How Simulations Develop Business Acumen in Leaders

This is the transcript of "How Business Simulations Develop Business Acumen in Leaders?" — an Insight Experience live event held on November 10, 2026. The session was hosted by Ned Wasniewski, Managing Partner, Insight Experience.

Ned: All right, folks, I’m going to go ahead and get us started. Thank you for being on time; I appreciate it very much. Today we’ll have a conversation about business acumen and what it means. One thing we’ll do is define what we mean by business acumen, because different people define and interpret it differently. Then we’ll discuss how business simulations can help develop business acumen in leaders and in employees at large.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Ned Wasniewski. I work for Insight Experience as a managing partner, and I’m also the practice leader for our business acumen offerings, which means all the different business acumen programs and simulations we offer. I have oversight of that part of the business and ultimate responsibility for it. I’m also a facilitator of our business acumen programs, and I think it’s safe to say I’ve taught hundreds of them for our clients over the years.

I’m joined today by Stacey Holtum and Julie Danielson, who have different responsibilities. Stacey will handle any technology troubleshooting, and she’ll also manage the polling we’ll be using. I’ll say more about that in a moment. Julie will monitor the chat feed. I’m going to ask some questions and would like you to answer using the chat, and Julie will watch for your input and play it back to us.

I have a couple of public service announcements before we start. First, if you have questions about what I’m sharing, feel free to enter them in the chat, and we’ll answer them at the very end. To give you a sense of how we’ll spend our time: about 30 to 35 minutes with me giving an overview of what business acumen is and how simulations can drive that skill set, and then five, ten, possibly fifteen minutes for Q&A.

On cameras, use yours or not. If you’re more comfortable with it off, that’s fine, and if you want to keep it on, that’s good too. I’ve already mentioned chats and polls. Throughout the presentation I’ll ask for feedback via the chat, and we’ll also use polls to get your input from time to time. Finally, after this is over, you’ll receive an email with the recording and a PDF of the deck I’m sharing. We’re also sending that to people who registered and were interested in this live event but couldn’t make it, so it goes to everybody.

We’ll start with our first poll question. I’ll share the question and answer choices on this slide, and Stacey will launch a poll in a separate window. You can answer there, and then Stacey will share the results.

The first poll question is: What is your interest in learning more about business acumen? In other words, why are you here? The choices are:

A: We’re actively building a program on business acumen for our employees.
B: We’re considering improving an existing business acumen program we already have.
C: We’re just exploring options right now.
D: I simply want to learn more about what business acumen is and what it means.
E: I’m just curious. I don’t have a specific agenda, but I’d like to learn more about business acumen and our offerings.

Stacey, if you want to launch that poll, we’ll see the results here. I’ll wait a minute. Great, I see some answers coming in. Terrific. I’m going to wait for one more person. All right, Stacey, you can end the poll and share the results.

One person said they’re planning to build a business acumen program for their employees. I hope this is useful for you. The others said they simply want to learn more about what we mean by business acumen, and that’s a great reason to be here, because business acumen can mean very different things to different people and organizations. We’ll provide our own point of view about what business acumen is and is not. Stacey, if you want to stop sharing that, that’d be great. Thank you.

About Insight Experience

As we get started, I want to share a little about our company, Insight Experience, and who we are. First and foremost, we’ve been around for a little over 25 years, and we are a leadership development company. We work primarily, but not exclusively, with Fortune 1000 companies. What’s important about those companies is that they’re all committed to talent development. They understand the importance of developing their employees and the talent they have.

In the leadership development space, we have a core capability in the design, development, and delivery of business simulations as well as other experiential learning activities. Throughout this conversation I’ll talk about why we use business simulations in our classes and about their power to teach and reinforce the content we share, whether it’s business acumen or other topics.

If you’re familiar with Brandon Hall, we’re a multiple-time Brandon Hall award winner. You can learn more about that on our website, so I won’t go into the details of the awards now.

Another thing that distinguishes us from our competitors, in addition to our simulation capability, is our facilitation capability. Our facilitators generally have deep experience teaching leadership development, strategy execution, innovation, and business acumen programs. I’ll share more about our facilitation capabilities as we get deeper into the conversation, specifically as they relate to business acumen.

Finally, we deliver our programs both in person and virtually across the globe. We’ve taught in probably 50 to 60 different countries and across six continents. Our facilitators are comfortable delivering to global audiences and can tailor their delivery to the business customs and norms of the audiences they teach.

What Is Business Acumen?

