How Business Simulations Train Leaders

Short answer: if you mean a multi-round model where teams set price and headcount and a spreadsheet reports the quarter, that is a real product and a good one, and it is not what I build. If you mean a situation built around your actual business that your leaders have to run against each other, in a room, with something real at stake, that is mine.

Both are called a business simulation. That is not a marketing accident, it is just an overloaded phrase, and I would rather clear it up in the first paragraph than have you find out three emails in.

And if what you are really after is the wider idea, leaders running a built situation together and then talking about what they did, that has its own page: leadership simulation.

A group of leaders discussing strategy mid-way through a business simulation

The shelf model, and the one built for you

The software kind is usually a licensed model. Built once, sold many times, the same board and the same numbers whether your business sells retail or runs a hospital.

And to be fair to them, that is not a small achievement. Getting a spreadsheet to behave like a believable quarter, and to do it consistently for a thousand different companies, is genuinely hard work. I would not want to build it myself.

It is just a different job from the one I do.

Mine is not licensed anywhere, because it is built from scratch for the business asking for it. Your org chart, your kind of scarcity, the trade-off your leadership team actually avoids in the Monday meeting. Then it goes on a table, with cards and pieces and a clock, and I sit in the room and watch what happens.

Side by side, more or less:

Dimension	The licensed model	One built for your business
What it models	A generic company, applicable to most	Your company's own scarcity and trade-offs
Where it runs	Software, often unfacilitated	In the room, with a facilitator watching
What it is best at	Financial acumen, P&L intuition, scale	Who goes quiet, who takes the room, who protects their own patch
How it scales	To a thousand people, easily	To one room at a time, which is the point

Financial acumen genuinely is better taught by the model that has done it for a thousand companies before yours. I would say that to your face on a discovery call. What a licensed model cannot see is which of your leaders quietly optimises for their own department when the pressure comes on, because that behaviour is specific to your team, not to business in general.

What that looks like, concretely

Ripple Effect is the simulation that sits closest to this phrase. Each table is the leadership team of one fictional company: a CEO, CFO, COO, CTO and CHRO, each holding their own function's resources. Every quarter the company can run only three projects, and most projects need resources from more than one function.

So they choose, they negotiate, they fund each other's projects. Or they don't. And the interesting part is never the arithmetic.

It is which leader backs somebody else's project when that means their own one waits. Every function can have a good quarter on its own board, and the company can still come out behind.

I facilitate it myself, and I have run it with leaders at a Fortune 100 company. One person in that room said it was a bit hard to follow at first. It settled once they had played a quarter.

Sixteen to sixty people, 90 to 120 minutes of play and then the debrief, and the debrief is where I tell that specific room what I watched them do, not a generic script about cross-functional trust.

A team working through decisions during a tabletop business simulation

The proof, and its limit

Ripple Effect ran inside a longer programme, so I do not quote a score for the game on its own. What I can show you is how the rest of my work has landed. On one programme at a Fortune 100 company, across six session-days, the satisfaction score came to 8.82/10 from 113 respondents. Across every session-day I have had scored, it is 8.40/10 from 244 respondents.

That is a satisfaction score, not a behaviour score, and I would rather say that plainly than let the number do more work than it has earned. A room can enjoy an afternoon and forget it by November.

The thing I would actually point at is that the same company has since had me run other, different programmes. Which is not proof either, but it is the kind of evidence I trust more than a survey.

Where I would send you to a licensed model instead

If you need five hundred managers across four countries doing the same module in the same week, on their own laptops, on their own time, that is not me. I run one room at a time, and I am usually in it.

And if the actual gap is financial literacy, reading a P&L, understanding how six small decisions compound into a bad quarter, a well-built software model will teach that more efficiently than a facilitated afternoon will, and I would tell you so.

Where I earn my place is the smaller, senior room where the problem is not a skill gap. It is a behaviour that only shows up when something real is at stake, and nobody in the room will name it out loud without a reason to.

Common Questions

What is a business simulation for leadership training?
It depends who you ask. For a lot of people it means licensed software - a model built once and sold to everyone, where your team sets price and headcount for a few rounds and a spreadsheet reports back. Mine is the other kind. A situation built around your actual business, played on a table, with the trade-offs your leaders genuinely face rather than a generic one.

Is this a management training simulation game or something more serious than that?
Both, honestly, and I would not want to pretend otherwise. It is played like a game - cards, budgets, a clock, people arguing over a table. What comes out of it is not a game at all. Who protects their own department when the numbers get tight, who actually gives something up for the group, who goes quiet. That is the part a workshop slide cannot reach.

How is this different from an online business simulation?
An online business simulation is usually good at what it does, which is modelling numbers over many rounds at a scale I will never reach. Mine is in-person, on purpose, because the thing I am asked to surface is social rather than financial - who takes the room, who quietly optimises for themselves, who steps back and lets someone else absorb the cost. That needs bodies in a room and somebody watching it happen.

How many people can play, and how long does a session take?
Ripple Effect, the one that sits closest to what people mean by this phrase, runs 16 to 60 people, with 90 to 120 minutes of play followed by the debrief. Other simulations in the catalogue run from 45 minutes to six hours, depending on the behaviour the room needs to see rather than how much of the day has been booked.

Is there proof this actually changes anything?
There is a satisfaction score, and I will not dress it up as more than that. On one programme at a Fortune 100 company, across six session-days, it came to 8.82/10 from 113 respondents, and across every session-day I have had scored it is 8.40/10 from 244. That tells you the room liked it, not that anyone's behaviour changed on the Tuesday after. The same company has since had me run other, different programmes, which I trust more than a survey. And Ripple Effect ran inside a longer programme, so I do not quote a score for the game on its own.