Background
After studying French at Oxford, I trained as a director at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and worked for ten years in the theatre. I then joined Arts & Business where one of my roles was to train arts managers how to raise sponsorship.
I became de facto the training specialist at A&B and was in the forefront of developing “arts-based” training – that is, using arts techniques and processes to deliver effective training solutions. I set up my own company in 2005 to continue this work and have now delivered courses for an eclectic group of organisations including Zurich, ITV, Ashridge, Capital One, the National Archives and the Portuguese firm Sonae Sierra. My latest client is The Royal Household.
As well as operating in the UK (and Portugal, of course), I have run courses over the last few years in Spain, Finland, Italy, Greece, Germany and the USA; and I served on the International Advisory Board of the Banff Centre for Leadership in Canada. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a trustee of the magnificent international theatre company, Cheek by Jowl.
Expertise
My company, Ci, specialises in “soft skills” training – how people work with people. So we have run courses on Personal Presence and Impact, on Presenting with Confidence and Imagination, on Influencing and Negotiation Skills, on Giving and Receiving Feedback, on Dealing with Conflict, on Working Creatively and on many other such issues. All our courses are tailored specifically to the needs of each client and we don’t run any open courses.
We also specialise in Forum Theatre, an increasingly wide-spread and powerful training process. It works like this: we research our client’s issue and write a short play about it. We then perform the play to the relevant audience and stop the action to ask where things are going wrong. The audience then tells the characters how they should change their behaviour and the actors play the scenes again, often many times, according to the suggestions of the audience, until a satisfactory outcome is reached. Because the audience can see instantly the impact of their suggestions, they really train themselves. Forum Theatre works particularly well combined with interactive exercises or role-play – and it really works. We won two National Training Awards using it on a major programme for ITV.
We also offer 1:1 coaching, particularly for senior managers preparing a speech; and occasionally we are asked to provide an imaginative conference intervention. I ran one recently in Portugal which involved exploring leadership and teamwork through working with an orchestra.
Other things to note:
My first book, 'Start with an Earthquake. . .How to make presentations that wow your audience' was published in August 2013. Based on my years of experience as a director in the theatre and on 20+ years of training and coaching people to deliver presentations, it distils material from my presentation skills courses and has already been positively received.
I run a virtual company. If I need a co-trainer, I have a small army of associates to call on, most of whom are feelance and run their own businesses. This means I can bring in the most appropriate person for the job in hand.
I am based in leafy and hilly Buckinghamshire, convenient for London, the M1 and the M40, and Heathrow.
And I am always delighted to receive invitations to corporate golf days!
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