If you’ve ever played Monopoly, you know something about business simulations. Do you remember watching friends or family members become fiercely competitive? Maybe a little cutthroat and devious even. You observed how players approached problems, some more effectively than others. And you had a lot of fun, as two, three or four hours passed. That’s what good training and business simulations do. Only with more emphasis on business than paying rent and avoiding jail.
Simulations can be just as fun as the Parker Brothers example, but they go a little deeper to help incite behaviors in the players that reveal actionable areas for change and improvement. Where do they come from? Usually, highly skilled learning experts with backgrounds in education and psychology.
One such expert, Donna Riechmann, Ph.D., developed the simulation “Polygon Puzzle” (among others) while working as a corporate trainer.
“It was created out of necessity,” said Riechmann. “A colleague of mine and I were looking for a one-hour exercise for a client, that was part of a larger program. Because of the format of the program, we wanted only one hour for them to do a team development exercise. And we couldn’t find anything. She was an artist and I had written lots of training manuals. Between the two of us, we created this, and then and we used it with that client.”
The COVID-19 pandemic put traditional non-digital business simulations in timeout, as in-person interventions were cancelled or moved online. But now with offices coming back together, there’s a resurgence in demand for business and training-related simulations.
A good training simulation is an icebreaker that stimulates interpersonal interaction across the group. It breaks tension and gets even the most reserved learners to open up. Most importantly, a simulation shows training professionals how well their learners and teams collaborate and work together, as it reveals areas that need improvement in a non-confrontational context.
“I love the fact that when you’re working with either leaders, or with teams, you may be able to gain some insight and tell them things,” says leadership development consultant Debbie Lane. “Or they may hear feedback that tells them things, but they may not really accept it. They may say, ‘Oh, we don’t really do that.’ Or a leader might say, ‘I don’t really take over and make all the decisions.”
“When you put people in a simulation, and then you go back and ask, ‘What were the emotions that you were feeling when I told you, you only have 15 minutes to do this?’ The goal is getting them to identify those, and then see how that drives their behavior,” Lane said.
Lane’s work has included clients BASF, Syngenta, M&M Mars and Kroger. And she has always used a lot of simulations in her work, such as “Desert King,” “Paper Planes, Inc.” to “Promises,” among others. Revealing behaviors that may hold learners back is a primary objective of these simulations.
Lane said, “Simulations get a little deeper than just, this is your behavior. They get to what’s driving that behavior. And then, importantly, it becomes less deniable. Because I might say, ‘I saw you, you took control of all the pieces to the puzzle.’ And they’ll go, ‘Oh, yeah, I did do that!’ Or the people on the team will say, ‘Remember, we kept saying the same things over and over again, because nobody was listening to each other.’”
Simulations are an opportunity for employees and leaders to get and receive valuable feedback from each other.
“They keep the energy level in the room very high,” said Lane. “And it’s fun. Even if they feel stressed, participants will say it was fun. And that’s a good thing.”
Making Learning Fun
In learning and development (L&D), fun is important. And most simulations have an element of fun through their gamification element. In practice, this can range from working in an airplane factory (“Paper Planes, Inc.”) to interactions with diverse civilizations (“AWAKA”) to building complex geometric puzzles that rely on accurate, effective verbal communications (“Polygon Puzzle”).
“I think one of the main factors is if it’s fun, it’ll be memorable,” said Geoff Grenert, trainer and principal of You Can Lead, LLC. “The fun factor and the fact that it covers all the bases about what a team is how you build a team, and the importance of communication are what makes simulations so successful.”
Amidst the levity is powerful learning data. Nothing brings out authentic individual and group behavior like a game in which the players become immersed in the competition. And it almost invariably mimics what goes on in the real day-to-day workplace.
“If you sit and listen to a dysfunctional team versus a successful team, you see a different climate. So, in the dysfunctional teams, people say things like, ‘I don’t want to work with him. I don’t want to be a part of this team. I’d rather not be on this project,’” said Riechmann. “But on successful teams, people say things like, ‘I really like being on this project. I like being with these people.’ They go so far as to say I love my project manager. So, there’s a set of emotions that are positive and supportive and respectful.”
As the pandemic rolled on, some training simulations transitioned to online versions with varying degrees of success. But it also revealed that the full value is found in real-time face-to-face engagement.
“I have not tried to run any simulation virtually and, honestly, I think that’s because I don’t trust myself to be able to create the same thing virtually that I know I can create face to face,” said Lane. “When people have talked to me about this, and I have tended to purposely steer them to say let’s do some other activity until we can get your people face to face.”
In an increasingly digital and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven training and development arena, old school physical simulations, be they board games, puzzles or even paper airplanes, appear to endure. There is a simplicity about the process: Getting people to lose themselves in a fun game.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of science and normative data underlying the best simulations. A simulation debrief gives everyone valuable feedback, such as do more/do less behaviors for individuals and observations about where teams can improve and be more successful.
The science bears out, too. Well-designed simulations can deliver predictable outcomes while offering a window into the real world of how teams are working together. And they work quickly.
“Good simulations provide insight that people then will want to work through. They say something like, ‘You’re right, every time I get in that situation, I start feeling this drive that I’ve got to hurry up and get all this stuff done, and therefore I just start pushing everybody around me because I’m so afraid I’m going to miss the deadline,” said Lane. “Then we ask, ‘Why are you afraid of that?’ It starts to give people insight in maybe three or four hours. You couldn’t get that in two or three weeks. I love that about simulations.”
For training facilitators, predictability is key. They know they can run the simulation and know what the debrief and the learning outcomes will likely be. For the participants, the immersive experience of how they performed is impossible to forget.
Also, there’s a simple practical advantage to unpacking a game in a corporate conference room. Nobody wants to sit in an all-day lecture. Simulations invigorate engagements and offer varied timeframes to fit most schedules, from one hour to a day.
“I don’t use them at the very beginning, but I see it very, very close to the beginning,” said Lane. “I might have a session with them first, in which I really listen to them, get to know them, get feedback from them, get feedback from maybe others around them. And then that helps me decide what the right simulation is. Because I want to create the right set of interactions. My number one goal in using simulations is self-awareness. And then my number two would probably be ‘team awareness.”
For trainers, a simulation becomes a break in which the group of learners does the work, while they observe. In addition, group feedback ratings for simulations tend to be positive.
“Our simulations have always been rated the best part of a leadership [training] program,” said Grenert.
There will always be a place for interactive in-person engagement in L&D. Ultimately, simulations can help you deliver powerful information that can make training and development programs more effective, memorable and actionable.
