One can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation
Socrates
Edutainment = Education + Entertainment
Possibly due to my limited playtime as a child, I've consistently felt a strong inclination for play. Over the years, I've crafted a variety of games!
Little by little, I have introduced them into my practice as a trainer and have witnessed first-hand how much play helps us, as adults, break free from roles and stereotyped perceptions of ourselves and others. It facilitates overcoming judgment barriers and stimulates divergent thinking, or our capacity for intuition and empathy.
At the same time, using games requires careful planning of the training intervention, clarity in the objectives to be achieved, and a solid competence in managing communication. It requires mature skills in activity facilitation, including handling reactions, perhaps of refusal or abstention, and the ability to facilitate subsequent feedback to transform the experienced into learning.
In short, this is not the kind of thing you can just improvise!
The games my team and I propose are designed to:
Develop specific soft skills
Highlight organisational and internal communication dynamics
Stimulate teamwork and cooperative strategies
Increase awareness of the impact of emotions on actions
Getting to know each other in a different way
Uncover some self-sabotage and laugh about it
Over time, I’ve developed a number of “tested” games, with different levels of engagement and impact, making them suitable for use in scenarios unaccustomed to this type of activity.
...God forbid anyone think that training is not a serious matter... It's not a game!!! Actually, play is a very serious matter; just think of ourselves when we were little or observe children playing...
For intrepid organisations that like to dare and try their hand at getting their employees to play with emotions and cooperative strategies in a decidedly innovative way, I have created BACKUP – Back to the Under Planet, my latest new game!