Carbon capture laboratory at Imperial College London
The Financial Times posted earlier this week an
interesting article authored by Helen Barrett. Titled Business
Schools Take A Playful Approach To Leadership - From kidnaps to oil rig
disasters, Serious Games are helping to train executives, the article is nurtured by the belief that “What the modern employer wants from
cutting-edge business schools is less talk and more action” and out of which we
have excerpted the following particulars:
“As the dean of a leading business school in
the executive education market says, companies are less and less interested in
paying for executives to sit passively in classrooms listening to experts.
The future of executive education, says the
dean, lies elsewhere. What the modern employer wants from cutting-edge business
schools is less talk and more action — or experiential learning, as it is
known. It is hands-on, it is demanding and it forces executives to rely on
their wits. Most of all, it is fun. The main challenge for schools is to think
creatively about how to stand out.
Plenty of business schools are doing just that.
Learning through experience at this level can mean competing teams of hard
hat-clad managers learning to tackle a crisis — for example, an offshore oil
rig disaster in the carbon capture laboratory at Imperial
College London.”
Executive Education use the Carbon Capture Lab
to engage executives in high impact, experiential learning in unfamiliar
environments. They work with chemical engineers and program faculty to design
different scenarios based on the specific learning objectives of the Executive
Education program.
From Leadership to Finance, the scenarios are
bespoke and are played out in an environment triggering decision taking in
uncertainty, it alone, exposes executives to new learnings which they had not
anticipated.
The FT article proceeds stating that role play
is an excellent way to solve problems and the breakthroughs that come from role
play can be much more significant, wide-ranging and measurable.
Grenoble School of Management (GEM),
in France, is one of several business schools to offer deep experiential
education: an entire laboratory dedicated to executive role play. Its Serious
Games department encourages participants to solve specific management problems
“in a playful way” — with simulations, virtual reality and even board games.
Since 2013, GEM has been developing and using
its own Serious Games. The School regularly uses Serious Games with
undergraduate and continuing education students.
Hélène Michel, the school’s senior professor of
Serious Games, says the aim is to find ways to engage jaded executives in
complicated, perhaps even boring, tasks.”
Hélène specialized in innovation management and
started working on Serious Games in 2003. She runs seminars on innovation
management using games to enhance the innovation process. Ten years ago she
found that game was a great lever to empower people to innovate, having supported
the creation of more than 100 projects (products and services).
“Renault, for example, invented a game to
create better profiles of prospective customers in an effort to increase sales.
Disneyland Paris used the lab to help it crack
a similar problem. For its third-party travel agents, selling a one-off family
trip to the theme park was easy, but too many travelers saw it only as an
once-in-a-lifetime experience. In the safety of the laboratory, agents could
experiment with games that segmented the customer profiles. By asking families
questions about what they wanted to do when they got there, the agents were
able to customize holidays and, in turn, sell more to the same customers.
The model can even be applied to risk, says
Prof Michel. One example is changing risky behavior among employees. Michelin’s
human resources department invented a game to help it identify employees likely
to take the type of risks that could lead to regulatory fines.”