpreted to indicate deeper changes in organisational learning.

Not many years ago I would work with clients to define a design brief by asking questions such as “How many people will attend?” “For how long?” “Who are these people?” and  “What do you need them to be able to do when the leave the room (that they couldn’t do when they entered)?” This type of question defined the parameters of the learning environment and allowed me to get creative within clearly defined boundaries.

Not many years later I found that I was seeing a move away from this event-based approach. I was working much closer to the power-centres of client organisations, and now the questions were “What organisation-level changes are you trying to achieve?’ “What are the behavioural obstacles and opportunities?” and “What tools and processes do your leaders need to embed these changes?”. The learning environments were less defined, more business-relevant and called for much more depth and subtlety from me as a designer.

More recently still the shifting balance that is rapidly moving emphasis away from formal learning towards informal learning have required a whole different approach and a different set of questions. In 2011 the need for organisations to be agile, responsive and learning-efficient is apparent in every sector, although the results of a failure to achieve these conditions are frequently masked by more fundamental economic failings. Recent conversations with learning and development professionals in these organisations suggest that many are struggling to address these new challenges. Many are caught in the professional paradox of never before having had more responsibility for the future learning needs of their organisation, yet never before having so little control over the ways in which these needs can be addressed.

Perhaps the questions that I now use to frame a design brief are ones that could effectively be used to interrogate the more general learning landscapes within ambitious organisations? The kind of questions I now find myself working with are  “What are the learning needs of the organisation?” “Who are the people, inside and outside of this organisation, who could contribute to this learning?””What are your peoples’ strengths, and weaknesses, as learners?” and “What support do they need to take individual ownership of the organisation’s learning needs?”

None of these are easy questions to ask, or to answer, when learning and development is under such extreme pressure to deliver. Arriving at effective answers is business-critical, yet will only be achieved if we recognise that we can’t manage the learning of others in any meaningful way, but we must find ways of supporting their learning to benefit our organisations.

Not an easy route, nor a short route, but a challenge to be relished – a bit like this run!

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Very often, when I describe and demonstrate RSVP Design’s range of experiential learning activities to L+D professionals, consultants and HR advisors, they respond in a predictable fashion. Something along the lines of…

“Yes, I do use games and learning activities like these with some groups but I couldn’t possibly offer these to some of my clients – they are much too senior.”

There seems to be a belief that the more senior a leader or manager in an organisation, the less likely they are to respond positively to learning through the ‘metaphor’ that a well-designed learning activity or simulation offers. It is perceived that these activities add value, for example, to a team-building event or to a management skills workshop for young employees but that they are, in some way, inappropriate for more senior leaders. There is a fear and anxiety about offering a form of learning that is seen as too trivial for senior executive education.

“I couldn’t offer that at Board level – they simply wouldn’t engage with it…..”

Our experience is exactly the opposite. The more senior and successful leaders are in a business environment, the more likely they are to engage with the learning activities we offer and to play, experiment and challenge their own learning and performance. They ‘get it’. They have the ability to see beyond the presenting activity and understand the processes it mirrors. They are also confident enough in themselves that they have nothing to prove – they are ‘comfortable in their own skins’ and able to demonstrate a willingness to step outside of their comfort zone -even if it means short-term failure – in order to develop their own, and their organisations’, performance.

Ben Bryant, a skilled and experienced psychologist, is  Professor of Leadership and Organization at IMD. He commissioned RSVP Design recently to work with him on perhaps the most senior programme we have ever delivered. The participants built geometric shapes out of plastic construction components, raced wheeled vehicles along the floor and connected complex webs of coloured ropes in order to solve a puzzle. They were completely engaged and immediately able to make the connections between what they were doing and the leadership capability they were at IMD to develop.

Ben explained this to us from a psychologist’s perspective. He confirmed that it is all about ego. These leaders are so senior they’ve left their egos behind. They don’t have to prove themselves – their track records stand for themselves. They can make the connections, see the big picture, be confident in their own abilities – confident enough to allow themselves to play, get things wrong, make a fool of themselves, knowing that that is crucial in learning and innovating. They can see the parallels in the ’simulated world’ and the ‘concrete world’.’

In contrast, we experience much more resistance from more junior team leaders and managers – the very people for whom these activities are often chosen. Many of them are likely to be working from a position of uncertainty and anxiety and they need to keep proving themselves to their teams and colleagues. They are reluctant to step into the unknown – concerned about losing the respect and confidence of those they manage. Asking them to leave ‘ego’ behind is a much bigger challenge. So, offering an experiential exercise becomes high risk for the facilitator and participating is high risk for the manager. It may be rejected as ‘demeaning’, when in fact it is just too scary!

Knowing this can help the learning designer to choose and frame appropriate activities and consider the appropriate level of ‘confrontation’ that the activity, and the facilitation, offers. The more successful and senior your team, the more likely they are to respond positively to the challenging experiential learning opportunities you offer. For all sorts of reasons, primarily to do with organisational politics, senior leaders are starved of in-depth, unfiltered, authentic feedback. Well researched, well-designed and well-facilitated experiential learning provides a rare opportunity for senior leaders to tap into the support and challenge that they are hungry to receive.

For more information about RSVP Design’s work with Senior Leadership teams, please contact us via the website

http://rsvpdesign.co.uk

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