Certified Red Nose Consultant · three levels · seven months
Children lose their victim status in the presence of a clown. Learn to be that presence in a boardroom. A certification for consultants, trainers and knowledge workers whose standard business is being eaten by AI: we teach the one capability that machines demonstrably lack, unlearning on purpose, in front of other people, without losing your footing.
Why now
Everything that works by monotonic reasoning, by collecting facts and never contradicting them, is now a prompt away: the report, the standard solution, the benchmark. Google Research spent a NeurIPS competition trying to make a model forget a chosen set of knowledge. More than a thousand teams; no exact solution except retraining from zero. And every day, in every chat, a context window overflows: the model has to forget, and it forgets by position, not by judgement. The oldest instruction goes first, however important it was.
Transformation needs the opposite move. Somebody has to say “this is no longer true” and survive it. In most organisations that person loses trust and starts hoarding shadow knowledge. The clown is the oldest professional who does the job without becoming the scapegoat. We certify people to do it in business.
The path
About 30 weeks on the continuous path; stretch it to 18 months if you need to. Admission requires three years of consulting, training or leadership experience and one interview question you will not forget.
The Least Informed Person
Fool’s Licence
The King as Jester
Curriculum
No trainer speaks for more than 25 minutes without somebody failing afterwards. Theatre experience is not required; if you have it, Level 1 teaches you to put it down.
Enter the stage alone and do nothing until the laughter comes. Interrupt a colleague’s expert explanation as the idiot, then swap roles. Name the last meeting in which you did not understand and stayed silent, and what that silence cost.
The only feedback allowed is “I saw you.” Nobody rescues a failing piece. The training is the permission for it not to work.
Write down three facts your organisation treats as true that no longer are, and rehearse saying them to a leadership circle. Define your personal forget set: beliefs about yourself as a consultant that AI has made obsolete.
Explain the machine-unlearning analogy to a sceptic in 90 seconds.
Wear a nose the trainer puts on you, and take it off at the end of the day; yours comes at Level 2. Status see-saw, mirror walk, and “the boss’s wife baked a cake”: how do you say it doesn’t taste good? Draw your relationship graph with directed trust values and pick one relationship for four weeks of repair work.
You have your relationship graph, your personal forget set and one relationship under repair. The Foundation exam comes after F5.
Walk the room in the neutral mask, play business scenes twice with status reversed, and present two minutes of something you are good at until the trainer says “thank you” before you are done. What remains when the act stops is the clown.
Andreas Simma or a Master with stage training. No theatre vocabulary is tested. If you have acting experience, your task is to be unable to do anything.
Prepare the intervention in pairs (which meeting, which sentence, what it may cost), rehearse it with the cohort as your meeting, then do it for real within three weeks. Protocol within 24 hours, peer supervision in your pair, one online evening to review every intervention.
Three parts on one day: the 10-minute solo stage, your intervention protocol with peer feedback, and a 20-minute colloquium on the reading (Reichl, Bergson, Lecoq, Johnstone) and your shadow knowledge. You pass by staying present in all three, not by shining.
Work status inside hierarchies, play KPI-as-blame scenes, draft a Fool’s Licence Agreement and hold it in a simulated leadership meeting while observers log trust changes.
Cynicism. It is scapegoating in disguise. It goes straight back on stage and back to love of the audience.
Formulate three wagers against your own firm or a client in the official format and peer-review them for testability. Simulate a wager office with roles for bettors, bookmaker, management and works council. Learn the legal and cultural limits by country.
The most serious part of the training. Full consulting competence is welcome here. The nose stays on.
Practise contracting (“What must be unlearned? Who is afraid of whom?”), the dramaturgy of the day and how to abort. Then run a supervised real engagement of at least two days with a Master as your shadow.
The engagement plus an 8-minute clown piece on an open stage. The red nose is awarded.
Work on real leadership-circle cases, study how a leader takes the fool’s licence without losing authority, run your own mandate with monthly supervision and lead a Foundation module as a teaching probe.
Case study with measured impact, teaching probe, colloquium with an external examiner from a clown-doctor organisation or university.
The Red Nose Kit
Faculty & ethics
Certification is held by an independent non-profit, the Society for the Advancement of Categorical Foolishness, which keeps the register, appoints examiners and awards no training of its own. Twenty percent of all licence revenue funds its annual prize for errors of historic proportion and its grants to Poor Theatre initiatives worldwide. Training is delivered by licensed partners; the founders’ academy in Vienna is the first.
Software developer without a degree, actor with one. CEO of a life-science company, founder of a software studio, author of “Digital Transformation: A Formal-Logical Model”, from which this curriculum is built.
Internationally recognised clown, trained with Jacques Lecoq and Ariane Mnouchkine. Owns the stage curriculum (F1, F3, P1), the stage examinations and the jury for the Poor Theatre fund. Lecoq’s flop and bouffon are the roots of our method.
Senior organisational consultant. Owns Blocks F2, P2, P3 and the wager-office rulebook, including the legal review by country.
Apply
“Tell us about your most embarrassing professional moment. And stay with it.” That is the whole admission interview. Three years of consulting, training or leadership experience are required. No theatre experience is needed.
Pilot Cohort 01 · March 2027 · 12 seats · €20,600 for the full path, or per level.
Send us your application by email. Please include: name, current role, the level you are applying for (full path, Foundation only, or not sure yet) and your most embarrassing professional moment, in three sentences.
Apply by email