In-house, 6 to 20 people, one to three days. On-site or online.
You bring the cases from your world. I bring the dramaturgy. What still holds after the coffee break is training that landed.
Core topics
Every good story has a conflict — that's the first law of dramaturgy. That same material runs through all five topics: sometimes a problem you solve, sometimes a tension you put to work. You bring your real cases, I bring the dramaturgy. What lies beneath all five is one method — Applied Improvisation.
Conflict isn't a malfunction. It's information. Read it early and you can steer, before escalation takes over the conversation.
The key is a simple distinction: conflicts aren't good or bad — they're functional or dysfunctional. A functional conflict moves something. It brings differences onto the table and makes them workable. A dysfunctional one goes in circles, hardens the fronts and eats energy and trust. So the goal isn't to smooth conflict over or smother it, but to turn dysfunctional conflict into functional conflict.
What you work through in the training:
Trigger isn't cause. Feelings don't arise from what others do — they arise from how we evaluate it. Separate the two and you stay able to act, where others escalate.
From a conflict training
A top performer complains that he's carrying five projects while the team averages two. In the conversation it becomes clear: he never hands a task over, because he doesn't trust his colleagues with the responsibility. They in turn experience every handover as micromanagement. The conflict wasn't between two people. It was a pattern both of them kept alive.
The salary conversation you keep postponing. The critical feedback you've been carrying for weeks. The supplier meeting where you don't want to give ground. It's the same muscle: a prepared conversation with another party.
Most of these conversations don't fail on content. They fail on defended positions instead of explored interests — and on an opening that either dances around the point or goes straight on the attack.
We train both: negotiating along the Harvard principles — uncovering interests behind positions, developing your BATNA, handling difficult counterparts without capitulating — and the hard message that stays clear without damaging trust. We rehearse your real cases: the stalled salary conversation, the overdue critical talk, the internal resource fight. What you play through here, you can take into the room next week.
Leadership is, at its core, communication. Feedback someone actually hears. Team briefings that land. A direction people follow because they understand it. That doesn't depend on personality, but on stance and craft.
Leadership has one job: making the inner and outer complexity of an organisation workable. A company is many-voiced and contradictory — whoever leads translates that into a direction people can follow. This happens on three levels: leading yourself, leading people, leading the organisation. All three end in the same place — acting and deciding.
Part of that is a look at informal leadership. Leadership isn't a question of title, but a position within a group's dynamic. Whoever truly moves a team isn't automatically the person with the business card. Every group hands out roles — down to the uncomfortable dissenting voice that questions everything. Read those roles, and you see where leadership actually emerges.
The lever is a stance, not a new vocabulary. Separate observation from evaluation, name your own feeling instead of packing it into a reproach, hear the need behind the position, and ask rather than demand — and friction becomes a resource. That's how the dissenting voice turns into a corrective, and disagreement into a better decision.
What we train:
A group makes a decision — and half the room doesn't carry it. Facilitation is the work with exactly this conflict: many voices, often unspoken, in the room rather than between two people.
You learn to guide a group through a decision without running over the quiet voices. To surface interests and needs before they show up as resistance. And to produce a decision the group genuinely carries — not just the majority.
For this I work with two method families. Liberating Structures — an open repertoire of compact facilitation formats that lets every voice in the room be heard, instead of letting the loudest dominate. And the Lewis Method of Deep Democracy: developed in the 1990s by psychologists Myrna and Greg Lewis in South Africa, to guide organisations through the legacy of apartheid. Its core is the conviction that wisdom often lies with the minority — in the no that nobody wants to hear. Deep Democracy makes exactly that no accessible and brings it into the decision, instead of outvoting it. I am certified to apply the method.
This is about the craft you apply yourself. When a conflict is already too entrenched to facilitate internally, I step in as a mediator — more on that under Coaching & Mediation.
A presentation that reaches someone works like a good story: a hero, a conflict, a turn. Without tension there's no interest — a slide that only informs holds no one.
Here conflict becomes the tool. You learn to build a message as a story, with storytelling and impro techniques from professional theatre. For pitches, briefings, internal communication. What you can do after two days: fill fewer slides — and make them land.
Improvisation theatre isn't the sixth topic — it's the lab beneath the other five. Here you train the mindsets every topic demands: listening before responding, tolerating uncertainty, reacting to what's actually happening.
Yes-And — accept what's offered, build on it, carry it further.
And the opposite — when is a clear no the stronger response? Where do your boundaries end?
The exercises come from professional impro theatre. In two hours, they make tangible what classical seminars only explain.
How I work
Before every in-house format, I run a scoping conversation. What's the specific situation? Who's the target group? What should be different afterwards? That conversation shapes the design. Not a catalogue entry I've run two hundred times.
All trainings follow the principle experience before theory. Participants live it first, then we frame it. Maximum three minutes of lecture at a stretch, then discussion or exercise. Anyone who can't bear that is in the wrong room. Anyone who can bear it has done more in two days than they would in two weeks of lectures.
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