Ripple Effect

Ripple Effect sits inside one fictional company, Ripple Water Retail. Five players take the five CXO seats - CEO, CHRO, CTO, CMO and CFO - each starting with a different resource. Every quarter they bid on a finite set of projects, so not everything can run.

And here's the sting. Every leader can hit their targets, tick every line on their own scorecard, go home rather pleased with themselves... and the company loses. Five locally perfect decisions, one worse whole. Nobody did anything wrong. That's the bit that makes the room go quiet.

I love running this one for exactly that moment. Nobody is the villain. Everybody did their job. And the business is still down.

How it works

Each player runs one function and controls one type of resource. Only some of the quarter's projects can be funded, so the CXOs have to negotiate, trade, and give things up in front of each other. Larger groups run several tables of five in parallel.

Local maxima, global maxima. Five people winning is not the same thing as the company winning. That is the entire lesson. Considerably less obvious at the table than it looks here.

What actually happens in the room

The leadership team starts confident. Everyone has a resource, a brief, clear targets. For twenty minutes it feels entirely manageable. Then the maths stops working. No function can fund what's sitting in front of it on its own. That is the moment the real game starts.

Somebody makes the first move across the table, and that first move sets the tone for the whole room. Come with an open offer and the others follow. Come to extract information and give nothing back, and the other four clock it inside ninety seconds and shut the door. By the midpoint, every leader has a private read on every other. Who can be trusted. Who was evasive. Who agreed to something in quarter one and never delivered it.

Late on, the alliances get tested. Resources tighten, and partnerships that felt solid start to bend. Some hold. Some don't. I'm watching who breaks an agreement quietly, who breaks it in the open, and whether anyone else in the room notices in time to do something about it.

What it reveals about your leaders

Three hours of this, and how each leader handles their own win against the company's win is right out in the open:

• Who reaches across the table first, and whether they arrive with an offer or a request. The ones who sit and wait to be approached almost never land the good deals.
• The win-lose negotiator who squeezes every last point out of every trade, then genuinely cannot understand why nobody will deal with them by quarter three.
• Who weaponises information and who shares it. The function that drip-feeds data to hold an edge, sitting next to the one that shares openly and builds trust twice as fast.
• The leader who says "let me sort my own function out first" while the other four are already trading and moving the company along without them.
• Who treats their peers as competition even though the company only wins if they cooperate. Which is, of course, exactly what happens between real functions on a real Tuesday.
• Who adapts when an alliance breaks, and who spends the rest of the game relitigating the betrayal instead of finding the next move.

Who this is for

Organisations where cross-functional collaboration is genuinely hard. Which is to say, organisations. It works especially well for:

• Leadership teams pulled from different functions
• Enterprise leadership programmes
• Groups you need to prise out of their silos

It hits hardest when you bring your own data on where collaboration keeps breaking down. Then the game isn't a metaphor any more.

Patterns that surface

• The leader who perfects a plan for their own function while everyone else is already trading, and turns up at the table late and holding less
• The negotiator whose language says win-win and whose terms say win-lose. Only visible in hindsight, which is the point of playing it here
• The CXO who personally controls every message leaving their function. A one-person bottleneck slowing five people down
• The leader who treats the other functions as rivals right up until the final round, when the bill arrives
• The one who reaches across the table first and quietly reframes the entire room's strategy inside twenty minutes

When to bring it in

• Post-merger, when the teams are integrated on paper and have built no working trust at all. Especially if they used to compete for the same customers
• Breaking silos between functions that are supposed to be interdependent and behave like separate companies. Sales and delivery. Product and engineering. Operations and commercial
• Large leadership cohorts from different business units who need a shared operating model and will actually have to work together on Monday
• Organisations where collaboration is the stated value and the incentives pay for individual numbers. The game makes that contradiction visible and nobody has to be the one who said it

Where the real learning lands: the debrief

Every session ends on an EPPA debrief. Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application. Nobody leaves with vague reflections. They leave with one named behaviour and one specific situation to use it in. And I run the debrief myself, because I'm the one who watched every deal and every broken alliance. That continuity is the product.

Come and see

Tell me where collaboration keeps breaking down between your functions, and I'll tell you straight whether Ripple Effect is the right fit. If it isn't, I'll say so and point you at the one that is.

Message me on WhatsApp Call +91 99458 61640

Let's see if it fits your team

Grab a slot and we'll talk about your team, your goals, and whether this is the right game. No obligation, and no pitch deck.

Book a discovery call WhatsApp Arvindh

With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.