Business Training
Corporate Training That Works
The act of improving ourselves, our team, and our corporate culture goes by many names: Corporate Training. Leadership Development. Team Building. Business Training. Soft Skills Implementation. Communication Mastery. But titles don’t matter if the results aren’t clear and don’t last. We’ve yet to meet a team that’s succeeded by watching videos, reading manuals, or listening to speakers. Imagine hiring the top speaker to train your team on how to ride a bike. Or buying everyone on your team the best book on learning how to ride a bike.
Those methods fail every time because learning is experiential. We learn by doing.
Why Improvisation is ESSENTIAL
Achieving our goals in communication, leadership, and collaboration requires just one fundamental skill: the ability to see and then work with our pwn psychology. The most powerful, revealing, and quickest method of attaining this skill is, ironically, also the most fun. We remove each other’s scripts. By improvising, we learn to see if we prefer controlling or being controlled; listening to others, or listening for certain cues; making eye contact or avoiding it. As we get used to having no scripts, we calm our nervous system and start to notice tools like body language, facial expressions, and other kinds of non-verbal communication. There’s no “reading a room”, building a team, or leading through inspiring others without first learning who we truly are under our masks.
Sadly, these skills aren’t taught in high school or at University, and most of us didn’t learn them from our family of origin. So how do team leaders, managers, directors, and executives learn, refine, or master these skills? In the same way that we learn any new knowledge: we become beginners once again and go back to school to learn a new way.
We train you and give your teams a competitive advantage. Better leaders create better teams. Better teams result in more productivity and positivity. More productivity and positivity are reflected in retaining top talent. And better long-term talent leads to more profit and success for the company.
Our trainers are acclaimed professional actors, improvisers, and facilitators. We arrive with decades of professional experience and come prepared to teach valuable communication and collaboration skills to your teams. We guide clients in simple, informative, and joyous ways that turbo-charge learning. We get participants out of their chairs and out of their routines. Our workshops assist even the most skeptical participants in learning, refining, and then mastering the skills of collaboration and communication. We bring leadership training in Portland - and beyond! - to those companies and brands seeking to evolve their culture.
Learn more about how and why we do what we do
Philosophy Matters
When you need a doctor, you find someone with decades of experience in the field. Our Founder, David Koff, has been acting professionally on stage and screen since 1993. So it’s no surprise that our corporate training work draws heavily on approaches from the worlds of theater, improvisation, and psychology. These approaches allow our clients to unlock their creative & collaborative potential in deep, memorable, and often profound ways. Most importantly, we believe strongly in the power and science of play. Play is not only how humans learn as infants & toddlers, but it’s also built INTO our biology, allowing it to help us learn as adults. Engaging in play elevates our emotional and social IQ, creating memorable and long-lasting change.
What to Expect
We’re often asked what our clients should expect from our training and workshops. Above, join our Founder, David Koff, for a short 5min video that explains four of the key concepts that we use when training or facilitating with our clients. As for what to expect after training has begun? That’s the good stuff: better team relationships, improved leadership skills. more laughter in the workplace, and better-performing teams.
What is a “Debrief”?
In every class, workshop, and training, we use a tool known as a “debrief”. In short, a debrief is a conversation about what participants JUST learned or experienced during our improvised and unscripted activities. Above, join our Founder, David Koff, for a short explanation of debriefs, why we use them, and… what an actual debrief looks like!