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ImprovIsatIon traInIng
for the workplace
www.hooplabusiness.com
07908 980409
we get your creative juices flowing
07908 980409
www.hooplabusiness.com
Improvisers are:
• Brilliant listeners.
• Fantastic collaborators.
• engaging story-tellers.
• great communicators.
• Confident people who thrive in uncertainty.
• Creative.
And improvisation-based training can manifest these qualities and skills in your staff.
Improvisers also work in teams which:
• Are defined by trust and support.
• Put a high value on emotional intelligence and active listening.
• Innovate constantly.
• Celebrate individuality and make full use of everybody’s creative capital.
• Are open, honest and feedback rich.
Improvisation-based training can create a
similar culture at your organisation.
IntroDUctIon
You want a corporate training solution that offers profound learning, fast. And from our experience you also want training that engages participants so that they have a great time whilst doing it. Improvisation ticks all these boxes.
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oUr methoDology: how we work anD what It looks lIke our workshops are fun, energetic and fully immersive. There is a lot of doing, and not a lot of watching.
our trainers will introduce pair and group exercises from the world of improv which we will first demonstrate, then get the participants to play themselves, before tieing everything into the learning objectives of the session.
Along the way we will introduce key improv ideas, such as “listening with intent”, “the philosophy of yes-and” and many more, so that participants leave with both a practical experience and theoretical knowledge.
A lot of these concepts will seem simple and ones that we all know intellectually. the beauty of these workshops is that everyone will get to feel and embody them, and gaps between theory and practice will be exposed.
the idea is that everyone leaves with not just new skills, but also a framework of ideas and language that they can apply at your business so it might underpin the culture moving forwards.
every workshop we offer is bespoke, and tailored according to your L&D goals, the personalities of the participants, and the mood in the room on the day.
our fast-paced and often hilarious workshops will get your staff talking to each other in ways they’ve never done before. In fact, a thread running through all our client feedback is how quickly participants got to know each other in our workshops. In short, we break down boundaries and accelerate relationship building.
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clIent lIst
For a full client list, testimonials and a selection of case-studies, please see our website.
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the traIners
max Dickins started his career as a radio presenter for absolute Radio, spending two years behind the mic with his own show. He was nominated
for a prestigious sony Radio award in the process. on the stage he is garlanded stand-up comedian, and his third solo-show ‘my Groupon adventure’ which was a sell-out smash hit at the pleasance courtyard at the edinburgh festival in 2014. His first book, inspired by the stand-up show, ‘My groupon Adventure’, was published in June 2016 by unbound/penguin-Random house. It is available to buy in bookshops throughout the world. He has recently worked as playwright, with ‘The Trunk’, a funny and moving one-man play a critical hit at the 2016 edinburgh festival with several 4 and 5 star reviews. As an actor and writer he has a myriad of tV and radio credits on both sides of the Atlantic, working with BBC2, e4 and Sky1
amongst others. He is currently proud to be the presenter of ‘Voom Room‘ (Sundog Pictures), featuring
news, gossip and great guests from the Vigin Media Business Voom competition. (think Dragon’s Den, but with Sir richard Branson).
steve roe is the co-founder of Hoopla and has been performing and teaching improv for over ten years. He teaches improvisation full-time five days a week in London
and also tours the uK and europe with public workshops. In 2010 Steve founded London’s first improvised comedy club, and in 2012 this was recommended as the best place to see improvised comedy in London by the Daily telegraph, time out and many more. Before setting up Hoopla Steve worked as a Management Consultant at Accenture, where he was a Consultant in their Communications & High tech Division. recently he spent five years working as an Assistant Producer with a number of tV production companies and channels including ItV, the History Channel, Pioneer, Prospect Pictures, Lion, BBC 2 and Channel 4.
who we are
Hoopla is Britain’s biggest and best improvisation school. Hundreds of students attend our public classes every week, and we regularly work with a long list of high profile corporate clients including: ogilvy & mather, merck, unilever and many more.
our work has frequently been featured in the media:
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traInIng optIons
we’re hugely experienced at delivering workshops, and have delivered
bespoke improv workshops on a diversity of subjects for businesses in a
variety of sectors. outlined below are our most popular products. But we
frequently design training for unique client needs, so if the below don’t fit
with what you’re after then drop us a line and I’m sure we can respond to
the brief with brio.
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team BUIlDIng
“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people,” Victor Borge
Nothing builds relationships like laughter, and this is what our team-building experience is all about.
But out team building experiences also foster the skills that support brilliant teamwork, because improv is the ultimate team-building skill. In improv you must work together as a team to create ideas out of nothing, with no resources apart from each other. thus improv is the purest manifestation of teamwork there is.