So let’s get to the first question we want to address in this webinar: what, in fact, is business acumen? As I mentioned earlier, different people and companies define it differently. We’ve certainly learned that as we’ve worked with clients and talked with prospects. We always start an engagement by asking, “What is your definition of business acumen?” and, as I said, it varies quite a bit. So I’ll share the definition we use.

Business acumen is the ability to understand how a business makes money and what drives its performance, and to use that understanding to make sound decisions. The shorthand is understanding how both your decisions and your actions ultimately drive business performance. That performance can show up as financial performance, operational performance, human capital performance, and so on. But ultimately it’s understanding how decisions and actions drive bottom-line performance, and in many ways anticipating that.

Other clients have often described business acumen as financial literacy, meaning understanding the finances and numbers behind a business. Others describe it as industry knowledge, and still others as organizational awareness. We believe it’s a combination of those, and in a moment I’ll break business acumen down into greater detail about its components.

The last thing I’ll share is that many of our clients have developed leadership competency models, and embedded in those models is a reference to business acumen. They might use different language. They might not say “business acumen” specifically; they might talk about their leaders needing financial literacy or fluency, or needing a commercial mindset. Those are examples of different terms that describe the same skill set and the same knowledge.

The Three Lenses of Business Acumen

We think business acumen has three components, or what we call lenses. You need all three to have a full and comprehensive view of a business. The three lenses are market perspective, financial acumen, and business systems thinking. Let’s take them one at a time.

Market Perspective

The first is market perspective. As the name implies, it’s about understanding the markets you serve, and a variety of things are required to have a strong perspective in the marketplace.

It starts with understanding who your customers are and what they want. Customers can be segmented into different types, especially for large, complex organizations, which will have multiple customer segments. Market perspective requires you to understand who those customers are, what they want from their vendors, and their specific requirements.

It also involves understanding who your competitors are and how they’re unique or different from you. How might they be similar to you? What is their value proposition compared to your own, so that you can develop and evolve your value proposition to be distinct from theirs?

Then it’s understanding your company’s position within the broader marketplace and the industry you serve, and how you’re attempting to differentiate yourself from your competitors so that customers ultimately want to work with you rather than with them.

Finally, market perspective includes being aware of the trends that shape your marketplace and industry. What’s happening in the broader economy, and perhaps the global marketplace, that can affect your business?

To test our understanding of market perspective and cement it a little, I have a question for you to answer in the chat: Share one market or business trend that is significantly affecting your business today. I’ll wait a moment for some feedback. Julie, if you see any, let me know.

Julie: We’ve got Barrett sharing lack of funding from NIH and changes in the funding landscape, and also rapid adoption of AI.

Ned: Great, thank you. Thank you, Krista, as well. One common theme, and no surprise, is AI. AI has been with us for a long time, but it’s impossible to escape now, and it is fundamentally changing the way we work. It’s absolutely shifting businesses and the industries in which we work.

Funding was also mentioned. If I’m interpreting those comments correctly, funding can be a byproduct of what I’d call the geopolitical landscape. It could be a result of the current administration or not; you’d be better experts on that than I am. But the political landscape is absolutely affecting different businesses.

Other answers we commonly get in today’s environment are inflation, and related to inflation, tariffs. Talent acquisition and retention is also a trend that’s affecting businesses. And finally, I mentioned geopolitics, which I relate back to the fact that it’s leading to inflation and tariffs. We have some very evident examples of what’s driving inflation: one is the war in Ukraine, and another is the conflict or war in the Middle East. Those are examples of trends affecting different businesses, and of course they’ll all affect us a little differently. Thank you for sharing.

Financial Acumen

The next element of business acumen is what we call financial acumen. As the name implies, it’s understanding the financials and financial performance of a business.

It begins with a basic understanding of financial reports: how to read them and how to interpret them. You’ll see a reference to metrics on the slide. Financial reports provide a variety of metrics, and those can be operational as well as financial. An example of a financial metric might be revenue, gross margin, or net income. It could be return on assets or return on equity. Those are classic financial metrics.

Why do we care? We use financial reports and metrics to monitor the performance of our business. As we look at our results, we can ask informed questions. If a metric is trending in one direction or another, we can ask why it’s changing. If we don’t like its trajectory, we can ask what we can do to improve it. That leads us to adjusting plans. Financial reports and metrics provide important insights about trends in the business and allow us to make course corrections if necessary.

Financial acumen also helps us understand how we, in our organizations and on our teams, ultimately impact financial performance. I would say this is one of the most important elements of the financial acumen component of business acumen: really understanding how you impact bottom-line performance. And when I say bottom line, that could mean departmental performance, functional performance, or enterprise performance.

