The A-Players Path — our flagship programme for teams
See the programmePlay, as a method
Play changes how we think, connect, create and work together. We design programmes, keynotes, workshops and offsites that use it on purpose — to work better, to learn better, and to be happier people.
The capabilities no manual teaches — connection, trust, standing pressure, improvising, saying the hard thing — are the ones a group only learns by rehearsing them. Everything below is the same method in a different room.
Where we have worked
Working in Spanish and English, out of Guatemala and wherever the room is.
First, the word
Not entertainment, not a break, not the bit before the real work. It is a specific way of behaving — and it is the fastest one we know for learning something that cannot be explained.
Doing something without knowing whether it will work, somewhere it is fine that it might not. That is not a mood. It is a condition you can build on purpose.
People drop the version of themselves they perform in public far faster while playing than while talking. What is underneath is who you actually work with.
Try, get it wrong, adjust, go again — with the consequences turned down far enough that going again is easy. Nothing else compresses that loop so far.
Not by decision. Twenty years of being rewarded for the right answer first time does it quietly, and the capabilities that came with it leave at the same time.
What it builds
Every one of these is trained by playing and by almost nothing else you do voluntarily as an adult. They are also, in order, what a team asks for when it says it wants a better culture.
Taking a loss, a critique or a setback without shrinking from the next one.
Noticing your own state under pressure, and managing it rather than being managed by it.
The energy you bring to a room, chosen deliberately instead of caught from whoever got there first.
Finding a way with what is actually there, instead of waiting for the conditions you were promised.
Genuine trust with the people beside you — not only knowing how to coordinate with them.
Knowing your role and everyone else's well enough to cover, adjust, and hand off without being asked.
Having the idea, and then being able to get it into a room in a form other people can use.
Seven marbles. You cannot buy any of them, and you cannot be lectured into one either.
What play builds
Twenty-seven documented benefits, in four areas. None of them is a side effect of the others.
How you think and solve
What the body can do
How you are with people
How you feel and recover
The flagship programme
A structured, multi-session journey for a team. Each session is built around one of the capabilities above, in a deliberate order — the individual ones first, the relational ones once the group can hold them. Interactive sessions, not lectures: the room does the work.
Scoped and priced after a first conversation. Months, not an afternoon.
Interviews, a survey and observation, run before anything is designed. It is what makes the programme this team's rather than generic.
A run of facilitated workshops, one capability each, in an order that builds. People do, try, talk, and name what happened.
Written material the organization keeps and uses — role descriptors, behaviour codes, the things most companies only half have.
Measured against the opening diagnostic, so there is an answer to the only question that matters: what changed.
What we offer
Shorter engagements, and often the way a company starts. Everything is priced on scope; what is fixed is the shape.
Keynote
A talk that makes a room reconsider what play is for, and leaves it with something usable on Monday. An argument with evidence that happens to be enjoyable — not a motivational hour.
30 to 60 minutes · conferences, all-hands, universities
Workshop
The room does something, talks about what happened, and takes a piece of it away. Spark Play moves a group from the play state of mind into a creative one, and then points it at a real challenge they brought with them.
90 minutes to half a day · one team, 5 to 25 people
Offsite
The long version, built around something the team actually has to resolve. Facilitated throughout — not a recreational weekend with a session bolted onto the Saturday.
One to three days · away from the office
Three ways in
Behind each is a whole page, written for a single audience and for nobody else.
Work together
Programmes, keynotes, workshops and offsites — for teams that have stopped talking to each other properly, and for the ones that want to stay good.
Learn to play
Almost nobody was. Facilitator training today; courses, a player profile and a book being built — with no pretending about which is which.
Find your people
Retreats, open nights, collaborations and Bop It. The part of this that is not for sale — no company and no budget required.
Community
Community is where the argument gets tested in public. We would rather bring a Playground lens to something already happening than announce ourselves as the organizers of everything.
Free
The open night. Arrive alone, play for two hours with people you do not know, and get the same debrief we run for teams who pay us.
Together
Festivals, clubs, coworkings, community nights. We design the play part and run the close; the audience stays with whoever built it.
In production
Conversations about play, people, and the things that keep us alive — filmed in a ball pit, because an interview about play across a boardroom table is already the wrong answer.
In development
A way to find what you actually have in common with someone, instead of trading job titles. Built to find playmates rather than contacts. Not a calendar and not a marketplace.
Practicalities
No, and it is the assumption we most want to correct. The method came out of a classroom before it ever went into a boardroom. We work with universities and schools, we speak at conferences, and we run open sessions anyone can walk into. Two of the seven things on this page are organizational by nature; the other five are not.
It depends on the shape — a talk and a six-month programme are not the same purchase. Tell us the room and the problem and you get a written quotation with every line itemised, before anything is committed.
Programmes and Play Labs work best between 5 and 25 people, because everyone has to be inside the exercise. Talks scale to a full auditorium.
Both, and we switch depending on the room. Written deliverables come in the language the client works in.
No. The Path is designed to build, so it is better whole — but a talk, a single Play Lab or the diagnostic on its own are all real starting points, and plenty of groups have begun there.
Not in the sense that word usually carries. There is no rope course and no forced fun. Play is how the room practises something specific; the debrief is where they take it with them.
In person across Guatemala — at your place, or a venue we help you find. Outside the country by arrangement. Talks and teaching also run online, from anywhere.
Next step
A first conversation is a conversation, not a pitch. We will tell you honestly whether this is the right instrument for what you are dealing with — and if it is not, we will say so.
Describe the group and what is not working. We come back with what we would run and what it costs.
A course, a module, or a session for the faculty. Tell us the programme and the year group.
Date, audience, how long you have. We will tell you within a day whether we can take it.
