CONTROL TRAINING

Work effectively and make good decisions  in unknown, complex, rapidly changing situations where everything and everyone is insecure.

Who is this training for?

This training is designed for individuals who have to assume responsibility for themselves and others in a work setting while operating in risky, unpredictable environments. This includes for example field workers, human rights defenders, civil activists, monitoring and donor organization representatives, aid workers, and crisis respondents.

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Training topics

This training integrates military and law enforcement know-how with self-reflection and skill acquisition, coaching techniques, relevant parts of the sociology literature on teams, and client centered psychological approaches. It is tailored to nonprofit activists, human rights defenders, aid workers, and others who operate in difficult environments either as an individual or in team settings.

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Control Training mixes role play exercises with debriefing sessions and classroom time for knowledge transfer. The training exercises are set in a utopia laden with armed conflicts, where paramilitary formations operate and central powers are weak. You'll be placed into this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment where you'll face complex moral, tactical, and personal decisions in role play exercises and group learning settings. You'll experience and learn to handle time pressure, choosing from bad options, feeling responsible for group decisions, and many other dilemmas. We suggest to cover the following topics, but topic selection is flexible and we adapt it to your specific needs if necessary:

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• VUCA environment and features

• Solving decision-making and leadership traps: time pressure, "life-and-death decisions", moral dilemmas

• How stress, resilience, and human decision-making function and how they impact one another

• Stress management

• Resilience development

• Handling overflowing, contradictory information

• Working with "pretty good" solutions

• Managing the work of organizational units with opposing interests

• Decision delegation and prioritization

• Gaining and retaining management control in a team setting

• Leadership, empathy, autonomy and awareness in decision making

• Learning and validating an effective decision-making toolkit for  VUCA environments

We believe in learning by doing. Training has a lasting effect only when it's tied to the trainees' personal experiences. Our training builds on the philosophy and methodology of training and operating elite military and law enforcement units, but we adapt it to the needs of nonprofit activists, human rights defenders, aid workers, and others in similar positions. During fieldwork exercises, you'll experience and process important stimuli and gain unique self-knowledge with the assistance of qualified personnel who interact with you within the framework of a role-play we developed for this purpose. The conditions are safe and professionally controlled at all times. Role-play field exercises alternate with debriefing, learning, and skill building sessions in a classroom-like setting and social events.

Methodology ​

We believe in learning by doing. Training has a lasting effect only when it's tied to the trainees' personal experiences. Our training builds on the philosophy and methodology of training and operating elite military and law enforcement units, but we adapt it to the needs of nonprofit activists, human rights defenders, aid workers, and others in similar positions. During fieldwork exercises, you'll experience and process important stimuli and gain unique self-knowledge with the assistance of qualified personnel who interact with you within the framework of a role-play we developed for this purpose. The conditions are safe and professionally controlled at all times. Role-play field exercises alternate with debriefing, learning, and skill building sessions in a classroom-like setting and social events.​​

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Delivery

Control training is open for groups of 12-16. Participants can come from one organization or - after proper coordination - from different ones. The training takes two days in a field location, primarily in our training center at Szentjakabfa, Hungary, where we provide accommodation and full board.