The biggest number in your ROI sum is not the invoice. It's the transfer rate - the share of people who take what happened in the room and actually use it. A conventional workshop moves 10-15% of participants (Baldwin & Ford, 1988, still the most cited figure in transfer research). A well-built game with a proper debrief can reach 60-80%. Same room. Same budget. Completely different answer at the bottom.
So stop haggling over the day rate for a minute and have a look at what the transfer rate does.
Put Your Own Numbers In
Rough is fine. The point isn't the decimal places. The point is watching one number bully all the others.
What Each One Actually Buys You
(at a 15% transfer rate)
(at a 65% transfer rate)
What I've assumed, said plainly:
- Conventional workshop transfer rate: 15% (Baldwin & Ford, 1988, and the meta-analyses since have not been kinder)
- Serious game transfer rate: 65%. This one is an assumption, not a measurement. A structured debrief and a commitment made out loud push transfer well above sitting-and-listening, but I have not run a controlled trial and I am not going to pretend I have. Your real number will be your own.
- Salary stands in for the value of someone's output, because there isn't a better proxy that fits in a box on a web page
- One year. No compounding. No second-order effects.
This is a rough tool, not a precision instrument. Change the transfer rate by ten points and the whole answer moves. Change the fee by ten percent and almost nothing does. That's the entire lesson, and it took four input boxes to say it.
So What Do You Do With This
Notice what just happened. The cheaper programme lost. A day that costs half as much and reaches 15% of the room buys you less than a day that costs more and reaches 65%. Cheap is not the same as good value. It never was, and everyone in L&D knows it, and we all keep filling in the procurement sheet anyway.
So here's what actually pushes the transfer rate up:
- They did it, they didn't hear about it. Real decisions, real pressure, real consequences two rounds later. The memory of a call you got wrong sticks in a way that a slide titled "Effective Delegation" simply cannot.
- The debrief names the actual thing. Not "you need to communicate better." More like: "In round 3 you sat on the one card your partner needed, because you wanted to be the one who solved it, and the team lost by four points." Specific. Watched. Very hard to wriggle out of.
- Nobody leaves without committing out loud. One named behaviour, one named situation, one named date. Said in front of colleagues who will remember. It is amazing what a room full of witnesses does to follow-through.
Make behaviour visible. Make the consequence immediate. Make somebody say what they'll do differently before they get their phone back. That's it. That's the whole thing that moves the number.
Want this run on your actual programme?
Tell me the group size, the behaviour that's bugging you, and what you want to be different by March. I'll scope it and come back with a quote within 24 hours. If a game isn't the right answer for your lot, I'll say that instead.
Get a quote Come and see the gamesWith love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.