Improv offers a brilliant grammar of successful collaboration that allows teams to create ideas and solve problems successfully and quickly. we teach that grammar.
TaKeawaYs
• Active listening.
• Supportive behaviour and great collaboration using the philosophy of “yes, and…”
• Status: what high and low status looks like, and when to play which role. Awareness of dominant behaviours and how they impact on others.
• Dealing with introverts and extroverts and getting the most out of both.
• How to give feedback well.
• Importance of body language and tone of voice.
• Knowing when to lead and when follow.
• the workshop will also show how the ideas and skills of improv can improve communication and teamwork between different departments in a business. we’ll show you how to get the whole team collaborating successfully on a project, and how to manage relationships at every stage.
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creatIvIty anD InnovatIon traInIng
are you making the most of the creative potential of your team? is everyone pulling their weight, sharing ideas, and collaborating positively with each other? are there silos within departments and between departments? Do you have a defined process for brainstorms and creative meetings? Does you organisation have a positive attitude to risk and failure?
we can solve these problems for you in our creativity workshops. where, in short, we teach you how to generate lots of brilliant ideas quickly. great ideas are produced by talented individuals working together positively with colleagues. great ideas come from teams having productive creative meetings. And they come from people having great conversations around the office. Brilliant brainstorms and creative conversations are supported by two key skills: LISTENING and saying “YES AND…”. And these two skills are what we focus on in our workshops. Improvisation offers a fantastic grammar of collaboration, and that’s what we teach. Plus you’ll leave with a replicable process for ideation that you can use again and again.
TaKeawaYs
• A tool box of practical techniques and improv philosophies that will allow you and your team to be more creative than ever before. Plus: ways to blast through any creative block.
• Ideas and techniques from improvisation to improve brainstorms. Including how to get the best out of everyone around the table: both introverts and extroverts. Plus the relevance of status to meetings, aimed at getting junior staff to speak up.
• essential insights into the science of creativity, so you understand common obstacles to creative thinking.
• How to structure and facilitate a brainstorm using the techniques of “yes, and”, “plussing”, and “showing your working”.
• A positive attitude to risk and failure.
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TaKeawaYs
• Build active listening skills.
• Learn how to embrace objections as an opportunity, and use the philosophy of “yes, and…” to overcome them.
• Learn the effective use of questions to seek information from a
prospect, and then justify your product in light of this, using the improv skill of reincorporation.
• How to tell great stories to persuade prospects to buy.
• Be comfortable talking off-the-cuff.
In this workshop we will use improvisation to help your salespeople leave their script behind.
Daniel Pink writes about improvisation in his bestselling book “to Sell is Human”. He says, “Once we begin to listen in this new, more intimate way, we begin hearing things we might have missed. And if we listen in this way in our efforts to move others, we quickly realise that what may outwardly seem like objections are actually offers in disguise.” And this is an excellent summation of what this workshop is about.
In the improv model of sales, the sales process is dynamic and evolving in real time. the salesperson must be active and present. the script will appear in the context of the conversation. And that conversation has never happened before, and will never happen again.
Plus we will use our insights as storytellers to help you use the power of stories to establish rapport, communicate customer success stories, and show your product in action.
Improv for sales
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using our unique insights taken from experience in the worlds of stand-up comedy, theatre and improv, and our dynamic delivery style, your staff will be transformed. Public speaking is listed as people’s number one fear. even more scary than death! which is why we think it’s crucial to establish a warm and positive training environment for our students to practice presenting and public speaking. And that’s what you get: road-tested insights, delivered with personality and energy, in a warm relaxed environment that makes people actually want to get up in front of an audience.
TaKeawaYs
• Charisma in a Day: speak with confidence and warmth by learning our 5 steps to irresistible charisma.
• Pillars of structure: how to brainstorm content for your presentation and then structure it in the most powerful way possible to influence your audience.
• Story-telling Magic: learn how to structure your presentation like a story to inspire and persuade your audience.
• the Improv edge: learn to use the skills of improvisation to effectively overcome objections and speak off-the-cuff.
presentatIon anD pItchIng skIlls
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storytellIng
the ability to tell a great story is a powerful skill applicable in so many areas of life and business. to an extent, storytelling is intuitive. Stories seem to be wired into our human brains, a natural capacity that we use to inspire, teach, or amuse each other. But imagine if we could take that raw ability and polish it into something magnificent? that’s what we teach you to do in this workshop.
you’ll learn the craft of creating and telling stories for personal impact: how to use the power of story to move your audience to action. And after this fun and experiential session you’ll have things you can take away with you and use immediately. Fascinating theory, brilliant examples, and practical takeaways.
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TaKeawaYs
• what elements good stories contain.
• the theory of how stories work: all great stories have a similar shape and this shape is what we teach.
