Some years ago, I watched a room full of senior managers sit through a flawless presentation on empathetic leadership — nodding, note-taking, unmoved. A week later I watched a different group watch a film scene in which a character makes a quiet, costly act of loyalty. The room went still. The discussion that followed ran forty minutes over time. Nobody looked at their phone.
That contrast set the direction for much of my work since: building experiential methods — Cinema as Classroom, Theatre-based learning, the Human Process Lab, NLP-based OD — into the leadership curriculum of a 10,000-person organisation.
Why stories work when slides don’t
A slide speaks to what you know. A story speaks to what you feel, and feeling is where behaviour actually changes. Neuroscience calls it narrative transportation; a facilitator sees it as the moment a leader stops evaluating the content and starts recognising themselves in it. Cinema achieves in ninety seconds what a competency model cannot achieve in ninety minutes: it makes the abstraction personal.
Theatre removes the screen
When leaders step into role-play or watch live performance, there is no distance left. Voice, posture, hesitation, silence: everything becomes data. We have used theatre-based learning to teach difficult conversations, and the learning is visceral. You cannot intellectualise your way through a scene; you have to be in it.
The Human Process Lab is the deep end
HPL — offsite, unstructured, and confronting in the gentlest way — strips away role and title and lets a leader meet themselves. I have facilitated these labs for 200+ senior leaders, and I still find them the most powerful instrument in the kit. People walk in as designations and walk out as persons. The behaviour shift that follows is durable precisely because it wasn’t taught — it was discovered.
Where to start
You don’t need a big budget. Pick one film scene that dramatises the behaviour you want to build. Screen it. Ask three questions: What did you see? Where have you lived this? What will you do differently on Monday? Resist the urge to debrief with a framework. The story has already done the teaching — your job is only to let it land.
Slides inform. Stories transform. Any learning function serious about behaviour change needs both — but the second one is where the magic lives.
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