what a day - small group
DESCRIPTION
Describes the What a day simulation applied to a small group settingTRANSCRIPT
LEARNING OBJECTIVE: IMPROVE LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS
The pressure on individual leaders to keep their priorities balanced in a stressful daily work life is becoming an increasing challenge.
The What a Day! simulation helps individual leaders fine-tune their priorities to achieve maximum effectiveness. It also generates valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of leadership teams.
GENERAL LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS TRAININGA global corporation uses What a Day! in its talent program. Participants play the simulation online, and qualified facilitators carry out the debriefings in training sessions.
NEW MANAGERS’ PROGRAMA global corporation uses What a Day! as a key element of its New Managers’ Program. In this case, new leaders play individually online and are debriefed in virtual meetings.
TOP MANAGEMENT CONFERENCEA global corporation used What a Day! to make discussions and reflections about leadership behavior concrete and tangible. 300 players in teams of 3.
MBA PROGRAMMEWhat a Day! is regularly played at Business Schools as part of MBA and other leadership programs.
APPLICATIONS OF WHAT A DAY! (EXAMPLES)
A QUICK OVERVIEW OF WHAT A DAY!
Professor Albert Angehrn, Director of CALT (Centre of Advanced Learning Technologies) & INSEAD Business School (Paris, France)
FOR INDIVIDUALS: Feedback, inspiration and tools for improving personal leadership balance.
FOR GROUPS: New insights and inspiration for improving overall effectiveness by better balancing different leader-ship behaviors.
FOR CORPORATION: New insight into the corporate leadership culture and ideas for targeted follow-up initiatives.
DEVELOPMENT PARTNER
A short video introduces the scenario. The participants face three competing challenges that all demand immediate attention.
1
All behavior is measured and reported in relation to eight performance indicators. This feedback plays an important part in the debriefing.
4
During the simulation, different people will call you or can be contacted. They will ask you to make various decisions, and these decisions influence how the story develops.
3
When a group has completed the simulation, the team analysis reveals different behavioral patterns. This insight can be used for reflec-tion as well as follow-up initiatives.
6
The simulation takes place from a desktop, where information about the challenges can be found via e-mails, documents and dialogue (via 100 prerecorded video calls).
2
The debriefing provides food for thought about how we, as leaders and as a company, balance:
5
LEARNING OUTCOMES
”WHAT A DAY!” USER FEEDBACK
“Very realistic simulation of our daily management life”
“An excellent reminder to balance listening and acting”
“Challenging, relevant and entertaining experience”
“I got the impression that the video was done exclusively for my responses”
“Very realistic, as stressful as real world”
“The quality of the personal report is excellent“
Overall relevance of the experience for your job?
Gaining relevant Learning & Insights? (Compared to traditional leadership competence development programs)
“A quick exercise to highlight our blind spots and make us aware of areas of improve-ment“
“The value is more in the debriefing meeting than the exercise itself”
“I would love to see more challenges like this that we can tackle online and practice!”
“By far the best learning session in (company)”
UNSATISFACTORY
LOWER VALUE
EXCELLENT
HIGHER VALUESIMILAR VALUE
1 5Would you recommend this experience to a colleague?
100% NO 100% YES
4.3
4.9
4.3
APPLICATION EXAMPLE:
Participants play “What a Day!” individually and meet in groups for debriefingParticipants complete the simulation individually before meeting in groups of 12-30 for a facilitated feedback session. This session is based on individual results and group data provided in a Personal Report for each participant.
It takes about 40 minutes to complete the simulation, and the group feedback session usually lasts around half a day.
Group feedback session (3.5 hours)Individual online simulation (35-40 minutes)
Invitation, instructions and login are e-mailed to all participants.
Participants must com-plete the simulation be-fore a certain deadline.
The feedback session is facilitated around a couple of strong learning points.
(A full facilitator kit, including detailed instruc-tions, presentations, etc., is provided.)
A virtual facilitator guides the experience and col-lects input on questions related to the simulation.
Each participant receives a Personal Report and all the participants in a session are benchmarked against each other.
The results also reveal different behavioral patterns in the group.
Participants use their own computers to complete the simulation. (Internet connection and sound needed.)
All insight is used for reflection and discussion in smaller table groups and in plenary.
The session focuses on the motivation for change and introduces frame-works and tools to help improve performance.
BRAIN EFFICIENCYBRAIN PERSPECTIVELEADERSHIP SIMULATIONS reach parts of the brain that other learning methods cannot reach
BUSINESS SIMULATIONS The ultimate tool for accelerating change
Leadership simulations provide an immersive environment that requires our attention and brings all of our resources into play. They are by nature motivating, as we all want to do well, and this engages our very powerful emotional systems. In addition, the realistic scenarios acti-vate pathways in the brain that pro-cess meaningful material, providing a strong foundation for memory. The additional element of learning by doing brings the information into our entire brain and body, with rep-resentation in a great many brain regions. These pathways cement the learning in ways that concep-tual knowledgedoes not. Simula-tions also spark creativity, as the rules for achieving the goals force
us out of familiar ways of thinking and we must draw forth intuitive resources to navigate the unfamiliar waters. Novelty, uncertainty, an-ticipation, and a sense of urgency produce neurotransmitters, notably dopamine, which enhance both motivation and learning. In short, they are a wonderful way to provide an effective and engaging mode for gaining competencies and improv-ing on-the-job performance.
Brain expert, Andrea Sullivan, M.A.Brainstrength.net
BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
To be effective in a challenging business world, we depend on tried and tested patterns. These patterns allow us to make a lot of decisions in a very short time span – with almost no real thinking involved. However, this extremely human way of acting also comes at a price: it makes it hard for us to change.Even when we agree with guiding principles, new strategies or new information that we want to implement, it can be very hard to change our behaviour. In a Leadership Simulation, we work with a realistic scenario where the situations we manage and the people we relate to are similar to our own experiences. Best of all, the entire situation, the
people around us, the competitive elements and the learning environ-ment allow us to experiment with-out any real risk.Simulation is only part of the ex-perience. Each participant is given individual feedback and a chance to relate the experience to their own working life. The key to learn-ing and changing behaviour comes during the reflection points and debriefing, which provide a chance to stop and analyse our own be-haviour.
A simulation experience challenges us deeper than a normal meeting or interaction, and helps us to reach a more profound understanding of what we need to change and why.