Frontline service workers and/or their supervisors delivering clearly inaccurate, bad, and/or unlawful service to customers or other “persons of interest” (POI) that is a causally antecedent to negative outcomes is one category of “shit-show” service failure performance. The study here presents both case studies and findings from national data showing that shit-show service enactments by performing, professional public servants (PPSs) occur on daily and frequent bases in the U.S.—supporting the perspective that shit-show performances readily occur even when the protagonists in delivering service have decades of job experience and/or has served as lead trainers for training recent PPS hires. “Professional public servants” includes employees working in various government agencies, departments, and branches (e.g., clerks in a branch of the U.S. Postal Service, a frontline service provider in a state department of motor vehicles, public libraries, and police officers). This study proposes “LARP” (i.e., live-action role-playing) by PPSs as actors in protagonists, POI (i.e., “person of interest”), and collaborative roles) in roles in known, actual, shit-show performances provides the necessary emotional heat that serve to prevent real-life shit-show reenactments. “Larp” is a new word and formerly an acronym, LARP. Larp is a training method incorporating designing and enacting trainee, role-playing, learning experiences via “hands-on” realistic participation by trainees in near-authentic performances of both bad and good service deliveries. Having prior coached experience in “doing it badly” (i.e., enacting shit-show behavior with a POI) in a larp exercise provides necessary individual and group process information and enhanced memory retrieval that psychologically inoculates trainees via memory retrieval not to re-engage in the prior larp-enacted shit-show behavior when in engaging in similar contexts in the future —prior enactment in doing-it-badly nurtures/generates enhanced shit-show memory retrieval, bad-behavior avoidance-vigilance, and generates workable steps for immediate and “downstream” preventing service failure (e.g., possible prison terms for the PPS for physically harming or killing the POI). The study here includes proposing a program of “true” field experiments (i.e., use of treatment and placebo groups with random assignment of groups) to test the short- and long-term efficacies of larp, shit-show, training in PPS contexts. Note that in the following example video of the talk and physical, hands-on, interaction between a POI and PPS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDK50CE0qfE) includes a real-life, live-action role-playing by Jeff Gray, the POI, and a highly trained LARP performer, who provides complimentary training to LT Furr, the professional public servant (PPS). Prior to their meeting LT Furr, served as a highly trained trainer of new police officers on how-to-engage with members of the public. The study here elaborates and provides evidence supporting its fundamental tenet: turning up the emotional heat via theatrical productions of shit-show enactments by professional public servants increases their memory-retrieval skills that are necessary for triggering prevention of subsequent, future, real-life, public-service, shit-show performances.

Keywords: Civil rights, emotion, First amendment, larp, POI, professional public service, shit-show, training.