The Game That Creates a Sense of Belonging

The dualism between teacher and learner is subverted, evaluation and assessment are old concepts, the rational component is largely replaced by emotional involvement. These are the three postulates of the learning experience theorized and disseminated by Points of You, an Israeli company active in the field of training and development, whose Italian division Michaela M. Carboni established and manages together with country leader Marcello Boccardo. Bocconi Class of 1995 graduate in Business Administration with a thesis on strategic marketing, Ms Carboni has embraced this method, based on maieutics, to emerge in the field of training and coaching.

There are four phases that compose this approach: "pause", which means taking distance from a given loop of thought, "expand", understood as observation from a new perspective, "focus", in which the most relevant intuitions are identified, and "doing ", which defines a concrete action plan. Add to this a strongly creative component, thanks to The Coaching Game, a learning tool that invites educators, managers, coaches and counselors to change their way of thinking towards change, expansion and growth.

"In adults, playing a game reawakens the creative dimension of childhood, fostering intellectual levity and open exchange, so as to allow individuals to free themselves from any kind of preconceived framework", says Carboni. "By distancing ourselves from our habitual comfort zone, we are able to discover new interesting points of view that can lead to the solution of certain critical issues or to the development of new talents".

The game is played with 65 cards that combine an image with a concept. They enable players to analyze their skills and the employment dynamics they encounter every day at work, in order to identify new solutions. "Discussion-based, active emotional education allows individuals to achieve greater personal awareness and open their minds to new insights, increasing the ability to process information and make decisions quickly and confidently: the image-word binomial generates a cognitive short circuit, capable of instilling greater self-awareness, so as to be able to strengthen a person's emotional intelligence".

The actual fluid experience of team work, determined by a non-traditional approach to learning, allows participants to develop a sense of belonging, which is often missing from our contemporary lifestyles: this kind involvement, combined with creativity and absence of judgment, offers the opportunity to become familiar with unexpected domains of thought and, therefore, action.