Funds Europe, October 2004

Adrian McDougall of CentreStage argues that acting out problems in a risk-free environment can encourage employees to think creatively.

When it comes to giving your employees the scope to learn and develop, the arts can play a pivotal role. Ever since the creation of Video Arts by John Cleese and other professionals from the entertainment industry in 1972, drama has forged a home for itself in the world of professional development.

But the benefits of drama-based learning and its relevance to businesses from every industry are still not fully understood.

For managers and department heads within the European finance community, the standards imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and other recent corporate governance initiatives, have made effective corporate ethics and compliance an integral part of good corporate governance. As well as intensifying focus on controls and oversight, employee training has come into the spotlight as a critical step in meeting these regulations.

Necessary Skills

So how best do you equip your employees with the skills and the knowledge necessary to deal with the risk issues so prevalent in today's international financial services? In June this year CSC Computer Sciences Ltd, a leading global IT services firm, decided to try something a little different and teamed up with CentreStage Partnership Ltd to present a piece of theatre to two hundred pan-global delegates from the reinsurance market as part of a conference entitled "Risk Management In Action", designed to cover the main implications of Sarbanes-Oxley.

The aim of the play, written by Anita Bradshaw, a managing consultant with CSC, was to highlight major industry concerns such as poor management, fraud, compliance and industry regulation, and to illustrate what can happen when things go wrong.

The story followed the fortunes of a number of overworked employees from an international reinsurance house embarking on the first steps to compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley.

Focussing on the risks run by the various departments of the company (Business, Operations, IT, Compliance), it began with the initial budget meeting, then took delegates through the rest of the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance process, from the installation of compliance software to user acceptance testing, illustrating how decisions taken at every level affected individuals, departments and the company as a whole.

And the denouement? Let's just say the company found itself relieved of several million euros, the two love-struck employees got away with the laundered money, and their bosses got demoted and given 15 months 'gardening leave'.

The point of the workshop was not simply to provide light relief, but to create a forum in which the audience would feel stimulated, challenged and sufficiently involved to take ownership of the story as it unfolded. So between scenes delegates were given the opportunity to discuss the issues raised and to suggest how the problems encountered in the play might be avoided.

Why use drama?

If there is one word guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of corporate managers it is 'drama'. It tends to conjure up images of inner sanctuaries and steady humming. The fact is however, far from being a touchy feely approach to communication skills training, drama-based learning works on many different levels and is continuing to change the way companies approach the challenge of staff learning and development.

Moreover, HR and development professionals are realising increasingly that the creative process so fundamental to artistic expression underpins the way we learn and the manner in which we apply what we have learned to everyday life.

Central to this thinking is experiential learning, the process of learning by doing. By allowing us to 'experience' a situation and influence it in an infinite number of ways, drama-based learning encourages us to experiment with new ideas, to test new approaches to existing issues, then to see the consequences of our decisions.

The problem is that the reams of regulations and tick lists imposed by legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley do not make for a creative working environment.

Moreover the pitfalls inherent in the risk management arena are all too real for those wielding the purse strings; making the wrong decision simply is not an option. And yet it is through getting it wrong that we learn because we are forced to approach problems from different angles. Experiential learning allows us to do just that: to put forward ideas and opinions in a safe environment.

Forum Theatre

The style of the workshop employed by CSC, often referred to as 'forum theatre', is just one form of experiential learning. Whether scripted or improvised, it puts the audience in the driving seat; an interactive stage where delegates are directors for better or for worse.

Forum theatre is extremely effective at triggering debate. By raising questions about working practices, it challenges perceptions and most importantly gets people to share ideas and compare experiences - giving your employees the opportunity to talk to each other is half the communication battle won.

Quirky Anecdote

What is more, forum theatre is a memorable way of making a relevant point. From the barrage of facts, figures and statistics of a key-note speech, do we not tend to remember the quirky anecdote, the dash of light relief and the sprinkling of humour?

Andy Toms, marketing director, CSC Financial Services EMEA, comments, "Using this concept for putting across the key points about risk has proved very successful. The drama element, supported with a very interactive approach with the audience, certainly has novelty factor, but it also manages to successfully combine this with the seriousness of the messages we wanted to put across.

"All in all, it makes for a very refreshing and welcome change from the usual type of presentation to an audience of this size, and created a real buzz afterwards. It brought the messages to life in a way that hasn't been so easily achievable with traditional presentation or training techniques."

Roleplay

Another form of experiential learning is 'roleplay'. A roleplay workshop typically takes the form of a one-on-one encounter in which a delegate can test or be assessed on a whole range of skills and techniques through their interaction with a character played by an actor.

Unfortunately, 'roleplay' is another of those words with negative connotations. For many, it is the embarrassing activity of simulating a work-related scenario with a colleague, a pointless and unrealistic activity serving as a put-off for any at the receiving end of the dreaded 'staff training day'.

However, roleplay is an extremely effective tool when used properly. As well as being realistic and believable, a professional roleplayer is capable of gauging the skills, experience and learning needs of an individual and responding accordingly. In a nutshell roleplay is as close to a real working environment as you can get without the risks that accompany it.

One such workshop, run by CentreStage, was the culmination of disciplinary procedure training run by a major UK drinks manufacturer, designed to assess line managers on their ability to deal with workers in breach of company procedures, conduct disciplinary hearings and issue formal warnings.

Facing characters played in varying levels of difficulty by CentreStage roleplayers, delegates were allowed to approach the scenarios in different ways and to discover how the style and language they used influenced the outcome.

Feedback revealed that the workshops worked because the scenarios and the roleplayers were realistic.

What was interesting, however, was that the success of a hearing was determined more by the delegates' communication techniques than by their knowledge of disciplinary procedures.

Similarly, compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley is not just about knowledge of regulations but the way companies, departments and individuals apply that knowledge to their work. Moreover it is an opportunity for your business to streamline and, more importantly, for employees to reassess their approach to issues old and new.

The forum designed by CSC and CentreStage, like any piece of drama-based learning, worked by inspiring delegates to debate issues and allowing them to think creatively by taking away the risk factor - because in the world of compliance, that risk is all too real.

Adrian McDougall is a director of CentreStage Partnership.