Bringing Unconscious Bias to Life with Actor-Led Training
Ahead of their 2019 annual conference, social housing association Muir Group wanted to put diversity, equality and inclusion back on the agenda and bring unconscious bias to life for their workforce. RightTrack Learning built a conference session around live actors, putting delegates face to face with familiar workplace situations and giving them the chance to ask the characters questions directly.
- Built into Muir Group’s organisation-wide annual conference
- Delivered to 150 people of all levels
- Live actor scenarios drawn from real workplace situations
- Room facilitation enabling honest, reflective conversation
The Story
As a housing association serving a genuinely diverse range of customers and communities, the team at Muir Group wanted to reintroduce diversity, equality and inclusion to staff in a way that would actually stick, rather than feeling like a box-ticking exercise bolted onto the day.
The challenge was reaching everyone in the room from frontline staff to senior leaders, with a topic that’s easy to talk about in the abstract but much harder to recognise in your own decisions and behaviour. This meant RightTrack Learning had to design a session that worked for a large, mixed audience in a single, high-energy conference setting, rather than a small workshop room.
“The solution that RightTrack offered us was really to combine the drama aspect with also discussion and debate in a really engaging and positive manner.” – Jonathan Haigh, Assistant Director of HR & OD
The Solution
RightTrack Learning’s answer was to put actors front and centre of the day, rather than build the session around slides and statistics.
Live scenes were performed for the whole room, derived from real-life situations that delegates would recognise from their own working week. With the drama as the anchor, delegates were then given the chance to question the characters directly through hot-seating, putting them in the position of working through the situation themselves rather than passively watching it. Being able to observe bias play out and reflect on behaviours gave delegates a far more deeper understanding of how it shows up day to day.
To get reluctant attendees on side, the session was deliberately kept relaxed and informal. There was no pressure to perform or get it right first time; people could be themselves, try things out, and know their views would be heard rather than judged.
The Impact
Delegates described the session as thought-provoking, powerful and impactful – three words that came up again and again in feedback.
The Q&A with the actors stood out as the most powerful part of the day. Bringing the characters to life and opening them up to questions from the floor meant every delegate had the chance to engage directly, test their understanding, and work through the scenario in real time rather than just discuss it afterwards.
For Muir Group, the most lasting outcome wasn’t just the session itself, but what it generated: honest feedback from staff about what they wanted more of, and a clear sense of how to build on the day going forward.
- “Using actors over traditional PowerPoint I felt was brilliant, it was really engaging, I thought it brought it to life and made it real.”
- “I feel that drama is more impactful because it’s a way the candidate really can interact.”
- “I felt the part that was most impactful was the Q&A session.”
- “I thought that it really brought to life the character and allowed all of the delegates to interact with the character.”
- “I think the most memorable thing that we’ll take away from today is the feedback from our staff with regards to what we can do more of and how we can build on it.”