• 4 essential business story structures.
• How to tell an authentic story with charisma and impact. Ditching the deck to use story to connect with, inspire and persuade an audience.
• How to articulate a personal connection to a product so you can stop “selling” and instead sound like a real, authentic human being.
• How important the inclusion of the “right” details in a story is. So: which ‘gleaming details’ make a story easy for colleagues and customers to pass on? i.e. how to make your story go viral.
• Bringing an audience into your story: to make it super relevant to them, and make them part of telling the story.
• How to tell stories ‘off the cuff’ (i.e. what to do when you haven’t had time
to prepare).
storytellIng
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Takeaways
• Improved active listening skills in
conversations and in meetings so that
the listener is present, and not stuck
in their own head waiting to say their
piece. Learn how to listen with intent to
improve collaboration, communication
and to build stronger relationships
based on trust.
• emotional intelligence: how to make
your colleagues feel heard and
understood. And also how to give
feedback with sensitivity.
• Picking up on not just verbal
communication but non-verbal
communication too.
• How to use active listening skills to
help pitch to new and existing clients to
improve sales.
Listening skills are crucial in the workplace. whether you are listening to a colleague, listening to a client or listening to a sales prospect, listening is the foundation of effective communication.
Improv training offers a brilliant, effective and fun framework to teach active listening and communication skills. Because the exercises we use are essentially a microcosm of the conversations your staff will have every-day, and, simply put, through repeatedly playing these games your staff will become better listeners. After-all: practice makes perfect!
But it’s not enough to just listen to another person’s idea. they must also feel supported too. they require us to hear them, and then to say “yes, and…”. that is, to accept their idea and attempt to support it in some way. these skills are the two building blocks of improv.
lIstenIng anD effectIve commUnIcatIon skIlls
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we live in a VuCA world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Improv can help your leaders cope with a world defined by constant change. the improv exercises we’ll use act like microcosms for the uncertain circumstances you’ll encounter every day in the world, and thus offer a perfect framework to train our responses to it.
Improv players are comfortable existing within uncertainty: when they go on stage they simply have no idea what suggestions the audience will throw at them. there is no script. the show is different every time. But improv performers thrive in this, seeing uncertainty as an adventure to be embraced, rather than a circumstance to be feared. And that is probably the most helpful part of the improv philosophy: always seeing opportunities to be taken, rather than problems to be escaped from.
In an uncertain world failure is inevitable. New products won’t work, marketing won’t connect, errors will be made. But improvisation can teach you to embrace it. to see the ‘little bets’ you make as an intrinsic part of a modern approach to business. And then we can use the debris of failure to build the next opportunity.
these ideas can seem like trite truisms. Ideas that we all agree with. But the exercises we’ll use will highlight the gap between theory and practice. And get participants to embody and experience the creative potential of mistakes and ‘failures’. In short, improv teaches you to have a positive attitude to uncertainty and change: accepT iT, celebRaTe iT, ThRiVe in iT.
vUca: volatIlIty, UncertaInty, compleXIty anD amBIgUIty
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TaKeawaYs
• Learn to be present in the moment and
actively listening, rather than being
stuck in your head, to allow awareness
of changing circumstances.
• Learn to throw-out existing plans in
light of new circumstances in order to
adapt to new circumstances quickly.
• Learn to see uncertainty and failure
as a positive opportunity, rather
than something to be feared. And
also manifest confidence within that
uncertainty.
• Change management techniques.
vUca: volatIlIty, UncertaInty, compleXIty anD amBIgUIty
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How to book
Please call 07908980409 or e-mail us [email protected]. we’ll seek to fully understand your needs and respond quickly with a full, bespoke proposal. www.hooplabusiness.com
faQs is it scary?
Not at all. Nobody is on a stage in front of an audience. we do everything in exercises
together as group or in pairs. we also warm into everything slowly so nothing feels like a big
leap. the feedback we get at the end of workshops is how warm the environment is and it’s
something we really focus on.
Do i have to have any experience?
Not at all. No acting, improvising or any sort of performing experience is necessary
whatsoever. you don’t have to be funny either. you just have to be yourself.
sounds kind-of weird. is this a normal thing to do at work?!
Absolutely. we’ve worked with a huge range of clients across a gamut of industries.
By using improv as a training tool you’ll be following in the footsteps of google, twitter and
Apple. Plus, improvisation training is now part of most leading business school programmes
worldwide. this is not a comedy class. this is not a drama class. we use the principles and
games of improvisation to provide delegates with real, tangible, practical skills that they can
use straight away.
how many people can you manage?
we can manage groups from anywhere between 5 people to 200. the most common
numbers however are usually between 10 and 20. we’ve done workshops and events
through-out the uK and europe, so we’re happy to travel.
