The huge interest in the `Serious Games'
area, where gaming technology is used for serious or business purposes, has
made it feasible for far-sighted organizations to gain enduring competitive advantage
by creating their own unique business simulation labs where they can present
their senior teams with all kinds of challenging business scenarios to improve
decision making capabilities by allowing the big
mistakes to be made in the simulator rather than
in the business.
The first part of this article explores how people learn and explains why
business simulation has become a vital tool for organizations who need their leaders
and decision-makers to be `well drilled' in rehearsing the many highly
challenging scenarios they could encounter in the
business year. The second part of the article
builds on this by proposing a systematic road-map which organizations can use to quickly
and effectively define, design, calibrate, refine and experience the benefits of their
own custom business simulation lab.
People act according to their `mental models' or `meaning structures.' In the classic
book, The Fifth Discipline , that popularized
the concept of the learning organization, mental models have been described as:
"deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations,
or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we
take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the
effects they have on our behavior. ...Mental
models of what can or cannot be done in different management settings are no less
deeply entrenched. The discipline of working with mental models starts with turning the
mirror inwards; learning to unearth our internal pictures of the world, to bring them to
the surface and hold them rigorously to scrutiny." |
