For bold leaders
Unboring Team Training
Unearth the wild intelligence of your team
Intelligence isn’t within people, it’s between people. Unboring training that rewires the connections that get your team humming.
Smart training for smart teams
Smart teams know the theory. They’ve talked the talk. They’re the experts. They don’t need another three-part framework or two-bob thought leader. Building collective intelligence requires training that engages people (body and mind), teaches behaviours (not facts), and unearths the joy and delight that comes from shared insight.
For all teams great and small
Three signs we might be a match.
Training is starting to feel a bit stale.
You invest in your people, which is pretty fabulous in a world of AI-slop and automation fanaticism. However, a lot of the training out there feels a bit like shopping for dishwashing liquid: 100 variations on the same thing. You’re maybe asking heretical questions like: “Can we learn things without being on our arses for an entire afternoon?” and “Can I attend training on Friday and remember absolutely any of it on a Monday?” The answer is a candid, joyous yes.
You know soft skills are hard skills to learn.
In The Matrix, Neo gets the cyberpunk equivalent of a USB stick in his head and, whoomph, suddenly he knows Kung-Fu. People don’t work that way. You can’t learn about difficult conversations, leading with influence, or presenting with presence by hearing someone else talk about it. Good training is more like The Karate Kid: We need to wax on, wax off. Get our hands dirty. Challenge ourselves. You’re ready for training that meets people where they are, in all their complexity.
You’re ready for change, but not sure where to begin.
There’s an old joke about a priest who, having lost his faith, turns to God to ask what he should do next. We do this too: We need our people to be more flexible and adaptable yet we turn to the old methods: stale planning days, org chart reshuffles, and leadership development frameworks that overpromise and underdeliver. You’re ready for an approach to team development that is genuinely different: Playful, wild, and human.
“ I saw people that are traditionally quite reserved let loose and engage more naturally than I've ever seen them do before. It just reinforced to me that you don’t have to do the typical corporate training.”
Daniel Gibbons, Umpiring Pathways Manager, WA Football
Unboring Training for Every Team, Especially Yours
All workshops are a half-day experience and include a design session and a debrief. Full-day variants are also available for bigger teams or deeper dives.
Feel like unboring might be helpful, but what you want isn’t on the menu? I can design something bespoke. Contact me.
GOOD
COMPANY
Spark Culture
Culture emerges from connection. We’ll use exercises, debriefs and rich conversations to make the culture you want a reality in the room. Forget post-it note promises to the future: Experience three years of culture change in a single day.
Best for: Culture change (obvs lol), leadership offsites, team diagnostic work.
SCARED
SCRIPTLESS
Build Courage
Ditch the elevator pitch and the sweat-soaked index cards. Modern communication means being present, knowing your audience, and thinking on your feet. Scared Scriptless builds the skills your people need to communicate in every situation.
Best for: A group of individuals who need to speak to other disciplines & sectors.
SHIFT
HAPPENS
Manage Change
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The best leader doesn’t have any one style, but the ability to move between styles. Shift Happens builds adaptive leadership and helps your best people think quicker, relate deeper, and change faster.
Best for: Leadership or cross-functional teams, team planning days, and change management.
Wanna share this with your boss? Download these options as a PDF (fancy!).
$5,000 + GST (half-day)
Includes travel within the Perth metro area.
Embed and Extend the Impact
Unboring isn’t just an approach to training — it’s an approach to work design. Clients sometimes approach me after a half-day experience and ask: “How can I make work feel more like this?”
Together we can redesign work so the big-brain intelligence of your people emerges spontaneously.
Extend:
PLAY BIGGER
Three-month program
Change how your people show up moment-to-moment.
PLAY BIGGER is a three-month program designed to help teams reduce escalation, caution, and permission seeking. We diagnose and reduce decision friction in real cross-functional work by training mid-level leaders to frame decisions clearly, lock accountability in the room, and have conversations with real candour. This isn’t about high-minded frameworks, it’s about high-wire stress and how it sabotages our best intentions.
We’ll rehearse, refine and practice the difficult stuff so your senior leadership can stop fighting fires and reclaim strategic headspace.
$20,000 + GST for a team of 8-25.
Indicative pricing, contact me for a quote.
Embed:
REWRITE THE RULES
Six-month program
Don’t just play better, play a different game.
REWRITE THE RULES is a six-month program which lifts the hood on what makes complex, collaborative work sustainable. You’ve done the hard yards building a strong, collaborative culture now it’s time to operationalise it by redesigning workflows, nailing decision rights and connecting authority to accountability. By designing structures that can hold a thriving culture, we ensure your business can move quickly without feeling like it’s on fire.
