Enabling Transformational Change Can Be Fun, Effective and Efficient
The School of Play is run with passion, fun and curiosity.
At The School of Play, we believe adults should get the opportunity to experience transformational change in a fun, friendly and safe environment where we can connect with others as well as reconnect with our playful selves.
The School of Play is the first ever creation of its kind which enables adults to discover the life-changing benefits of play. Each encounter is designed to ignite self-discovery and transformative change through fun, friendship, scientific research and play.
Watch Portia’s Agile 2019 closing keynote to learn about Playful Leadership, a concept Portia has created, which contains the secret to creating transformational change and how to have fun doing it: “Playful Leadership: How to Enable Transformational Change and Have Fun Doing It”.
Transformational Change Thru Personal and Executive Coaching
Our focus is on enabling transformative and enduring change through 1-2-1 coaching sessions. We begin with a meet-and-greet session (in person or remote) to explore how we may work most effectively together. We typically recommend a set of 3-6 sessions at intervals of one session every 4-8 weeks, each session lasting between 60-90 minutes.
Transformational Change Thru Agile Coaching
We have 20 years of skills, knowledge and experience to work across hierarchical boundaries to amplify the benefits of Agile throughout an organisation. Our aim is to enable organisational agility as effectively and efficiently as possible, always with our clients’ end goal and success criteria in mind. We achieve this by co-creating, with our clients, the optimal approach of enabling change for their organisation in service of their customers and colleagues.
We specialise in Executive Agile Coaching in order to provide leaders with the support they need to lead change, as well as support upcoming leaders and internal change agents. By supporting organisations with this approach, we enable organisational coherence which leads to positive, enduring change.
Transformational Change Thru Play Coaching
We offer coaching to individuals, groups and teams based on the latest research on play science to help you reconnect with your playful self and ignite your play brain to achieve your goals in a fun, efficient and transformative way.
Workshop Design and Facilitation
We delight in co-evolving and delivering unique, inspiring and playful workshops that enable clients to achieve their goals with clearly defined scope and success criteria upfront to ensure we achieve what we set out to achieve.
Examples of our public programmes and workshops include:
- Four Seasons of Play – A series of half-day workshops for exploring what we call “personal engineering”, professional development through personal development.
- Playful Leadership – An in-person leadership programme enabling personal mastery.
Testimonials
“Portia has been a delight to work with. She’s an indefatiguable source of energy, creativity and fun. She provided both 1-2-1 and group Agile coaching to my team of business experts in Europe and showed us exactly how to estimate, prioritise and plan our deliverables based on business value. Portia’s expertise and enthusiasm showed us all how work can be fun and fulfilling.” – Head of Business Sector @ Global Financial Institution
“Portia worked with me and my colleagues from April 2018 to March 2019 and helped us transform our agile/lean practices. With Portia’s guidance, we introduced ‘Synch and Stabilise’ demos, to bring together the work of several departments and 300+ software engineers i.e. agile at scale. The approach has been revolutionary. Portia was instrumental in enabling us to make this transformation – from steering the initiative at the beginning to running our international workshops and keeping us on track when we might otherwise have lost our way. I highly recommend Portia!” – Engineering Director @ Ocado Technology
“I had the pleasure of working with Portia during her time at Ocado Technology. Her playful approach, along with a deep wealth of experience in Agile and her coaching abilities were tremendously affective. I personally learnt a great deal from Portia by working with her directly and by watching her deal with a very broad range of challenges. Portia’s ability to articulate situations and help drive positive change is truly impressive. I found Portia to be very insightful and adroit, making her easily one of best Agile coaches I’ve ever worked with. I would strongly recommend Portia to anyone.” – Team Lead @ Ocado Technology
“Portia has an amazing skill of coaching and teaching. Her Agile/Scrum class was so effective that my stakeholders who attended her class (many of them are non-technical business users) found the class extremely useful and relevant to their roles (and lots of fun too). I had various Agile trainings in the past, hers is simply the best.” – Head of Technology, Life Insurance Company
“I hugely enjoyed working with Portia. She provided executive coaching to me and my partners in a healthcare environment, and proved to be incredibly insightful, provoking, and helpful in exploring new options. In a limited time frame, Portia was able to identify and address the nature of historic blockers, helping to articulate these in such a way that change seemed not only achievable, but highly likely. I would absolutely recommend as possibly the best coach I’ve worked with in my entire career.” – Senior NHS Leader
“I attended Portia’s From Carpe Diem to Carpe Annum day in January 2017. It was more than compass setting for the new year; it offered me an opportunity to step outside the flow and events of the day-to-day to look at what would really make a long-term difference to me and those around me. It supported a profound re-evaluation of my work–life composition — not just balance — one that I can say endured through the year.” – Kevlin Henny, Technology Thought Leader
Find out more about our clients’ experience of working with Portia and The School of Play here.
THE SCHOOL OF PLAY 