Ducks Away started with an accidental manager, a winding path through academia, and eventually a table covered in Lego.
Ducks Away was founded by Penny Bradshaw after she became one of the accidental managers Ducks Away now helps.
Penny started out managing a business with her husband back in 1995, before moving into the Civil Service and finding herself managing over 100 people.
Penny dealt with dreaded compliance issues as well as the wonderfully messy elements of human behaviour and relationships.
She could also see other managers around her genuinely wanting to do the job well, but they didn’t have the support or tools to do their best work.
With a strong desire to get things right and do right by others, Penny completed her master’s degree in Human Resources and became a Chartered Member of the CIPD.
But that was just the beginning of the story.
When Penny was asked to step in as a lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University in 2022, she quickly climbed the ranks to a senior lecturer position, teaching HR alongside business and management, leadership, inclusion, and diversity.
It was here that Penny discovered LEGO ® Serious Play ®. Penny saw that getting students to learn by doing was far more effective than traditional lectures.
When she walked into a room carrying a bag of LEGO ®, she saw people thinking, talking, and working things out for themselves. Getting a group to work with their hands using bricks as metaphors provided a safe way for them to express their opinions. And because everyone was tasked with building something, by design, LEGO ® Serious Play ® made space for every voice in the room.
What Penny didn’t love was watching all of that get squeezed out.
As cohorts grew and education became more and more standardised, teaching was reduced to a set of slides with less time for group interaction and discussion.
That’s when another curveball came her way.
Several years into her academic career, Penny received diagnoses of Dyslexia and ADHD. Neither surprised her, but they did solidify a belief she’d held for years: often, problems in the workplace don’t come from individuals, but rather they stem from environments that aren’t designed to include and support different ways of being.
As a result, many workplaces unknowingly exclude people while wasting the strengths already in their ranks.
Penny firmly believed that if you build the work around understanding, curiosity, and communication, you get the best of your people.
Experiential, hands-on learning was the way back.
Penny found that LEGO ® Serious Play ®, MTa and magnetic mapping matched everything she already believed about fairness, learning, and getting the real conversations out into the open.
So Penny became an accredited facilitator in the Lego ® Serious Play ® methodology, as well as Train the Trainer.
Then she packed up her bag of bricks and left academia to bring world-class facilitation methods to organisations that wanted to think differently, act boldly, and grow inclusively.
And Ducks Away came into being.
Ducks Away is founded on the belief that most managers genuinely want to do their best by their teams and their wider organisations. They just need support, understanding, and the right tools.
Our inclusive approach extends to how we work with our clients.
We recognise that the businesses and organisations we work with will all have their own specific needs and goals. Some need more compliance support, others lean towards leadership coaching, while some are more focused on team development. Many will need an equal mix of all three.
That’s why Ducks Away’s model is flexible. We design our support according to what your organisation needs, and adapt as we go.
The answers to workplace challenges are already in your organisation. We’ll help you find them.
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