What are Simulated Corporate Games?

Humans have been playing games for thousands of years with evidence from ancient artefacts and paintings found in Europe, China and Africa going back as far as 1295 BC. Using games as a training tool for people and leadership development in organisational settings has been around for approximately 20 years. They provide a way for participants to practice and improve their decision-making skills, communication, and teamwork in a low-risk environment. Most importantly, they are a fun and engaging way to learn, as they allow participants to actively apply their knowledge and skills in a hands-on way. This is an important factor to enhance knowledge and skills retention and optimise learning experiences.

Corporate Games are simulations designed to mimic real-world corporate scenarios and challenges. These simulations are base on realistic business cases and allow participants to experience and learn about the many complexities of managing people, teams, projects and/or organisations in a safe and controlled environment.

Typically, participants are divided into teams and are given a set of tasks or challenges to complete. The teams must work together to make decisions and solve problems, just as they would in a real corporate setting.

One of the advantages of Simulated Corporate Games is that they are designed to focus on a specific area of business or people management such as change management, team development, leadership development, or strategic planning to name but a few. The lessons learnt during gameplay can be mapped back to real organisational challenges to deepen the learning and benefit the organisation.

Read more about the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve and learning optimisation through Heads-on-Hands-on Learning.

Why are Simulated Corporate Games Important?

With all the technological advancements and increasing pace of change, the way people learn is also changing. Employees need to learn, unlearn and relearn faster than ever before. This is complicated even further by the differences in personalities, value systems, learning styles, generation gaps, the way the human brain works, experience and maturity. Added to this are the challenges presented by the modern workplace.

According to research by Backboon (2022), the main challenges faced by corporate Learning and Development currently are remote work, hybrid learning and sufficiently engaging employees in learning processes – regrettably to the point where 52% of L&D decision-makers believe the learning they offer is not engaging enough.

Engagement is a key success factor for any learning experience. At ChangeVerve we believe that gamification is an important driver that significantly enhances engagement while incorporating neuroscience principles to support memory retention, optimise learning and enable the immediate application of skills learnt.

The Benefits of Gamification

The outcome of international research studies has found that learning through a simulation of a real event or real experience is the most effective way to learn. Some of the more notable findings include the following benefits of learning through gamification:

• Board Games allow all levels of learning and enable individuals and teams to move from ideas, decisions and strategic intent to action;
• Gamification fosters the self-confidence to act and apply skills and develop essential management-, problem-solving-, decision-making-, and critical thinking skills;
• Retention of learning and the ability to apply skills more than 1 year after playing the game;
• Workplace implementation of learning;
• Improved collaboration and team alignment;
• Improved communications; and
• Significant improvement in participant engagement with high energy levels and participation.

During the learning process, learning and retention are enhanced by engaging the whole brain of participants in a non-threatening, playful, yet competitive way. The game material and business case serve as a visual metaphor and analogies that assist participants to connect and organise information in a conceptual and practical framework.

This enables teams and/or leaders to learn together and improve team dynamics and communication. Delegates are focused on understanding and applying the content with recognition of success and learning from mistakes in an engaging and supportive environment.

What do Simulated Corporate Games do?

Corporate games:

• Provide a simplification of the world, the dynamics and process of the topic at play as well as the complexities of human behaviour;
• Create a language for talking about difficult topics in an easy and safe way;
• Are based on salient and generic case studies that enable dialogue about own context and issues;
• Depersonalise challenges and issues to focus attention on objects and content;
• Accentuate the various key elements to focus on during the various stages of activity;
• Turn theory into practice.

Simulated leadership and team education games and dialogue tools

Simulated corporate games are a practical, engaging and effective way to learn and apply new skills using a realistic business. It creates a safe environment to experiment, gain experience and promote healthy team dynamics. It has also been proven to improve knowledge retention and enable immediate application within the workplace. Our list of simulated corporate game experiences for leadership skills includes:

Contact us to discuss how Simulated Corporate Games can support your organisation.

If you are interested in developing Leadership skills, click here.