Friday Night at the ER

[apjones@MIT.EDU (Andrew Jones)]

Dear SD Community --

Aldo Zagonel asked about "Friday Night at the ER"
>If this is a "non-computer" simulation, I am curious to know how it
>works? How is it "like the beer game?"

I had a chance to play a couple hours of the "Friday Night at the ER" the
other day on the new 5th Discipline CD ROM program. I havent seen the
guts of the flight simulator, but it is indeed a computer-based flight
simulator -- one that is quite visually attractive. Perhaps it is
"non-computer" in that most of the decisions are made by pointing and
clicking on icons in a user-friendly way, as opposed to entering numbers.
The beer game is different from it, however, in that in "Friday Night" a
computer must (I assume) run a model and deliver output to the user based
on the users decisions. In the beer game, no computer is involved.

Andrew Jones
apjones@mit.edu

[Fred Cagle]

I would like to know more about the the new 5th disciplne CD-ROM. Wher is
it available? Thanks Fred


Fred Cagle
Tijuana Watershed International MAB Project
3751 Ray st. ,San Diego,Ca 92104 619-297-0931
internet Fred.Cagle@sdsu.edu

[boothli@MIT.EDU (Linda Booth)]

Fred,

You can contact tlcmailbox@aol.com for more information about the 5th
Discipline CD-ROM.

LBS
Linda Booth
<boothli@MIT.EDU>

[BTLng@aol.com]

Several people on the SD mailing list have asked about the Friday Night at
the ER game, so I am providing basic information here. Send additional
questions or call me at 408-779-0701 if you would like to talk about it, or
provide a mail address if youd like a brochure/price list and/or a short
informational video.

Friday Night at the ER is an experiential simulation exercise in the form of
a board game. Teams of 4 people (in groups ranging in size from 4 to 250)
play the game and then participate in an interactive debriefing of the
experience. Required time allocation is 3-4 hours.

The game was designed to support people in learning core Systems Thinking
principles, although it is also being used to teach reengineering, process
improvement and cross-functional team management. We provide learning
programs using the game, and we sell the materials to people who want to use
it themselves. Cost of the minimum-size set of materials, which includes a
facilitator guide and training video, is $1,360 (U.S.). About 200 companies
worldwide presently use Friday Night at the ER.

In the game play, participants work as teams to manage a hospitals
emergency, surgery, critical care and general care departments during a
simulated 24-hour period in an environment in which service quality and
financial performance are top priorities. Players become highly engaged and
absorbed in the experience--typically trying to optimize performance of the
parts, although it becomes apparent to them during the game play that the
parts are highly interdependent and that system performance is at stake. An
interactive debriefing after the game play enables people to gain insight and
transfer learnings from the game experience to their work. People from all
industries (not just healthcare) relate well to the experience and claim its
an effective team-learning tool.

The game design is based on a real case from my consulting practice, which is
primarily healthcare based. In that case, a metropolitan hospital was
struggling to service a high demand rate of emergency-origin patients, which
was causing havoc throughout the hospital with feedback effects that produced
interesting dynamics and management challenges. We used a systems approach
and modeling to learn how to bring that system into balance.

For the game, which is a highly simplified representation of the case, I used
data from the case for the mathematical relationships that govern the
starting conditions, the flow rates of patients and the frequency
distributions of other occurrences. The layout of the game board diagram
resembles a stock - flow diagram, although it appears as the layout of a
four-department system modeled after a hospital organization. Players find
themselves a part of a system with certain established relationships, but
their actions and interactions add to the richness of the simulation dynamics
and create many alternative performance outcomes.

Sherry correctly mentioned that there is a version of Friday Night at the ER
thats part of "The Fifth Discipline Multimedia" (CD). I can elaborate. The
electronic version is based on the board game, but there are significant
differences. The electronic version is designed for an individual player to
experience and reflect about being part of a system and to begin to learn
what it takes to successfully manage within a system. The electronic "coach"
in that product requests that the player reflect in some specific ways about
the experience as a lead-in to the larger course which introduces the
discipline of Systems Thinking and working with mental models. In contrast,
the board game is played with teams and an in-person facilitator guides the
reflective debriefing, which is typically customized to meet learning
objectives of the group.

Bette Gardner
Breakthrough Learning, Inc
17800 Woodland Ave
Morgan Hill CA 95037 USA

email: BTLng@aol.com
voice: 408-779-0701
fax: 408-779-5158