Why your best operators struggle in the leadership seat
Manufacturing and engineering companies build their leaders from the operation up, and thank goodness they do. The plant manager was the production lead who could hear a bearing going. The function head knows the process better than the SOP does. That is a genuine strength - these are people who understand the work in their hands. It also produces a very predictable gap. People who are brilliant at doing the work, suddenly paid to align other people doing it, coordinate with functions who do not return calls, and lead a change they did not choose and privately think is daft.
And you will have seen far more of this than I have. You already know exactly where it breaks. Plant and corporate optimise different numbers and blame each other in different meetings. Automation lands on the shopfloor as a threat, and your mid-level leaders have to carry it without freezing or quietly sabotaging it. And at 2am, when the line drops and the information is half there, somebody has to decide - now, expensively, either way. Classroom training will discuss all of this beautifully. Everyone will nod. It has never once shown a manager what they personally do while it is actually happening.
What a serious game surfaces in manufacturing
A serious game is a simulation with teeth. A designed scenario, a running clock, other people carrying their own targets, and then a debrief that names what came out of you. For a manufacturing leadership room, it makes visible:
- Whether plant-side and corporate-side leaders actually coordinate - or defend their own numbers while the seam between them quietly fails.
- Who leads people through a change and who defends the old way well past its expiry date.
- Who keeps deciding cleanly when conditions move mid-round, and who goes very, very quiet.
- Who shares information across the floor - and who holds a little of it back, because information is leverage and everyone in the room knows it.
The debrief names those behaviours specifically, in the language of how these leaders run their own areas. No theory. No models. Here is what happened, here is what to do about it.
Which games fit a manufacturing programme
I match the game to your situation, not to a theme. Nobody needs a factory-shaped game to learn something about a factory.
- Ripple Effect - cross-functional trust, systems thinking, silo vs. collective optimisation. Every table runs its own company and needs what the other tables make, so each deal is a choice: keep your word, or grab. That is the plant-versus-corporate seam in miniature. 16-60 people, 75-90 minutes of play.
- Chaos in the Kitchen - senior decision-making when the conditions refuse to sit still. Built for plant heads and function heads who have to call it on partial information. 15-50 people.
- Planetfall - learning agility, and adapting when the evidence contradicts the plan you defended last month. The core muscle for leading automation. 8-20 people, ~2 hours.
- Sticky Fingers - emergent leadership and collaboration under pressure. Scales to a whole supervisor cohort. 12-150 people.
Why I run every session myself
Operations people can smell training theatre from the car park. They will be perfectly polite about it and switch off completely. The reason this one works is that the person who designed the game is the person standing in the room running it. I watch your leaders under the simulation's pressure, then debrief the specific behaviour I saw. Not a scripted lesson. No associate delivery. No licensed hand-off. Concrete, named, no padding. Which is how a good operations review runs, and it is why people who lead by doing take it seriously.
Proof
I have run these programmes for a global engineering and technology firm and other technically deep, operations-led organisations - out of Bengaluru, in groups from 15 to 150. One programme at a Fortune 100 company scored 8.82/10 average satisfaction across 113 respondents over six session-days. And when that programme ended, they came back and commissioned a second, different one. That last bit matters to me more than the scores do.
What you get
- A discovery call and a written brief before we start, calibrated to your plant, your functions and your leadership level
- The game itself, half-day or full-day, run by me, the person who designed it
- An EPPA debrief, built to make behaviour visible and then say it out loud
- A written behaviour summary afterwards, ready to hand to a CHRO or leadership team
- A committed action plan from every single person in the room
And a promise. If the session doesn't surface at least three named leadership behaviour patterns worth changing, I redesign the next one at no cost. Nobody should pay for a session that showed them nothing.
What it costs
A day in the room runs between ₹60,000 and ₹1,00,000, plus taxes as applicable.
Half a day is half of that. So ₹30,000 to ₹50,000, plus taxes as applicable, on the same terms.
Both of those are ranges rather than a price list, and I do mean that. A short session with a lot built into it can land above a longer one with very little, so the clock is only part of it.
I put the range here because you should not have to sit through a call just to find out whether we are in the same ballpark. If that number is nowhere near your budget, you have saved yourself a fortnight and I would still rather you wrote to me and said so.
Where you land inside either of them comes down to five things, and none of them are a mystery:
- How long we are in the room. Half a day with one game and its debrief is one thing. A two-day programme is another.
- How many people are in the room, and how senior they are. Fifteen managers and sixty leaders are not the same day's work.
- How much I build from scratch. Running a game I already own costs less than designing your world, your constraints and your data into a new one.
- Whether I am leaving Bengaluru. Travel and stay are quoted separately, up front, so nothing appears on the invoice we did not talk about first.
- Whether it is one session or a series. Four batches of the same programme do not cost four times a single batch, because the design is built once.
A bespoke senior day, built from nothing, in another city, sits at the top of the band. A game I already run, one batch, here in Bengaluru, sits at the bottom. Most work lands somewhere in the middle, and I will tell you which end you are at in the first conversation rather than the third.
One honest thing about the calendar while we are being straight with each other. I take two or three engagements a month, mostly because I run every one of them myself, so dates go three or four weeks out. I would rather say that now than when you already have a date in mind.
Tell me roughly what you are trying to fix and you will have a real number, not a range, within a day of us speaking.
Frequently asked questions
Why do manufacturing companies need serious games?
Because manufacturing promotes technical and operational excellence into leadership, and then asks those leaders to coordinate plant with corporate, carry teams through automation, and decide in minutes when a line or a schedule breaks. None of that is a knowledge gap. They already know what good looks like. It is behaviour under pressure, and behaviour only turns up when there is pressure for it to turn up under. A serious game is a simulation that creates the pressure and makes the behaviour visible, which is the only way anybody has ever developed it.
Which serious game fits a manufacturing team?
Ripple Effect for cross-functional trust and the plant-versus-corporate silo. Chaos in the Kitchen for senior decision-making when operational conditions will not sit still. Planetfall for the learning agility that leading automation and change demands. In the pre-session brief I match the game to your situation, not to a theme.
Does this work for shopfloor-to-management leaders?
Yes, and honestly this is where it lands hardest. Leaders who came up through operations lead by doing, and they will engage with a simulation they have to act inside long before they engage with a session on leadership theory. The debrief is grounded in what they actually did in the room, so it connects straight to how they run their own areas on Monday.
Related
- Serious games for leadership development in India
- Change management for managers
- How to break down silos between teams
With love from Bengaluru, this is Arvindh saying over and out.