The spaceship is descending. The planet below has multiple atmospheres, none of them mapped. You have probes, limited data, and decisions to make before you know enough to make them confidently.
Welcome to every leadership challenge worth having.
What the game is
Planetfall is a learning agility and ambiguity simulation. Participants work to land a spaceship on an alien planet, navigating atmospheric conditions they can’t fully predict. They deploy probes, gather data, buy upgrades, and adapt their strategy as new information arrives — often invalidating what they thought they knew.
The game is designed to be genuinely uncertain. There’s no single right answer, no guaranteed path to success. Progress comes from disciplined experimentation: form a hypothesis, test it, read the result, adjust.
What it reveals
Planetfall makes visible something most organisations struggle to assess: how leaders actually behave when the answer isn’t clear and waiting for certainty isn’t an option.
You see who experiments boldly and who freezes waiting for more data. Who updates their strategy when evidence contradicts their initial read, and who doubles down on the original plan regardless. Who treats ambiguity as a signal to control more tightly, and who uses it as an invitation to explore. How quickly teams build a shared mental model when everyone is working from incomplete information.
The debrief connects those patterns to real organisational challenges: leading through change, making decisions under uncertainty, and building cultures that learn from failure.
Who it’s for
Planetfall is well suited to leaders in fast-changing environments — organisations going through transformation, teams navigating new markets, or any group that needs to get more comfortable operating without the full picture.
It’s also effective for high-potential cohorts. Learning agility is one of the most reliable predictors of leadership effectiveness, and this game measures it directly.
Logistics
- Group size: 12 to 50 participants
- Duration: 2.5 to 3.5 hours including debrief
- Format: In-person
- Facilitated by: Arvindh Sundar