Using Business Simulation to “Drive” the "Driverless" Classroom

    

The driverless classroom is here.  What is the driverless classroom?  It is a live learning experience business-simulation-driverless-classroom.jpgthat enables participants to enjoy the benefits of interactivity, socialization of learning, and immediate application of learning back to their jobs without the need of a “driver” (full-time instructor).

Last week, I had the pleasure of launching a foundational business leadership training program for a group of 20 leaders from an innovative and progressive high tech organization that utilized this model of learning.

It has been a goal of Advantexe's for several years to have a completely simulation-centric learning experience where all of the content is actually built into the business simulation software and not delivered by a stand up instructor.   That goal is now a reality and here’s how it works:

The facilitator welcomes everyone to the session and shows them how easy the software is to operate.  Within 20 minutes, the group is divided into teams of 5 and asked to go to their breakout rooms to start the simulation workshop.

Working independently, the small teams begin.  They are introduced to the simulated company they work for (ABC, Inc.), the strategy of the company, the leaders of the company, characters they will work with, and their role as a leader within ABC.

They are then presented with about 18 scenarios per round of the simulation workshop.  All of the scenarios are based on real-life business situations and are directly aligned to the competency model of their company. Just like the real world, situations are complex and ambiguous and many times there are trade-offs in decision making.

As the participants weave through the business simulation, they are presented with an assortment of micro-lessons of leadership in the areas of business strategy, personality styles, leading change, leading execution, coaching and feedback, leading innovation, and situational leadership.  Each micro-lesson is 2-4 minutes and gets right to the point so participants can learn, do, and learn-by-doing.  The first simulation workshop takes about two and a half hours to complete.

After the participants are provided with the support content, they move through the simulation and make all of their decisions.  The "story" of the simualtion unfolds based upon the participants decisions.  At the end of each simulation round, they are provided with both qualitative and quantitative feedback.  The qualitative feedback is a scoreboard related to their competency model and the qualitative feedback is written text overviews of each decision and the best practices associated with that scenario.

The teams then self-discuss their own results and understand what happened in the simulation, but more importantly how they will handle the same scenario when it occurs to them in the real world.  The small team debrief takes about 30 minutes.  When the small team debrief is completed, all of the teams get together in the large group and further discuss the simulation. Again this is all self-driven.  In the large group discussion, participants talk about their agreements and disagreements with the feedback in the simulation and do personal action planning for how they are going to handle the situation when it presents itself back in the real world.

After the large group discussion, the participants broke for lunch and when they came back, they proceeded to the second round of the simulation which lasted another 2 hours including the embedded content.   They then repeated the self-driven small group and large group debriefs.

At the end of the second workshop, individual participants started to develop their own SMART actions plans were they take one key learning lesson from the simulation and build an action plan around how they will implement it.  The Action Plans are also self-driven!  Yes, the self-driven classroom and learning experience is really here.

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Robert Brodo

About The Author

Robert Brodo is co-founder of Advantexe. He has more than 20 years of training and business simulation experience.