By Nigel Higgs.

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Role-play - its uses

Role-play (with and without an actor) is being used as the tool of choice in many businesses particularly when they are looking to extend their people’s skills in such areas as sales, customer service and generally within soft-skills and management development. 

Role-playing opposite and actor allows participants to test their existing skills and to apply new learning against what is approaching a real situation.  The reality of any role-play is generally dependent upon the actor playing opposite the participant as there is an inherent need to lift the character they play off of the scenario page and into the room.  This requires actors with good improvisation skills and a reasonable knowledge of the situations being played.

Early in its use (the early 1990’s) there was a tendency to ‘cram’ as many participants into a session as possible.  This meant that each participant would only have one attempt at the role-play and the emphasis was on the analysis of the workshop leader, feedback from the group and possibly the actor.  Now days, it is more likely that there will be fewer participants (or more actors), allowing each participant more time to try out and ‘flex’ the skills that they have been learning.

Also, the actor is seen as a more important source of feedback – they can provide input on how each participant affected their emotional state, their reactions to specific strategies used can provide a high degree of insight into how participants need to adjust the strategies they are using.

The structure and approach to the use of role-play within a workshop still remains the same – it is usually situated towards the end of a workshop.  The theory section within a workshop is generally given priority, the approach tending to be to learn the theory and then apply it.  This has the effect on participants of needing to take on board a number of concepts that are usually new to them, retaining the meaning and importance of those concepts and then applying them at a later point.

I would suggest that not only does this minimise the use of role-play and the actors involved, it also places a greater pressure on participants when trying to apply all that they have learnt in, what is effectively, a short space of time.  People have differing learning styles and therefore need to assimilate information in a different way, but the common theme to any learning process should be the application of those new skills.

It has been my experience that by using a role-play format throughout a workshop – for example, by breaking the learning process up into sections dealing with specific a concept or related concepts – the participants gain a greater insight into those concepts, can apply any basic strategies (or see them applied in real-time – mistakes and all), and can gain a greater understanding of why those concepts and strategies are more appropriate, more effective, and why they may provide better outcomes.

There are also added benefits from such an approach – the interactions between the actors and participants become less traumatic as it becomes a more iterative process, reducing the pressure to perform for some participants, an effect that can alter the way they perform within a role-play.  Also, the actors are accepted as part of the team (whereas they can be seen as ‘visiting’ just to do role-play), and creativity increases – because of the more dynamic quality of the process.

But there are times that ‘one-off’ role-plays can be much more effective – a prime example is assessment centres.  Since an assessment centre will focus on the current abilities of a person, a role-play carried out with an actor who the participant has never met before, provides a stage upon which more can be discovered about an individual’s abilities within certain situations or interactions.

Plus, it also makes the actor feel better as it’s like watching other people do auditions – always a more pleasant prospect than doing them yourself.

Forum Theatre – Next Step from Role-play?

First of all for those who haven’t experienced it I will provide an outline of how Forum Theatre works – at least how it works the way I use it.

The objective of Forum Theatre, as it is used within the training and management development area, is to engage the participants into exploring how personal interactions work in as deep a way as possible by watching actors play out one or more scenarios.  And to look at how outcomes can change when different behavioural approaches are used (in both positive and negative ways).  They can then, with the actors, experiment around the ways in which they could use these different behaviours within their workplace.   This initial form of Forum Theatre helps them do this without them feeling pressurised by having to role-play any of scenarios. 

The Process:

The facilitator will outline the Forum Theatre process and the subject matter – the topic. 

The actors will then perform one of the scenarios that have either been scripted and rehearsed, or improvised from a scenario.  The Facilitator will then split the audience (Participants) into 2 teams, each of which will support one of the actors (there usually are 2 actors within each scenario, although this can be expanded).  The initial brief is for each team to support and help ‘their actor’ in achieving his or her aim (as is apparent from the action of the scene).  This is achieved through a start/stop process – after the first performance of the scene, the actors run it again and any member of either team can stop the action, merely by calling out ‘STOP!’  The actors will then each go to consult with their team. 

 The objective of the team is to provide the actor with alternative strategies (language, behaviours, attitudes, etc) with which he/she can achieve his/her character’s objective.  There is a time-limit on each stop and the Facilitator will bring the actors back to the performance area once this is reached.  The team who stopped the action will start the process and will decide where it will start from (it can start from any point that has already been covered).  Also, at some point the Facilitator will switch the teams to support the ‘other’ actor – so both teams can look at the other side of the equation.

Once the teams become happy with the process the Facilitator can adjust each team’s aims to look at specific issues, which usually evolve around specific behaviours and/or attitudes.  For example this process can be very useful when exploring or dealing with bullying, sexism, racism, violent or aggressive behaviour, prejudice, bigotry, anger management, assertiveness, sales skills, customer care skills… in fact, it can be used or adapted to work on any face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) interaction between two or more people.  Through the Forum Theatre process the teams can compete with each other to define behavioural strategies that are more appropriate to the business cult