Learning and Development
At the heart of effective collaboration lies self-awareness and clear communication. We believe that when people understand their own patterns and can express their needs and expectations, working together becomes more natural and productive. That’s why we offer a variety of learning and development opportunities to support both individual growth and team effectiveness.
Our offerings include in-company training and coaching, designed to strengthen communication and collaboration within your organisation. These can be tailored to meet your specific needs – just get in touch and we’ll be happy to discuss the possibilities.
In addition to bespoke services, we regularly organise workshops and trainings that are open to everyone, with some offered free of charge as part of our Community of Practice.
Start Better Conversations
As part of Start Better Conversations, Umar and Pascal have started a Community of Practice, and in 2025 we will facilitate 8 different workshops.
On the first Wednesday of the month we will come together to discuss, practice, learn, explore and share different ways of improving our communication and collaboration by improving our conversation skills.
Clean Language Introduction
In our ongoing effort to spread Clean Language in the Netherlands, we offer introductory workshops in Dutch for those who like to have first-hand personal experience.
These workshops are offered online by Clean Language Nederland. Both Michael Oskam and Pascal Clarkson are available for bespoke workshops. Contact us for more info or sign up for one of the planned sessions.
Workshop Purposeful Interrupting
When we engage in conversation, things will happen that require an interruption. We might need clarification, people might be getting off topic, or something happens that requires us to pause what is currently going on. Often interruptions will hurt our interaction. Many people find it difficult to interrupt. This workshop centers around finding out more on how you view interrupting, what is required to do an interruption well, and you’ll get a lot of practice of interrupting.
Clean Language Event
One of the highlights of our event calendar has been the Clean Language Event, which we’ve proudly organised and facilitated three times. Please note that we will not be hosting this event in 2025.
Introductory Workshop Clean Language Interviewing
This introductory workshop, Clean Language Interviewing, is your first step in getting your skills for eliciting information from others to the next level. You’ll learn the basics like keeping your inferences, biases and assumptions separate from your interview so that you do not pollute your data. What it means to use Clean and Contextually Clean questions and what impact this has on your interview.
Contact us if you’d like to improve your employees’ ability to elicit high quality data fast.
Start Better Conversations
By raising awareness of what small things we can do to improve our conversations, we can quickly and with great impact improve how we engage and communicate with each other.
Once we know what we need to be in a better state and how our assumptions play a huge role in our conversations, we can make some changes. By spending more time on the different contexts we all bring to the conversation, and how we can listen with curiosity, we will more accurately and easily understand each other. Bringing in practical ways of doing this and adding useful tips on how we provide feedback, we will have a huge impact on our conversations.
A rough Guide to You and your Team
In this series of workshops, we will support your team in finding out what they need to be performing better by providing them with basic tools and skills to investigate and learn from each other. By knowing and understanding their own and each other’s preferences of working, learning, collaborating, making decisions and so on. These sessions will help in discovering these basic and invaluable themes, and how to support each other to be at their best more of the time.
No more boring learning
I love to learn, and I know this isn’t true for everyone. And so what can we do to make sure that when learning is on the agenda, we are actually able to make the transfer from the learning environment to the working environment? This is where the “No More Boring Learning” concept comes in. As part of my own development, I’ve been training with Jeanne Bakker at Brain Bakery. Bringing the right models, tools and techniques to design and deliver training that has impact. If you are interested in “No More Boring Learning”, contact me and perhaps check out Jeanne’s book and podcast.
