More details:

If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. The woods are a mystery. They represent the future, the unknown, the uncertain, the people we know and the people we don’t, and places we want to get to but do not yet have the map. In the woods live lovely creatures and lavish greenery, high trees and hidden rivers and monsters that watch from the undergrowth. But one thing is sure: whoever steps beneath the trees emerges transformed.

In this session, we will take a journey into the woods. You will encounter different things as you explore with us. There might be a trail of breadcrumbs. There might be a gingerbread house. Will there be dreams of where you want to go? Or nightmares that you want to avoid? We will help you start to articulate your change management journey by envisioning the journey and your happy-ever-after.

On our journey, we might meet artefacts and woodland creatures such as rats and pumpkins. If your Change Challenge simply needs a good storyteller to help it flourish, your Change Agent persona can be the fairy godmother. Perhaps you can find a way to transform the items at hand into a beautiful coach, and send Cinderella off to achieve her dreams by putting her in a pretty dress.

But if your management monster is an enormous wolf with great big teeth and great big goggly eyes, it is going to eat up the fairy godmother, put on her sparkly tiara and sit in her bed waiting for the next meal. You might need to be the Slayer, the Agent of Change that knows how to brutally dismember the monster; then fill its stomach with rocks so that it cannot rise back up and eat you again. Change management does not have to be the hero’s journey.

Through this roleplaying, card-scaffolded, giant imaginary boardgame with dressing up, we will help you identify what kind of fantasy your change management fable is, so you can explore creative and appropriate ways to disguise yourself, and make positive change in the world.

Expected outcomes:

This workshop is, on the surface, about navigating culture change. Some facilitators and educators might love using playful techniques, but others might struggle to see the added value. Helping colleagues specify useful educational practice and embracing fun storytelling (and drawing the distinction between this and bullshit), we hope this session will provide some useful pointers to navigate the transformation from frog to fairy prince/ss (or back again, if that’s your thing).

Under the surface, this session is about using and abusing playful metaphors for continuing professional development (as management consultants and trainers often love to do). An underlying theme of many fairytales is that “that harm and danger can be survived, and make a person more robust” [1]. This can only happen, though, if the conventions are met, the trials are faced fairly, the crone’s advice is heeded and good triumphs over evil. With their focus on values, archetypal roles and artefacts that are more than meets the eye, fairytales provide rich metaphors for exploring the complexities of culture change. This session, and the game we are developing for the workshop, will help participants to reflect on real scenarios in training and change management, using fairytale stories of heroism, challenge, death and glory, and apply their own narrative to get to a happy ever after that they are willing to live with.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/28/sara-maitland-gossip-forest-review