Portland Press Herald - April 23, 2004

Corporate training goes live

Like most actors, Kym Dakin wants to know that her audience connects with her performance. Unlike many, however, she can stop the show and ask questions to find out.

Dakin is the director of Short Fuse Interactive, a theater troupe that works in the corporate world. The company performs skits that focus on issues ranging from workplace harassment to diversity awareness and dealing with the public - and the actors often interact with the audience to share insights and discuss perspectives.

Dakin said acting out the situations that workers face every day, in skits that are often laced with humor, provides a richer depth of training than most workshops or lectures on the same issues.

"Companies are getting a little tired of sticking people in front of videos and calling it training," Dakin said.

The performances are aimed at re-creating common situations in the workplace and getting employees to look at them from a different point of view. Often, the workers will see little things in encounters between the actors posing as co-workers - a particular phrase or look, for instance - and recognize that what one person sees as an innocent comment can be seen as harassment or hostility by someone else.

"That's a concept that comes up often: perception," Dakin said. To explore differing perceptions, she said, sometimes the actors will re-create a scene several different ways to show how the same situation could change with slight alterations in behavior and reactions.

"Since they're commenting on our behavior, it's much more comfortable," she said. "We do the dirty work."

Jim Erwin, a partner at the Portland law firm of Pierce Atwood, said that's the experience he's had with Short Fuse.

"Introducing concepts, problems, solutions and drama, as opposed to just lectures or written material, in my experience tends to have a more lasting effect on people," Erwin said.

Short Fuse has made presentations to Pierce Atwood, primarily on issues such as workplace violence and sexual harassment, Erwin said. He recommends the troupe to client companies for their training.

"They understand the training goal," he said, and hit the right balance between a presentation that's entertaining and engaging and sending a message without being heavy-handed.

Dakin got her start in the field before she moved to Maine about 13 years ago.

She was an actress in New York at the time, doing stage and voice-over work, when she saw a magazine article about a growing concern at medical schools that students were graduating without the ability to talk to and comfort patients.

"The bedside manners were pretty horrible," Dakin said, and she worked on a program that used familiar scenes from plays as a jumping-off point for discussions on how people communicate. Since her husband at the time worked at Cornell University, Dakin contacted the medical school there and it was interested in seeing her ideas.

Before the program got off the ground, however, Dakin and her now ex-husband moved to Maine, where Dakin worked in radio and with local theater groups.

But the idea of using acting in training came up again when Dakin was with Mad Horse Theatre, which was asked to create an "interactive theater experience" for a construction union. The group at the time was dealing with the entry of more women into the construction business, and Dakin was reminded of her experience with Cornell.

She soon decided to branch off into the niche market of working with companies, trade groups and other business organizations on a new approach to training.

"I got the sense that this tool could be used in an educational context for behavioral issues," she said. "We could take a tool that most people regard as entertainment and turn it into something that can be useful."

Dakin's troupe has made presentations for groups ranging from law firms and manufacturers to human resource professional associations and the U.S. Postal Service.

Dakin said she's trying to move her own role at Short Fuse into directing, marketing and administrative work. Most of the actors she works with are hired on a contract basis and Dakin said she works hard to find people who can both act and be sensitive to the teaching role they play.

She also said that there's a growing demand to use her group for morale-building. She develops "game shows" for companies, built around themes and personalities supplied by the clients. It's a burgeoning area, particularly as companies are looking for ways to boost productivity through better working relationships.

And others are looking to train workers in sales, even for jobs that aren't directly related to selling. She noted that Short Fuse was hired by a New Hampshire oil company to teach service technicians selling techniques since they deal with customers on a daily basis.

Dakin noted that John Cleese, a former member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, has built a hugely successful career making training films with a humorous approach to teaching sales techniques, running effective meetings and offering better customer service.

Twisting a famous Python phrase, Dakin said she offers something that's not-quite completely different.

"We're much more affordable than John Cleese and we're homegrown," she said.