Professional Development

Business training. The term probably conjures up images of endless PowerPoint presentations, tedious and repetitive exercises, and hours spent listening to sales pitches masquerading as solutions in sterile hotel conference rooms. Training is supposed to engage your employees with both the material being taught and the process itself. It’s supposed to encourage risk-taking in a safe environment so participants can discover new strengths and strategies. It’s supposed to make people feel invested and invested in.

All too often, though, trainers and training programs are cookie-cutter programs designed to be easy for the trainer or training organization to deliver over and over, rather than designed to fit you and your employees. Even worse, they shy away from change, using the same strategies, tactics, and theories that they’ve depended on for half a century.

Cardboard Corner is different. Our trainers and instructional designers – who have more than 25 years of education and training experience – embrace modern methods and are always looking for ways to make our programs more effective and engaging. We stay up-to-date on modern learning theories to bring you programs that present and support content in ways that people both understand and connect with. Cardboard Corner combines modern learning theory with tabletop games to reinforce the concepts we teach. This result is a potent, compelling, and fun training experience.

Teambuilding

Whether your work team just came together or has been a unit for years, it can always benefit from team building exercises. Board games provide a fantastic way to throw unexpected challenges at a group and let them discover new and exciting ways to work together to meet objectives. Board games can provide invaluable opportunities to see how fellow team members think and approach problems, and can demonstrate the value in that diversity. Our expert facilitators can also identify team communication hurdles and point out strategies for creating a more cohesive group.

Managing Time, Projects, and Priorities

Work today is a challenging environment. Dozens of tasks, responsibilities, and communications in a variety of forms constantly vie for your attention. While true multitasking has been revealed to be a myth, process and focus shifting are possible – but can actually harm productivity if not done correctly. One of the things that games are fantastic at teaching is how quickly identify where your attention needs to be while still keeping track of things that might suddenly require more of your time.

Communication and Collaboration

We have a million ways to communicate in the workplace today – fax, email, instant message, and in-person meetings, plus a wide variety of project management programs and apps that provide space for updates and conversations. Unfortunately, most people struggle with communicating effectively in any of them – in part because we’re trying to use the same strategies and techniques for all of them. Beyond the basics of getting your ideas across, it’s important that you be able to understand what your colleagues, customers, and vendors have to say, and, when necessary to persuade them to follow your recommendations. Games teach you how to talk to other people in ways that are specific to settings and scenarios, and help you become more consistent, more concise, and most importantly more understandable in all of your communication endeavors.

Critical and Creative Thinking and Problem Solving

There are many facets to solving problems, and tabletop games can help with all of them. The following questions are among the topics addressed:
Problem Triage – Which obstacles or issues require your focus first?
Problem Evaluation – What are the discrete pieces of the problem? What are the desired outcomes?
Solution Selection – Which of various possible solutions you should apply?
Risk and Reward – What are the possible problems and benefits of each solution?
Resource Evaluation – Who and what do you need to help implement your solution?
Solution Delivery – When should each piece of the plan be put in motion?

Do you have an upcoming corporate event or party that needs some added fun? Have you been looking for monthly, loosely-structured teambuilding for your company?

We have a collection of over 800 games that can come to you! We can also provide a gaming conceriege to help teach games and facilitate these events. Additionally, if you love your game rentals and want to purchase your own gaming library, we can assist you with a personal shopper at TableTop Game and Hobby

Future Plans

Because this is a new venture for us, we have limited topics on which we’re prepared to present. We’ve focused our initial efforts on what contemporary research over the last year has revealed are the biggest skills deficiencies businesses are seeing in their employees: Critical Thinking, Innovation and Creativity, Independent Initiative, Problem Solving, Leadership, and Communication. We will be adding to this list over the course of the next year, but if you have a specific course want us to cover, we can develop a custom program to fit your needs.