What possibilities open up for companies willing to explore and employ Nordic-style educational live-action role-playing (edu-larp)?

In his presentation, Ljubljana-based author, business coach and game master Blaz Branc, will present key findings of his newly published book “Imagine This,” focusing on 5 case studies showcasing results and benefits of “larping” for developing employee’s competencies.

HR managers and HR development specialists of a wide array of industries (think banking, pharmaceuticals, home appliances manufacturing) have successfully run edu-larp-based trainings to address issues such as silo mentality, innovation and general strategy alignment, digital transformation strategy, situational leadership, change management and more.

Closing the presentation, the audience will be provoked with ideas on how the rapidly developing technology, joining forces with live-action roleplaying, can change how we assess, reflect and transform that which is most elusive in humans: attitudes and mind-sets.

From our earliest years, we learned how to perceive our safety and danger through narrative storytelling and metaphors and tested how to navigate our worlds through abstraction and group play. As adults, Serious Games enable us to continue that practice, offering us enormous potential for exploring difficult issues and challenging themes, and testing dangerous strategic questions, within a safe and confidential space.

In this presentation, Paul O’Connor will demonstrate the importance of abstraction and metaphors in serious game design, through examples of highly immersive serious game experiences created for Board directors, senior management teams, HR directors, business organizations, academic institutions and their students.  He will explain how they were used to expose and generate deep insights regarding risk appetite, business blind spots and unethical values, to challenge attitudes towards diversity & inclusion, to build teams and improve internal communications, to overturn assumptions and transform attitudes to historical events – and why you should never shake hands with an alien!

If time permits, he will present a simple but highly effective game structure for conducting analog business war games with small teams of stakeholders.

An Introduction to Positive Leadership for a Positive Organization

Positive Leadership boosts employees’ engagement, leaders have to help their people play to their strengths and find purpose at work. This workshop shows people and teams how to solve complex challenges and promote individual and organizational leadership with a systematic approach to creativity and collective thinking, designing and facilitating “vivential” learning experiences with LEGO® SeriousPlay®.

INSPIREO® is an agile learning method developed at University of Barcelona, using project based learning, agile management and innovation methods interwoven with the LEGO® Serious Play® method to create learning environments in which participants can discover how to integrate practical concepts and specific knowledge in a project / problem solving scenarios, which facilitates the building and exploration of innovation frameworks and collective thinking.

Hundreds of gamified solutions have been launched and used by millions of people globally, yet gamified solutions are still approached with caution. Organisations looking to adopt this approach for L&D or education still feel like early adopters and risk takers. Why is this the case for an industry that’s predicted to grow at 37.1% with revenues quadruple by 2023? In this session, we’ll explore the top 5 steps you need to consider to make your serious game successful and highlight organisations who have been there and done it. By the end of the session, you will understand your options, understand the pitfalls and learn the lessons of the real early adopters.

This talk will focus on how to combine the best of both worlds from the digital and analogue world. Over the years it has become increasingly clear that each format has its strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, choosing the right format is crucial to ensure the right impact from the business simulation game. Unfortunately, the choice is most often based on random preference rather than a careful analysis of what format is most appropriate to achieve the intended impact.

We will discuss the characteristics of each format and why a combination can make a lot of sense. We explore recent customer projects, where the focus is on just-in-time micro-learning closely intertwined with the learners’ existing practice. We insist that the social interaction and reflection is kept center stage as, all too often, the critical social component is damaged when business simulation games become digital.

Ingrained in this approach is a focus on moving business simulation games away from a traditional instructional approach. Traditionally, learners are removed from their practice to learn, and then expected to move back into their praxis bringing in all the new insights. This is far from optimal, and especially possible with a blended approach.

A collaborative workshop on learning game design.

The 4C’s of 21st Century Education are almost identical to the four skills identified by the World Economic Forum as most valuable in the future. They are also competencies that permeate much of current training and change management in the HR field. In this collaborative workshop we will explore how we can use serious game methods to develop these skills to an even greater degree in the future.