Sarah Lawrence at Work

A strong team operates much like an ensemble: its members pay attention, respond to one another, contribute individual strengths, and remain focused on what the group is creating together.

Through accessible theatre games and improvisational exercises, participants develop trust, listening, adaptability, and shared attention. They experience how individual choices influence the group and practice supporting, extending, and responding to colleagues’ contributions.

Designed for: New and established teams, cross-functional groups, departments experiencing change, and organizations planning retreats or team-building events.

People prepare carefully for presentations, pitches, and negotiations, but often enter their most consequential workplace conversations without rehearsal.

Participants work with realistic scenarios involving feedback, conflict, boundaries, misunderstandings, resistance, or competing priorities. Through role-play, perspective switching, and facilitated reflection, they can test different approaches and observe how changes in language, tone, timing, and delivery affect an interaction.

Designed for: Managers, team leaders, human resources professionals, client-facing employees, and anyone responsible for navigating sensitive conversations.

Decision-making is not only an intellectual process. The ways people gather information, establish direction, respond to uncertainty, and commit to action can also be seen in their movement patterns and interactions with others.

Using discussion, movement observation, and guided exploration, participants identify their own decision-making preferences and examine how different styles operate within a team. They also experiment with less familiar approaches, expanding their capacity to work with colleagues who process information and reach decisions differently.

No dance or movement experience is required.

Designed for: Executive teams, leadership groups, project teams, and organizations seeking to improve collaboration and collective decision-making.

Effective listening involves more than remaining silent while another person speaks. It requires attention, curiosity, observation, and the ability to respond to both verbal and nonverbal information.

Drawing on psychology and dance/movement therapy, participants explore listening as an active, whole-person practice. Exercises develop awareness of words, tone, pacing, posture, interaction patterns, and what may remain unspoken. Participants consider how deeper listening can build trust, improve communication, and help leaders respond more thoughtfully.

Designed for: Managers, executives, healthcare and education professionals, human resources teams, and people in advisory or client-facing roles.

A strategy may be logically sound and still fail to engage people. Facts explain what is changing; stories help people understand why it matters, what is at stake, and where they fit.

Participants learn how writers and theatre-makers use audience, structure, tension, point of view, and narrative movement. They then apply these principles to a strategic initiative, organizational change, presentation, pitch, campaign, or case for support.

Designed for: Executives, nonprofit leaders, development professionals, marketers, consultants, entrepreneurs, and teams responsible for communicating strategy or change.

Strong communication depends on more than having something valuable to say. How a message is structured, voiced, embodied, and adapted to an audience determines whether it is understood and remembered.

Using techniques from writing and theatre, participants practice communicating with greater clarity, confidence, and authenticity. The workshop can address vocal delivery, physical presence, concise message construction, audience awareness, managing nervousness, and responding effectively in the moment.

Designed for: Emerging and established leaders, presenters, sales teams, client-facing professionals, subject-matter experts, and anyone seeking greater confidence when speaking.

Leaders rarely have complete information, unlimited resources, or a predictable environment. They must be able to respond to what is happening, build on other people’s ideas, and move forward without knowing exactly how events will unfold.

Through improvisation, creative challenges, and guided reflection, participants practice working within constraints, relinquishing excessive control, responding constructively to the unexpected, and turning incomplete ideas into collective possibilities.

Designed for: Leaders, innovation teams, entrepreneurs, organizations navigating change, and teams working in fast-moving or uncertain environments.

Many workplace problems are discussed repeatedly in words without becoming any clearer. Visual thinking can reveal relationships, assumptions, patterns, and possibilities that conventional discussion overlooks.

Using observation, drawing, mapping, collage, and other accessible visual methods, participants represent complex challenges in new ways. The emphasis is not on artistic skill, but on slowing down, noticing more, and making ideas visible so that teams can examine them together.

No artistic experience is required.

Designed for: Strategy teams, innovators, planners, designers, educators, healthcare professionals, and groups addressing complex systems or persistent problems.

Participants examine a real or simulated organizational challenge through several liberal arts perspectives. They identify assumptions, uncover competing values, consider overlooked stakeholders, and develop a more rigorous approach to reaching decisions.

Designed for: Executive and leadership teams, boards, strategy groups, nonprofits, public-sector organizations, and teams making consequential or values-based decisions.