Abstract
A U.S.-based solar technology company faced increasing pressure to balance near-term performance with long-term innovation in a rapidly shifting global market. Insight Experience designed a custom, immersive business simulation that enabled senior leaders to practice enterprise-level decision-making in a competitive, technology-driven environment. As a result, leaders developed a shared definition of readiness, sharpened strategic discipline, and gained confidence navigating trade-offs across growth, investment, risk, innovation, and financial performance.
Challenge
In 2020, a U.S.-based solar technology company set ambitious goals for the decade ahead, committing to long-term growth, innovation, and operational excellence. Insight Experience was hired by the company to provide an engaging, high-energy, and inspirational learning experience for an annual offsite for its top 150 leaders. The challenge was to inspire and equip senior leaders with the strategic thinking, planning discipline, and agility required to meet and exceed the company’s 2030 goals amid increasing competition, both domestically and abroad; growing complexity; market volatility; and rapid technical innovation.
Solution
Insight Experience partnered with the company to design Leading at the Enterprise Level, a high-impact, custom business simulation integrated into a three-day 2026 leadership offsite. The top 150 leaders were organized into four parallel competitive “worlds,” each comprising a distinct industry. Within each world, six teams competed for market share against one another and against a sophisticated international competitor, creating a realistic and energizing competitive dynamic.
The experience unfolded over three deliberate phases. On Day One, teams immersed themselves in the business context and developed integrated strategies, aligning assumptions, priorities, and risk tolerance for the simulation experience. Day Two was devoted to the simulation experience, with leaders spending the day navigating multiple rounds of enterprise-level decision-making. Teams responded to competitive moves, market shifts, new technology opportunities, and internal constraints, while facilitated debriefs surfaced patterns in how leaders balanced short-term performance with long-term value creation.
On Day Three, Insight Experience elevated learning from individual team outcomes to an enterprise perspective. Trends across all teams were analyzed and shared, highlighting common decision traps and differentiating leadership approaches. Short-term and long-term winners were recognized to reinforce the consequences of strategic choices over time. The experience concluded with a facilitated panel discussion focused on the “so what,” translating simulation insights into clear implications for how leaders would think, decide, and lead moving forward.
Learning Objectives
As a result of the custom executive simulation experience, participants developed the ability to:
Build enterprise-wide situational awareness and readiness by understanding how business functions interdepend and influence outcomes.
Strengthen strategic decision-making in an environment of uncertainty.
Demonstrate leadership behaviors aligned with the company’s cultural pillars: Accountability, Agility, and Collaboration.
Apply financial and operational discipline to optimize long-term value creation.
Design Highlights
The design of Leading at the Enterprise Level intentionally balanced action with reflection. After each round of simulation decision-making, leaders engaged in structured, group-based reflection exercises anchored in the company’s strategic priorities and long-term goals. These discussions shifted attention away from simply “winning” and toward understanding how decisions were framed, how trade-offs were evaluated, and how leadership behaviors influenced outcomes. This rhythm of decision-making, reflection, and reapplication reinforced disciplined strategic thinking and helped leaders translate insights directly into their real-world leadership roles.
The simulation was customized to reflect the competitive and technological realities facing the business. Insight Experience introduced a seventh competitor representing a large international player, allowing teams to compare performance both within their six-team competitive set and against a broader global benchmark. This addition reinforced the reality of competing on a global stage and against a competitor with a different business model and government-subsidized advantages.
A new innovation-focused opportunity was also embedded into the simulation. Leaders faced decisions related to emerging technology investment, material sourcing strategies, and the pace of pursuing new market opportunities. These choices introduced meaningful trade-offs across cost, speed, quality, risk tolerance, and long-term advantage, reinforcing innovation as an enterprise leadership challenge rather than a purely technical one.
A core element of Leading at the Enterprise Level focused on how leaders scan their environment to inform strategic decisions. Through a simple scanning model, leaders examined internal, direct business, and macro environments and then reviewed data showing where teams actually focused their attention.
The results revealed that most leaders consistently scanned internal operations and the direct business environment, while fewer teams intentionally incorporated macro-environment signals such as technology shifts, regulatory dynamics, and global trends into their decision-making. Making this pattern visible prompted insightful discussion about the need for leaders to scan externally as part of readiness to meet their 2030 objectives.
Simulation Overview
Participants assumed the role of General Manager of a fictional, U.S.-based technology company operating in a capital-intensive, highly regulated market with two primary product lines serving distinct customer segments. The business faced steady demand growth, tightening margins, and increasing pressure from international competitors with different cost structures, business models, and strategic priorities.
Teams managed the entire enterprise, including sales and marketing, manufacturing, service, research and development, and workforce capability. Decisions spanned pricing, supply chain and manufacturing capacity, talent investment, operational efficiency, and technology innovation. Each simulation round represented a full business year, compressing time and making the long-term impact of decisions visible in financial performance, market share, product performance, and organizational health.
A central challenge involved evaluating and investing in a promising new technology with the potential to dramatically disrupt the marketplace. Teams had to decide how aggressively to invest, how to protect intellectual property, and how to balance innovation with the short-term performance of the core business.
"The dynamic environment ... really pushed our leadership team to think strategically, challenge assumptions, and collaborate in new ways." — Executive Sponsor
Participant Reflections
Following Leading at the Enterprise Level, participants were asked to reflect on the experience. Their responses included:
"What stood out most to me was that the event was not a one‑way dialogue but truly interactive and engaging. The simulation, in particular, was super fun and interesting, pushing our limits, stretched our thinking, opened up new perspectives, and helped us experience what it feels like to collaborate with cross functional leaders we haven’t worked with before.”
“Loved the ability to connect with so many other leaders at once, and being arranged in random teams. It gave me a sense from the start that we're here to solve problems and reinforced collaborative behavior across departments.”
“Better decisions were made when we got others’ perspectives.”
“The feedback loop and ability to see how decisions worked or didn't work allowed for recalibration and thoughtful discussion on how to move forward.”
“It was eye opening how easy it is to lose track of your original strategy and become only reactive in round 2.”
“[The simulation is] interactive and learnings stick better with you through 'practice' rather than just 'listening.'”