The last few weeks sum up exactly why I set up Enact Solutions. Great people. Great clients. Great work that leaves me buzzing!
Here’s just a couple of examples.
‘Life changing’ is easily said, but I reckon our Ed’s Up show is just that. It’s small scale, very intimate, working close up with young people who have lost their way within formal learning. It connects. It really does. The youth workers at one of our recent workshops for Suffolk County Council told us about one young man. They hadn’t managed to get him to stay in the room for more than 10 minutes, not for anything. Ed’s Up, the actors, the plain speaking, the interaction, they all held him for 2 hours! Awesome. Will it change lives? Well, there are many factors at work, but we are very, very sure that this workshop reaches disaffected young people in ways that other approaches don’t. It gets its positive and hopeful messages across, along with very practical help and support. If that makes a difference to just one or two young lives, well that’s more than enough!
Seemingly in another world entirely (a galaxy far, far away), we’ve been working with a leading light in the F1 motor sport industry (one that prefers to remain nameless) on their new recruitment process. They want to do everything they can to ensure that when they expend time and money on finding new employees they get the right person, first time. In a couple of one-day workshops, we helped them introduce their new standardised approach to all of their managers, including getting very busy developing their Interviewing Skills with our professional actors in a range of realistic scenarios. It went very, very well. The client was delighted. We were chuffed!
That’s just two of the things we’ve been up to at Enact. Maybe they seem like chalk and cheese. Certainly it’s hard to see any obvious similarity between training managers in a corporate setting and our work with disillusioned young people in Suffolk. But there is one, as this Interviewing Skills delegate ably illustrates:
“I did my first training course in 1991 and have done hundreds in the interim… I can honestly say this is the best format of training I have ever attended. Most trainers have to drag information from a reluctant audience. By using actors and asking for observations, Enact ran a very interactive and valuable session.”
See what I mean? Using a drama-based approach gets through to people. It’s out of the ordinary and it works because it engages people like nothing else. Disaffected young people, busy employees, most everybody, it doesn’t matter. It gets people thinking, and feeling, and that makes it that bit more likely that it’s going to make a positive difference.
And that’s why I do it. I want Enact to make a real difference!!
