Could the ‘Yes and...’ game help prepare for case study exams?

This BBC video report (Can Comedy and rock’n'roll help business?’) looks at a business workshop which uses improvised comedy to create positive responses in the workplace, where each response to a statement has to start with ‘Yes and…’ rather than ‘Yes but…’. Leaving aside the rather dodgy conversations in the example, I wonder if this could be adapted to help students who are reading through typical AQA BUSS3-style case studies to consider the options offered to the business that is the subject of the case. After allowing a few minutes to read through the case story, the teacher could start things off by making a statement like ‘This business has to make a decision about introducing a soft HRM strategy’ and then ask each student to continue in turn with a sentence with starts with ‘Yes and…’ and has to make some reference to the text or data contained in the case. For example the first student might say ‘Yes and the new HR Director has no experience of this business’, followed by ‘Yes and the rising labour turnover means that the reputation of the business is suffering and they are losing customers’ - and so on. The idea would be to encourage students to recognise which aspects of the text and data they are given could be used for application in their answer, in order to build a logical argument.

As for the second example in the BBC report, of using rock’n'roll to teach business management, my students recently came up with some brilliant credit crunch songs - they worked in groups to create lyrics to any tune of their choice which had to include references to consumer spending, borrowing and interest rates and the housing market. The results ranged from Oh Credit Crunch (to the tune of Oh Christmas Tree) to a lively rap, to three verses plus chorus to the tune of Eye of the Tiger; only problem was that I hadn’t had the foresight to bring in recording equipment!