About The Crimson Kitchen
The Crimson Kitchen is the place of practical ideas for developing people, organisations and yourself as well as providing ideas for making regular meetings more creative and sparky. Our goal is to offer new, interesting and engaging ways to stimulate change and growth
Come to the Kitchen to:
- discover interesting and unusual materials to help with development, training, learning, creativity and change.
- glean ideas for developing your organisation, your people and yourself
- find ways of improving your coaching or mentoring practices
- choose ways of pepping up your regular team, project or management meetings - to promote new thinking and action and to wake people from the tedium of always working in the same way
- locate interesting places to hold your workshop, away day, management conference, course, etc.
- select books and materials to support your work
- contribute your own exercises and materials
- engage in debate with others with similar interests and concerns
Kitchens are fascinating places full of tools and implements, containers of all shapes and sizes and ingredients ready for mixing into simple, staple and exotic meals. Crimson is a vibrant, energetic colour that can’t be ignored.
In The Crimson Kitchen are tools and ingredients for stimulating those engaged in the development of people, of teams, of organisations and of themselves or to introduce into your regular meetings.
The main item in our kitchen is the menu of training and development exercises – there are actually hundreds of them on all sorts of subjects. There are over 100 different categories of exercise ranging from emotional intelligence to financial intelligence, marketing and decision-making to creativity and social skills to management skills.
Each exercise stands on its own. They can be used in isolation to aid very specific development needs or as a catalyst in a meeting. They may also be woven together or used with other material from elsewhere to design more comprehensive programmes.
Use the exercises to provide a new approach, a way of involving people more, a provoker of thinking, discussion, and action.
It is expected that you will adapt and change what the exercise offers to fit your situation and needs.
New exercises will be added on a regular basis and members can stay up to date by accessing the Hot Potato page.
The Crimson Kitchen is primarily a membership site with an annual subscription. If you prefer, however, you can pay for exercises as you go, but you will miss out of all the benefits of membership. Membership benefits include the use the Recipes, big discounts for Master Chef Training, details of rated Venues for running your own workshops, Rhubarb where you can air views, ask questions, and debate issues of interest to those involved in people and organisational development. Members can also make money from the site when they contribute to Here’s my Recipe. If you want our team to devise an exercise for something you are planning, then follow the Create a Recipe for Me menu to explain what you want (this service will cost you a little more!). Before you join, sample the ingredients and go to Taster.
We hope The Crimson Kitchen is easy to use. There is a detailed guide with step-by-step instructions for How to Use the Exercises or if this is not enough you can Contact Us or share your question with other members in Rhubarb. An extensive help menu accessed on any page will answer questions about what things mean and clarify how to use the site. Finally, to make it easier to find the exercise you want there is a good site search engine.
For those who want plenty of meat with their meal, many of the exercises are supported with optional links to articles explaining the theory or models on which it is built (see Larder Links within each Exercise) and the methods employed by each exercise (see the links within the ‘What Approach Does It take?’ section of each exercise). You can also read more about the site in the Why The Crimson Kitchen and Us pages
The 21st Century is no different from the 20th Century – the pace of change continues to speed up. Change is inevitable for both individuals and organisations and there is a constant search for tools to help make this process easier and more effective.
We have seen fashion in these things come and go and good ideas and approaches being discarded as new ones come along. Ideas in management and development can move from the oven to the freezer very quickly. Very often new ideas are simply a re-wording of old ideas.
We have also seen increasing ‘scientific’ approaches to working with and developing people. An interest in the art of management has died under a wealth of measurement, minutely defined competencies, and learning outcomes. A risk - averse culture needs to predict everything, nothing can be left to chance
In a similar way you can make a science out of cooking
The Crimson Kitchen doesn’t deny the value of all these things but wants to see the art, the emotions, the ability to work with uncertainty and ambiguity, and a concern for creativity put back into organisational life. This site is committed to:
- enabling people and organisations to develop. The Crimson Kitchen involves exercises that promote learning and change at individual, team and organisational levels
- catering for different approaches and preferences to thinking, learning and change which can be influenced by past experiences, personalities, age, and cultures in which we currently live. The Crimson Kitchen recognises that the exercises probably need adapting for specific situations and people and they won’t all suit everyone. What we do guarantee is that they have all been used and found useful in real life development situations
- valuing choice and flexibility for individuals. The Crimson Kitchen is not primarily a programme but a database of exercises that can be used in a variety of ways and in different circumstances. They can be incorporated into events or can be strung together to produce your own programme. There are exercises that provide different approaches to the same issue
- making development activities and meetings enjoyable, engaging and relevant - bringing colour, action, intrigue, humour, reality and humanity. The Crimson Kitchen exercises are participatory and often experiential. Many have a strong visual component or encourage involvement in joint exercises or experiments
- the view that people always need new ways of approaching their development needs and the way they plan and solve problems - so new ideas and ways of engaging people in thinking, learning and change are really important. But what is new and fresh to one person may be like stale bread to another. The Crimson Kitchen attempts to be both innovative and a store house of the tried and tested. The site is added to on a regular basis and subscribers can help by contributing the old and the new from their own collection of development and meeting exercises
- depth as well as breadth, recognising that there is an increasing wealth of knowledge about thinking, learning, development and change within individuals and in teams and organisations. The Crimson Kitchen offers exercises that are designed around different understandings of how learning, development and change occur in adults, professionals, teams and organisations. The Larder also provides background articles covering theory, models, and background to exercises. If you’re not interested in this don’t bother with them. Ignoring them won’t reduce your ability to use the exercise
- member involvement - believing in the expertise of all who develop their own ways of doing things. If they work others should know about them and may pay to use them. The Crimson Kitchen does not see itself as the final answer to everyone’s development needs. On offer is a widening range for you to choose from. The Crimson Kitchen is however set up as a member network and we welcome your own contributions to the site
Dr Anton Baumohl
Anton has been in the development business for over 20 years. Setting up and running a training agency and then turning to consultancy work specialising in professional development and organisational behaviour. His work has involved executive coaching, management development, training, facilitating, counselling, change consultancy. His clients have ranged from the BBC to Shell Chemicals. He is an acknowledged expert in creativity in organisations and engages in occasional lecturing. The Crimson Kitchen fulfils a long term ambition of making materials he has helped create available to a wide audience.
Charles Longbottom
Charles is a qualified designer who moved into branding and business consultancy. He set up and became Managing Director of Circle Design with clients all over the world. Recently he left Circle to set up The March Hare, a consultancy focused on building and developing new businesses.