With that, I’ll ask you another question to answer in the chat: Name one financial metric that is either important to your business, so it’s omnipresent and in front of you at all times, or that you’d like to understand better. You’ve seen references to it quite a bit, but you don’t have a full understanding of it. I’ll wait for some comments to come in. All right, any takers? Anybody willing to admit?

Okay, great. Krista, thank you. Cost of sales is a very common line item you’ll find on the income statement. Anybody else?

Return on investment for leadership development programs. Thank you, Rachel. Return on investment, often referred to as ROI, applies to all types of investments, whether it’s leadership development programs or others. Rich, you mentioned EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Howard, you mentioned fully loaded recruitment and retention costs. That’s something that could show up on a departmental or divisional P&L.

Those are all great examples. EBITDA is a very common metric that most businesses pay attention to and track, and there can be others that are specific to an organization. Howard, what you mentioned might be more specific to your organization, your department, or your function. I’ll talk about this a bit later, but when we develop business acumen programs for our clients, we want to really understand the most critical metrics for them so we can highlight them, teach them, and reinforce them.

Business Systems Thinking

The final element of business acumen is business systems thinking. This is really seeing the big picture of a business and its component parts. The component parts could be the different functions that make up a business, its divisions, its business units, and so on.

One of the great benefits of a simulation is that it requires you to think about how decisions made in one area of the business affect other departments or functions. Most of us, when we make decisions, first and foremost think about how they’ll affect our own department or functional performance. But especially as you gain more leadership and management responsibility, it’s important to think more broadly and consider how decisions in your line of business can affect other parts of the business.

Business systems thinking also helps you understand how the different decisions and actions you make combine to build strategic advantage and value compared to your competitors. And finally, it covers how different lines of business contribute to overall business performance.

We have some people on this call who work for fairly large organizations that are, I would offer, organizationally complex, with multiple business units or lines of business. What’s interesting is that different lines of business can contribute very differently to a company’s bottom-line performance. That’s important to understand as you aspire to deeper business acumen knowledge and capabilities.

I’ve just shared the three lenses of business acumen, and here’s a question for you: As you think about them, which lens is the biggest gap for your leaders? You can see the options. The first three are the ones I just mentioned: market perspective, financial acumen, and business systems thinking. For some of you it could be all of the above, and for others it could be “I’m not sure.” Stacey, if you want to open up that poll, I’d appreciate it if you’d answer the question.

Great. These answers are coming in very quickly. Good. All right, Stacey, I think you can close that and share. You should be able to see the results.

One person mentioned market perspective as a gap, meaning they need to strengthen their overall understanding of the market and their position within it. Others mentioned business systems thinking, which, as I just described, is understanding how the entire enterprise works and how its component parts interrelate. And one person mentioned all of the above.

As we develop business acumen programs, we work with our clients to understand their biggest gap, and we can weight the content of the program appropriately. We might bias it toward market perspective or business systems thinking, depending on our clients’ needs.

Business Acumen Offerings and Simulations

I’ve given you some background on what business acumen is and its three lenses. Now I want to talk about our business acumen offerings and simulations and what they look like. We’ll spend the rest of the time before Q&A on that.

First, here are sample learning objectives for a business acumen program from some of our existing clients. I want to underscore sample. I’ll give you a moment to read across these, and then a couple of comments. First, for the sake of time I’m not going to go into depth, but I could provide context on each one and why it’s important for participants or leaders to develop these capabilities.

Second, as I’ve said a couple of times, when we first engage with a client we have a discovery process and phase where we better understand their business challenges and their gaps in business acumen. We then modify or customize the learning objectives for that client. That’s a byproduct of the discovery work, which we do in collaboration with our client or prospective client.

As we move on, I’ll talk about the structure of a typical business acumen program, which does include a business simulation. First, I have another poll question, and I think it might be our final one: What experience do you have with business simulations? Your choices are:

A: I have none. This is all new to me.
B: I have participated in simulations personally, either at work or at school.
C: I’m quite familiar with using them. Our company uses them on a regular basis.

Stacey, if you want to launch that poll, I’d appreciate it if you’d answer for me. Great. I’m waiting for a couple more people to respond. All right, I’ll give it another five or ten seconds to get one or two more answers. Stacey, if you want to end the poll and share the results.

You can see we have answers for A and B. One of you doesn’t have any previous experience, and I’m delighted about that, because this should provide some insight into how we use business simulations to teach business acumen and into the methodology in general. Some of you have experience participating in simulations yourselves, so you probably have some idea of the methodology and perhaps even the power of business simulations in general. Thanks for sharing. You can close that, Stacey.

How Business Simulations Develop Business Acumen

I want to begin with how business simulations develop business acumen. First and foremost, they provide a platform to practice and reinforce the content taught in one of our classes. I would say that’s one of the greatest benefits of simulations.

