The Business Pyjama Party

Description

Everyone arrives at 10am in their pyjamas, and stays in them until the night.

It sounds stupid. And it is the most reliable icebreaker I have ever built, and the reason is simple: you cannot tell who is in front of you.

Every professional room runs on costume. The jacket, the watch, the laptop bag, the practised way people arrange themselves before they speak. You read someone's status in two seconds and the conversation is shaped by that reading before either of you says anything real. Take away the suit and tie and the apparatus stops working. You have to become curious. You have to actually ask, and be present.

A whole day in a onesie does something a two-hour icebreaker cannot. By early afternoon the room has forgotten to perform.

What is always the same

• The dress code. Onesie, joggers, kimono, any sleep attire. 
• A costume contest, with a fun prize. 
• Genuinely good food. Healthy, where possible. I have run these with a biohacking chef doing the catering and it changes the day.
• Connection exercises throughout, structured so that nobody is left standing at the edge of the room.
• The room built as a living room. Soft lighting, blankets, intimate shape, no rows.

What is designed for you

Every Pyjama Party I have run has been different, because the theme carries the content and the theme should belong to the client.

Deal Day, Berlin. The first one. Negotiation was the theme, and the whole day was built around deal-making between the people in the room.

Winter Wonderland, Vienna. A fireside chat: a successful solopreneur, a high-level athlete, and a business owner running a large team, talking honestly about what they had come through and how. No polished keynotes. Authentic shares.

Depending on what you need, the day can carry fireside chats, panels, speed connecting, facilitated discussions, journaling, singing and mantras, a cacao ceremony, or a hot seat mastermind. For a singles or community audience it can run as speed dating. We design the program together.

Two scales

The Pyjama Block (3 to 4 hours). A pyjama session inside your existing conference, offsite or festival. Most events have a networking problem they solve with a buffet and hope. This solves it, and becomes the part of your program people describe to other people afterwards.

The Full Pyjama Day. Daytime into the evening, custom theme and program, designed with you. This is the real thing.

Benefits

• Removes status from the room in under twenty minutes. No amount of facilitation achieves what a dress code does instantly and involuntarily.
• Forces genuine curiosity. When you cannot read someone's seniority, industry or income, you have to ask, and asking is where every real conversation starts.
• Solves the conference networking problem. People leave with actual connections instead of a pocket of cards from people they cannot place.
• Levels hierarchy inside organisations. People say things to leadership in pyjamas that they never say in a meeting room, and leaders hear things they otherwise never hear.
• Built around your theme. The content is designed for what you actually need from the day.
• Zero preparation from participants. They bring pyjamas. That is the entire ask.
• The most memorable thing on your calendar. This is the event people are still describing to colleagues years later.

Additional Experience Info

DRESS CODE: Onesies, joggers, kimonos, any sleep attire. Enforced, not
suggested. One person in business dress undoes the mechanism for the whole
room, so the invitation has to be unambiguous and I will say so to your
guests in advance.

VENUE: A room that can be made to feel like a living room. Soft lighting,
movable seating, blankets, floor space. A standard conference room with
fixed rows does not work.

CATERING: Provided by the host. Healthy and home-cooked where possible.
I will give you a brief.

TIMING: Daytime start, traditionally 10am, running into the evening. A
night-only version is possible but the daytime start is what makes it
strange enough to work.

AFTERMOVIE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkoS2Qk2V3g

LANGUAGES: English or German.