Don’t Underestimate a Paper Based Business Simulation

Someone emailed me in January asking which simulation platform she should buy. She had a leadership program already built, a rollout date, and a budget that had already cleared. What she wanted from me was a business simulation reinforcement tool recommendation and estimated pricing.

What I told her was not what she expected, “From what you’re telling me, I think a full computer based business simulation will get in the way of your learning and sideline your perfectly capable internal facilitators. Have you considered a paper based solution?” I spent a little time trying to explain that people often assume computer based business simulations are better when this is certainly not always the case. Focusing on something simple can be incredibly engaging, challenging, and effective.

In full disclosure, I’ve been building business simulations for over 20 years. When I say that sentence out loud to a buyer, I am talking myself out of a project, and I do it several times a year. So take it with whatever salt you need.

But I'd rather you heard it from someone who builds these things.

Why you rarely, if ever, hear this

There's very rarely an  invoice attached to a paper based business simulation.

A paper simulation has no per-seat license. No hosting fee. No annual platform tier. No tailoring costs, no facilitation fees, nada. These can be built by most internal instructional designers and facilitated by internal facilitators. If you’re talking about extremely complicated leadership development, change management, or strategy execution needs, a paper based business simulation might be a mismatch, but it’s certainly something to think about.

What software is actually good at

Software does things paper can’t easily accomplish. It does math you can't do in your head. A real quantitative model where teams' decisions all move against each other, in real time, over simulated years. It also shows participants in real time results of assumption, ideas, and/or decisions. Paper can’t easily do that.

Those are real. If you need all three at once, buy software. That's a genuine answer and it's what most of my work is.

What you're actually buying

Here's the thing I keep watching happen.

A business simulation in leadership development usually has three parts: 1) a story that provides context, 2) rules and data that make the thing playable, and 3) a design that doesn't confuse anyone. Get those balanced and you barely notice any of them. Get them unbalanced and one part is all you notice.

An overly complex, tech centric, flashy business simulation is the most common failure I see, and it fails in a specific, recognizable way. Participants come out having had a great time but having learned very little. You've been to a party and didn't meet a soul. Everybody's engaged, nobody's changed. The scores are fine. The scores are always fine.

That's not a bug in a particular product. It's what happens when the tool becomes the program. And the more the tool costs, the more pressure there is to make it the program, because somebody has to justify the number. As a general rule: Most of your budget should be put into the training program content and less in the business simulation.

What paper is good at that software isn't

Three things, and they're not the ones people expect.

A human made the call, and they’re standing right there. The most common objection I hear inside a computer-based program is some version of the “program felt heavy and I forgot what I was supposed to be practicing.” Whether or not it's fair is beside the point. Once a participant says it, the exercise is discredited, and you can lose the whole day's learning to it. Paper rarely gets that objection. A person adjudicates the decision, the person is in the room, and if you don't like the outcome you can argue with them. People argue much harder with a person than with a screen, and the debate is where much of the learning actually happens.

You can change it Tuesday morning. A software change is a ticket, a build, a test, and a redeploy. A paper change is a few key strokes. When you discover during round one that the room has a completely different problem than the one you designed for (and you will) paper lets you follow it. Software makes you finish the program you paid for.

Participants forget it's paper. This is the part I didn't believe until I'd watched it enough times. Give people a genuinely hard decision with real consequences and a scoreboard, and within about ten minutes nobody is thinking about the medium. The engagement doesn't come from the pixels. It never did.

My position clarified

I should deal with this, because someone will notice.

In my own book I wrote that most paper-based exercises will frustrate today's learners, and that to do a strategy simulation right, it has to be computer-based. To be clear, and I need to go back and clarify this in the book, this applies to advanced strategic change/execution simulations. This is when math is required. Most of what makes a strategy simulation work — the trade-offs, the incomplete information, the argument at the table about what actually matters is exceptionally hard (if not impossible) to replicate effectively inside a paper based solution.

If you want to try building a business simulation

The bar is lower than you think and the discipline is higher.

• Three objectives. Not four. If you can't name three things you're measuring, you don't have a simulation, you have an expensive afternoon. This is the single most common way these fall apart, on paper or in code. Focus is critical.

• Two metrics that fight each other. Profit and customer satisfaction. Speed and quality. Engagement and the number. The tension is the exercise.

• A story that isn't your company. Close enough to be recognizable, far enough that nobody spends the day arguing about whether it's accurate. If you make cars, make motorcycles. It’s very rare a business simulation should be a duplicate of a company. This is likely the first or second most common money wasting suggestions I see. You likely do not need a custom business simulation. See article: You Probably Don’t Need a Custom Business Simulation.

• A decision map, and a grid that says what each decision does to each metric. That's the whole engine. It fits on a page.

• Test it on colleagues first. It will go badly the first time. That's not a signal to add software.

Don't try to boil the ocean. The failure mode isn't that the paper version is too simple. It's that somebody gets ambitious in week two.

The last thing

If you're being told you need a platform, ask which of the three — the math, the scale, the error-proofing — you're buying it for. If the answer covers all three, buy it, and I'd probably build it for you.

If the answer is vague, you may be buying a party.

If you’re having trouble finding a provider, read the article: How to Choose a Business Simulation Provider.

Hope this helps!