I could amend that to say they provide practice and reinforcement in a safe, risk-free environment. We allow people to make decisions in the simulation where, at the end of the day, there are no consequences if you make mistakes or fail. In fact, we encourage that risk-taking because, as we all know, the greatest learning is often where people don’t perform up to expectations or make mistakes.

Simulations are also relevant and realistic. When we design a simulation, we often design it to reflect our client’s business and the broader marketplace they operate within. That provides context and greater relevance, and that leads to higher engagement among participants.

Simulations also provide immediate feedback. Participants make a variety of decisions in the simulation and get immediate results after submitting them. That’s a great benefit, because in the real world we don’t always get immediate feedback, and in some cases it can be hard to measure the impact of our decisions. For many decisions we make in our businesses, we might not see the benefits or impact for days, weeks, months, sometimes even years. A simulation provides that immediate feedback.

The simulation also allows us to target our clients’ strategic goals and key metrics. As I mentioned earlier, you might have some critical metrics that you’re even compensated or measured on within your business, and you want to be sure you understand what they are and ultimately how you can impact them. These are some of the reasons simulations do such a great job of developing business acumen.

The Insight Experience Learning Cycle

Now I want to quickly share what a typical Insight Experience business acumen program looks like. We refer to it as our learning cycle, and it has four components. I’ll describe each one and then give some examples.

It begins with large group presentations and discussions. This is where we actually teach content and concepts. Sometimes we’ve referred to this as theory; for a business acumen simulation, it’s where we teach financial principles and concepts. As we do this, and you’ll see a reference on the slide, we often integrate client and, in some cases, competitor financial data and performance into the presentations. This serves a couple of purposes. One, it reinforces the content or theory we’re teaching. A secondary benefit is that it increases participants’ knowledge of their own company’s financial performance, as well as that of their competitors. We call that double-loop learning: we teach the concept and then reinforce it with examples from the real world.

Then there is simulation decision-making. In terms of process, we typically organize participants into teams of four or five, and together they assume the role of leaders in a fictional business. That fictional business is designed to look like your own business, and together they make a variety of decisions on behalf of that company. The primary purpose of the simulation is to provide a platform to practice, apply, and ultimately reflect on the concepts they’re learning in the program. It’s about providing that practice environment, or playing field.

After each round of simulation decision-making, our facilitators conduct what we call a results presentation or learning discussion. It has two primary purposes. First, we want to help participants understand how the decisions they made in the simulation affected their simulation results. We call that causal analysis: how do decisions drive performance or results? Second, part of our job as facilitators is to make connections between what they’re learning, both in content and in the simulation, and their work. How can they apply insights and lessons learned to their day-to-day jobs?

The primary way we do that is the last leg of the learning cycle, reflection and application activities. We ask participants, individually and in groups, to reflect on what they’ve learned and identify how they can apply it immediately back at work. We generally ask them to report out on this, and the report-out process holds them accountable for that learning. That’s our overall cycle.

Now I’ll give some very quick examples of each. First, large group presentations and discussions. As I said, this is where we present content and theory to participants. It can cover a lot of ground. We’ll clearly focus on financial concepts, but it can also include strategic, operational, and leadership principles and concepts. This slide is just one example out of many different slides we may use in a client engagement. It refers to the income statement and describes its primary elements. It’s simply an example of content related to financial acumen.

The next slide is an example where we integrate client financial performance into the program. As I mentioned, there’s a dual benefit. We initially teach participants what revenue is. Then, in this case, we provide real data about our client’s revenue performance over a period of time, which happens to be five years. We also include the financial performance of its primary competitors. Again, this reinforces the concept of revenue and educates participants about their own company’s performance as well as their competitors’.

The final example is a slide we use with one of our heavy equipment manufacturing clients. It reflects their primary competitors in the marketplace. These are all publicly traded companies, so this is information I can freely share, because anyone on this call has access to it. There’s nothing confidential or covered by an NDA in here. One of the reasons I’m sharing it is that it helps reinforce the market perspective element of business acumen.

Next is simulation decision-making. This is a picture of a laptop, because participants enter their simulation decisions on a laptop. If you look closely, there’s a screenshot of one of the simulations we use for a client. If I move on, I can share a little more information. What you see on this screen is the home screen of one of our client simulations. Once again, as a reminder, participants make a variety of decisions that span financial, strategic, and operating decisions, as well as leadership decisions.

