Ben Laumann, Co-Founder

Where Psychology Meets the Stage

Ben Laumann is Co-Founder and Managing Director UK of Sidestream. He is an organisational psychologist and a theatre director, which is an unusual pairing, and it is the pairing that the whole consultancy is built on. The science tells you what changes behaviour. The craft of immersive theatre is what makes it land in the room. Most training keeps those two worlds apart. Ben does not.

His academic grounding runs through three institutions that anchor Sidestream's thinking: an MSc in Industrial, Organisational and Business Psychology at University College London, an MPhil in Innovation, Strategy and Organisation at the University of Cambridge, and ongoing doctoral research in management and organisational behaviour at Bocconi University in Milan. Alongside the psychology sits a working actor's training, an MA in Acting from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and a BSc in Psychology from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a member of the British Psychological Society and a researcher at the UCL School of Management and at Bocconi.

The Frustration That Started Sidestream

Sidestream began with a frustration Ben kept running into. Well-meaning programmes would leave no trace. People nodded in the room and forgot by the weekend. The evidence was clear, passive learning hardly changes anything, and yet keynotes, surveys and questionnaires kept being the default. Some things cannot be taught, they have to be felt, and that is especially true of behaviour change. Because real change happens through lived experience that makes a memory stick, Ben built a method that puts people inside the moment rather than talking at them about it.

The Behaviour Change Approach: Designing for Level 3

Ben's expertise is organisational psychology applied to a single hard problem: how do you get a real, observable change in how people behave at work, not just a better quiz score. That distinction is the heart of Sidestream's approach. Most training is measured at Kirkpatrick Level 1 and Level 2, whether people enjoyed it and whether they learned the content. The value sits at Level 3, whether they actually behave differently when it matters. Ben designs for Level 3 from the start, scripting the specific behavioural moments a cohort needs to rehearse and building in behavioural measurement rather than relying on what people say about themselves. If you want the framework in full, his team's guide to the Kirkpatrick model sets it out level by level.

That focus on measured behaviour comes directly from the research. His own 2020 UCL study (n = 57) looked at how people learn a communication skill. Rehearsal with a role-play coach produced significantly better delivery than an instructional slideshow or video, rated blind by two independent assessors (Cohen's d = 0.75 to 1.08). More telling was what happened with confidence: it rose after every format, including the two whose delivery was rated significantly weaker, and self-rating did not predict assessed performance in any condition. The fix was to stop trusting self-reports and measure behaviour instead. That principle now runs through every programme. For the practical contrast between the two methods, Ben's team also wrote a comparison of immersive training versus e-learning.

Award-Winning Productions

The method is not theoretical. Ben has directed and designed live behavioural productions that have been recognised for the quality of the work. The Death of Jane Doe is an award-winning production built around an honest encounter with serious mental health conditions. The Accused puts audiences inside a story about how much, or how little, has changed for women in the workplace. Top of the Cops reframes leadership and reputation through the unlikely lens of an 80s punk gig. These are not role-play exercises bolted onto a slide deck. They are scripted, visceral experiences that participants are still describing months later, which is the whole point.

What ties the academic work and the productions together is a refusal to settle for awareness. Awareness is easy to produce and easy to forget. Behaviour change is harder, and it is what Ben builds for. You can read more about the people and the thinking behind the consultancy on the about page, or follow Ben's work on LinkedIn.