Create Your Own Business Simulation Lab to Drill Your Teams in Better Decision Making

This article explores how teams learn and stresses on the importance of business simulation as a vital tool to improve organizational decision-making capabilities. The article also outlines a clear business-driven roadmap involving ten steps for organizations and enterprises who wish to develop their own in-house business simulation capabilities. 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.