In this section, Michael Davies shares his insights about engaging students in role-play and simulation exercises as a way to hone their abilities to make strategic decisions in business settings.
Becoming a Decision-Making Ninja through Role-Play and Simulation
Role-play and simulation experiences are core components of ESD.S51 Systems Leadership and Management Praxis. Early in the term we do the Ember Corporation role-playing exercise and case study. After students write briefs on the perspectives and motivations of a specific member of the Ember Corporation high tech leadership team, students from the class are selected to enact Ember’s decision-making process, while the other students observe. We perform this role-play in MIT’s Killian Court and attract a lot of tourists. It’s like Shakespeare in the Park for business people! After the role-play we have a discussion about how individuals’ perspectives and motivations impacted strategic decision-making during the role-play.
The bottom line is that decision-making has nothing to do with rationality.
—Michael Davies
The Back Bay Battery online simulation, written by a team at Harvard, is another key experience in the course. In the simulation, students assume the role of a business unit manager at a battery start up company. Most people play the simulation with the goal of maximizing profit. But what I ask students to do is different: I ask them to play Back Bay Battery as a team, twice—and under tremendous time pressure. In addition to limited decision-making time, there’s also too much information, and a lot of ambiguity. In other words, it’s very similar to the real world. The simulation becomes a test of students’ ability to build, as a team, a robust process for thinking about how they’re going to cope with information thrown at them when they least expect it. I’m trying to get them to become decision-making ninjas!
Learning from Failure
The first time through the Back Bay Battery simulation, students generally screw up completely. They haven’t thought about how to organize as team to process new information. They haven’t assigned roles to people. They don’t have good decision-making criteria. Typically, one team, out of about six, will do well, four will perform moderately badly, and one team will be just horrific. They’ll keep going bankrupt. They’ll get nowhere. They’ll argue with each other. But it’s this team that usually ends up doing very well during the second run of the simulation. They end up doing well, because they learn so much from having things go so badly.
Usually the team that does very well during the first run does poorly during the second run. I think it’s because they get complacent. They think they’ve got it all figured out and don’t need to change anything, whereas everybody else who didn’t do well during the first run focuses intently on becoming better. The teams that don’t initially do well are motivated by failure. They spend many hours running through contingency plans and different scenarios. They assign each other roles. In other words, they come completely prepared for the second run-through of the simulation and this makes a significant difference.
Deciding to Teach through Role-Play and Simulation
My decision to teach through role-play and simulation grew out of my career experience as a consultant for multi-billion dollar companies. In my work, I became increasingly focused on the role that “soft” factors, as opposed to “hard” analytic factors, played in companies’ decision-making processes and their related outcomes. I noticed there was a huge amount of effort put in to analyzing the hard factors, and not nearly enough effort being put into thinking about the soft factors, such as people’s perspectives and motivations, and how they influenced decision-making. I was curious about why people made bad decisions in the face of very strong analytical evidence that they shouldn’t make those decisions.
I started thinking really hard about how decisions actually got made. The bottom line is that decision-making has nothing to do with rationality. I realized that business students needed to understand how to make decisions as a group, how to work without entirely complete information, and how to think about others’ perspectives. Role-plays and simulations are an excellent way to teach these kinds of skills.
This is a really fun course to teach! At the beginning, though, it was very scary to teach through role-play and simulation, because I didn’t know how it was going to go. It’s not a didactic form of pedagogy. You really have to think on your feet. It’s a very challenging course to teach, because it’s very, very interactive. You rely heavily on students participating, contributing, and interacting with each other. So the first time I taught it, I thought, “This could be great, or it could be terrible.” Fortunately, it was great.