We’ll work with a real cross-functional business issue (not abstract theory) and resolve it together in six months or fewer.
$55,000 + GST for a team of 8-25.
Indicative pricing, contact me for a quote.
Unboring Behaviour Change
The future of behaviour change has arrived, but the world of training and leadership development hasn’t caught up yet. There are three seismic shifts in cognitive science that drive how leaders need to approach people development. My approach uses performance training and cognitive science to engage and delight your team.
In the age of the internet, we have access to all the information we could ever need. Our minds resort to shortcuts, or mental frames, to manage information overload. Mental frames are in the synapses of our brains, shaping what kind of thoughts are possible. To change people, you need to change mental frames. My approach focuses on (gently, lovingly) disrupting the mental frames that keep us stuck in place.
We need to train the whole person. You can’t teach difficult conversations with a four-step process. There’s no one-size-fits-all model for adaptability or resilience. Training approaches that focus on intellectual strategies don’t work. People need to be able to bring themselves and their context into the room. My approach trains the whole person by getting people practicing skills and reflecting on their experience, bridging theory to practice.
Teams are more than the sum of their parts, which is why teams of smart individuals don’t always produce smart results. To build a team, we need to focus on relationships over individuals. In training, this means we don’t need more experts. We need to discover the expertise that’s already in the room. My approach centres on building connections and relationships so people can learn from each other.
“ You took us through communication, empathy, and team dynamics, but you didn't talk to us about those concepts. You gave us experiences, which was so much more meaningful.”
Kat Thompson, CEO, Zest
Hi, I’m Aden. I was the ratbag at the back of the classroom. I know what it’s like to be smart & bored.
When I was a kid, I graded my teachers. I drew a little thermometer on the bottom-right of every page: The “bored-o-meter.” I told my teachers how bored I was with their lessons. I got yelled at more than once for this. I refused to believe that learning needed to be boring.
Things changed when I started taking improvised theatre classes in high school. Improvisation challenged me in a way that academic work didn’t. I needed to move. I need to think on my feet. I needed to connect with my team and make them look good. Improvisation felt like real life: messy, real, and fun.
We’re making it up on the spot. Why not get good?
I read academic articles by day and slay the stage by night.
In my mid-20s, I raised $5,000,000 for UWA to bring experiential, community-based learning to students’ academic life. The idea was simple: There’s a limit to what you can learn in a lecture theatre. The most transformative, high-impact learning happens outside the classroom. This idea was compelling enough that the McCusker Foundation put their largest ever donation towards it (here’s proof!).
Around the same time, I was running improv night classes out of an old Masonic hall on the fringe of the UWA campus. That small group eventually became my company, Only the Human. Only the Human gave me an opportunity to lead playfully. Now I lead a small team of staff and contractors and we have taught over 500 people how to improvise.
When I work with teams, I blend the two together: Experiential learning that’s actually fun.
You’ve got questions, I’ve got answers
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You’ve got questions, I’ve got answers ◉
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I adore this question. Firstly: I am an introvert. I love a good book (can you tell?). I didn’t design this work for the people-loving extravert, I designed it for the introvert looking to be challenged and engaged on their own terms. My workshops invite people to participate at their own pace in a way that feels appropriate to them, with clear protocols around safety and non-participation, while still inviting challenge and discovery. The converted sceptic is my favourite attendee. Bring ‘em in.
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Most offerings are designed for teams from 8 to 25 people. With smaller groups, we get to go a bit deeper. We have more space to unpack behaviour and translate personal insight into action. With larger groups, the focus is more on connection, relationships, and growing culture.
In Good Company works well with very large groups (50-200), and Shift Happens is best with smaller teams (8-12).
Every workshop includes a pre-brief so the design fits the size and composition of your fabulous team.
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This work is designed for those teams with enough psychosocial safety to try something different. It assumes that a certain level of trust, readiness, and appetite for challenge exists in the room already. If your team is facing acute performance management issues, has a hazardous or unsafe culture, or if team members are in mediation, then this may not be the right work for you at this moment in time.
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Yes! Please contact me to discuss as online options are usually bespoke.
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I do for those with the wherewithal to keep scrolling for long enough. If you’re mission-aligned, have a turnover of less than $10m p.a., or if the workshop is with frontline staff (who desperately need a brain break) reach out. We’ll see what we can do.
Are you in?
I’m in an old, 1920s newspaper office staring at a rotary phone, eagerly awaiting your call.
The best time to unboring team training was when you last got your team together. The second best time is now.
Trusted by businesses big and small.
