Beef up your team with PsyCooking

Objective: 

Improve the effectiveness of your team.

Audience: 

teams in all organisations

Group size: 

up to 16 persons

Faciltator(s): 

Harmen Stevens

Marc Van den Steen

Program Type: 

In-company Workshops and Masterclasses

Program Context: 

Process Facilitation

PsyCooking is a unique ubeon concept, combining project work with individual and team assessment via a behaviour scan, developed by psychologist prof. dr. Ap Dijksterhuis and his team at Radboud University Nijmegen.

PsyCooking provides you with insights to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your teams.

PsyCooking delivers a report within 3 hours showing you the conscious, but more importantly also the unconscious behaviour of your team members in a project environment. Hardly any classical assessments provide you with this wealth of information within such a limited time frame

Afterwards, each participant gets in full transparency insight in what the psychologist has observed. Everyone learns, not just the manager.

Working effectively in fixed and ad hoc project teams becomes more and more important in all professional environments. Investing 4 hours in PsyCooking is one of the best investments you can make this year to increase the effectiveness of your teams.

The combination of serious project work, fun and full openness stimulates participants to give the best of themselves. In the heat of the cooking, all the masks fall. Participants forget that a psychologist is observing them closely.

Just do it

Your team of up to 8 persons prepare a three course meal in 90 minutes. All ingredients, a professional kitchen equipped with all required cooking tools are at your disposal. You also get a nicely printed menu. The only thing missing are the cooking instructions. A cook is present  to prevent technical disasters, not as an advisor.

From 5 to 8 persons cook as one team. A larger group is split into 2 teams, competing with each other to obtain the most tasteful result.

Once all preparations are finished, the group sits at the table to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

As a  pousse café the psychologist serves his report.

Everyone gets to see the results in words and graphics, showing her functioning as a team member and the functioning of the group as a whole. Who took the lead, who talked to whom, how often and about what, who gave instructions to whom and who followed them?

Thanks to this open sharing of the behavioral observations, everyone is able to understand better how he can improve personally and what the team can do to function better in its professional context. This open sharing requires maturity of the participants and the organisation. In return, everyone gets highly powerful information, bringing the organisation on a higher level.

The behaviour scan

The behaviour scan is an integrated part of PsyCooking. its objective is to map the psychological structure of the group and its internal processes,  their frequency and type, thus combining a quantitative with a qualitative approach. The focus is on unconscious processes and on the differences between group behaviour in normal (at the beginning)  and stressful circumstances (as the session progresses)

Download a sample report (PDF)

Prof. dr. Ap Dijksterhuis:
“Unconscious is often much more important than conscious (mostly verbal) behaviour. This is even more so in a group context where people are asked to work on a project. As an example: do people look each other in the eyes?. The psychological balance within a group is extremely important for the functioning of a group. The context has a large impact on the group. The functioning of a group changes substantially as the stress level increases. We measure both the relatively  calm and the stressful situations with the behaviour scan.”

Improve your teamwork with PsyCooking. Contact ubeon and get more info on this revolutionary concept.