INTEGRATED ROLE-PLAY | Management Excellence Programme

What the client wanted

The end client, a national regulatory authority, engaged Academee, a leading learning solutions consultancy, to design and deliver a modular management and leadership development programme. The aim of the programme was to prepare managers and leaders for their role in transformative change.

Impromptu worked with Academee to design and deliver the role-play elements to support the programme and to ensure that there were a variety of organisational specific opportunities for participants to develop and practice their skills.

What we did

Impromptu (who have involvement in two modules of the four module programme) provided design input into the shape of the ‘integrated role-play solution’ for module 1, wrote the client specific scenarios and provided the role-players for this module. (Module 2 uses a business simulation approach).

The ‘integrated role-play solution’ on module 1 involves role-play throughout both days of this two-day module. Role-players are variously used to give coached demonstrations (where the participants coach the manager, portrayed by a role-player, in an observed scenario – this is sometimes called ‘forum theatre’), best-practice demonstrations and forum role-play activity, where the participants have to deal with a challenging issue with a member of their team. Each of the practice sessions relates to one of the themes of the programme and is used to support and reinforce the learning.

The use of integrated role-play ensures that each of the learning themes is embedded, that the role-players are fully incorporated into the learning experience and that there is an opportunity to make the learning process organic.

Although pre-written around client specific themes, each of the scenarios can be tailored to reflect the specialism of individual participants who come from all areas of the organisation and have very different areas of expertise – economics, government, medicine, operations for example. The role-players have to absorb new information quickly to make each unique scenario realistic.

The outcomes

The benefit to the participants of working in this way are:

• Immediate translation of theory into practice;
• Transfer of learning back to the work place because the connections are clearly being made throughout the module;
• Strong engagement brought about by the links continually being made between theory, practice, personal experience and business context.