web-based management simulation game

["Michael Bean"]

Forio Business Simulations has just released a system dynamics simulation game,
titled Leadership-in-Action, that focuses on leading a team through a project.
Its a variant of the popular project management simulations.

We would appreciate any insights from our colleagues in the SD community on the
simulation. You can try the simulation at:
http://www.forio.com/lead.htm

The simulation is part of an online leadership training workshop that we offer
with Isvor Dilts Leadership Systems, a firm that specializes in leadership
training.

One of the challenges in the simulation design was finding a way to communicate
leadership concepts to simulation users in a way that would be engaging while
allowing users to experience issues described in the leadership framework.
Typically, challenges are provided to users in the form of trade-offs and these
trade-offs are linked to distributing some scarce resource, like money (at least
in business sims).

The leadership framework we used focuses on employee communication, empowerment,
and coaching. These concepts alone dont lend themselves to an engaging
simulation because users dont think of them as scarce resources. When someone
asks you, "Should you communicate with your team more or less?" the right answer
is nearly always "more" and the answer, when framed this way, is too obvious to
make a simulation engaging.

To solve this problem, we used time and task completion as the scarce resource.
Investing in coaching or communication will reduce time available for completing
tasks today, with the possibility of increasing productivity some time in the
future. Users, playing the role of team leaders, can hire or layoff team
members, hold meetings, coach individual team members, delegate their personal
work to the team, and set stretch goals for the team.

Because this simulation is played over the web, usually people will be playing
without a live facilitator. So to improve user retention of the core concepts,
we included text-based feedback from the simulated team that can help guide the
user to understand why past decisions were good or poor. Our initial usability
tests indicated that users, without assistance from a live facilitator, had
difficulty connecting their decisions to the simulation results. Including
simulation feedback from the team helped to solve this problem.

Regards, Michael

Michael Bean
Forio Business Simulations
mbean@forio.com