Generally, we design our simulations to be functionally organized, meaning teams make decisions in different categories that align to different functions in our client’s business. Here you can see references to sales and marketing, research and development, manufacturing, and so on. The screen capture in the foreground of this slide is a product pricing and marketing screen, where teams make decisions about pricing their products for customers and about investing in marketing. That’s just one example, and of course we have other simulations. I’m happy to give you a deeper demonstration.

In the simulation, teams and participants get lots and lots of feedback. What you see on this screen are some sample reports: an income statement, an inventory management report, and an organizational update report. These reports give participants feedback on how their decisions affected these different results. As facilitators, we work with simulation teams to help them understand the reports and to do the causal analysis I mentioned earlier: how did their decisions affect the results? This is another place where we tailor for our customers. You may be a customer in a service industry where inventory is just not relevant, so the inventory management report would not be included in your simulation.

I also mentioned the simulation results presentation and learning discussions. The primary purpose is to help participants understand how their decisions affected results. The slide you see here is an example of different decisions teams might make in the simulation. If you read the fine print closely, you’ll see references to product pricing, marketing investments, and product sales reps. Those decisions, along with others, can drive results.

The next slide is a market share slide. It’s a typical slide we share to demonstrate results, and market share is one of the more important results or metrics for any business: how are you doing compared to your competitors? This is an example where we walk participants through the process of understanding how decisions led to bottom-line results. In this case, the example is market share.

Finally, we have reflection and application activities. I mentioned those before. There’s not much else to say, except that they give participants the opportunity to reflect on what they’ve learned and identify opportunities to put it into immediate practice back at work.

That’s a quick flyby of our learning cycle. The only other thing I want to add is that this cycle will happen a number of times, depending on the length of the program. We start with a round of group presentations and discussions. Participants apply what we teach in the simulation. We have the simulation results presentation and learning discussion, give them time for reflection, and then go through the cycle again, with more presentations, more simulation decision-making, and so on. In a typical Insight Experience business acumen simulation experience, there are about three to four iterations of this cycle.

What Makes a Business Acumen Class Successful?

I have one last slide, and then I’ll open the floor for Q&A. At the end of the day, what makes a business acumen class successful? We’ve been doing this for well over 25 years, and business acumen can be a difficult topic to teach if you’re just teaching theory. Here is what we’ve learned makes it successful.

First, relevance. I talked about the ability to customize content and the simulation, and about integrating client and competitor financials to reinforce the work. All of that makes it more relevant, and participants are naturally more interested in the course content because it’s so relevant to their own company’s performance, which most participants care about. They care about the financial performance and success of the business they work for.

Second, facilitation. We think our facilitation really helps bring a class to life, in addition to the content. Our facilitators typically don’t have an L&D background. They’ve come to us after working in industry and holding management and leadership roles in business, so they have actual experience running a business. For example, one of our business acumen facilitators worked in a sales leadership role at Salesforce for about ten years in Latin America. During that time he had full P&L responsibility, and he needed a deep understanding of business acumen, and certainly financial literacy, to be successful in that role. So he can not only teach the concepts of a class, but also bring his experience into the classroom and make the content and theory more meaningful with real-life examples.

Finally, the simulation. Especially for those who’ve been through one, you know it’s a very engaging experience for most people. Most people really enjoy the simulation aspect for a number of reasons. It’s highly experiential and hands-on, and there can be a component of competitiveness that gets the juices flowing and leads to greater engagement. And depending on its design, the simulation reflects our client’s business and their industry at large, which leads to higher engagement. I should also say learning retention.

With that, thanks for listening, and now I’m going to open it up to Q&A. Julie, I don’t know if people have posted questions along the way, but if you want to share those with me, I’d be happy to answer any questions people have.

Q&A

Julie: Not yet, but if anybody wants to type a question in the chat, now is a great time. I can get us started with a couple of questions people often ask about programs like this, but everybody please feel free to put any questions in the chat. How do you run a group that mixes finance people and non-finance people?

Ned: It’s a good question. In case everybody didn’t hear: how do you manage groups that include both finance and non-finance leaders or managers? This happens all the time with customers, and we welcome both. There’s an obvious benefit for non-finance managers, because they’re more likely to have less financial literacy than the finance managers.

But even though finance managers may have studied finance or accounting in school, we’ve recognized that they often quickly specialize in some finance discipline. They might work in the treasury department, or in accounts receivable or collections. There are many different disciplines of finance, and we often get feedback like, “This was a great refresher on financial concepts, and what was even better was that it was taught in the context of our business. It gave me greater perspective beyond my own functional discipline.”

The other benefit of having finance people in the classroom is that, as facilitators, we often lean on them. We don’t always have all the answers, and in some cases, especially when it’s very specific to our client’s organization, the answers reside with those finance employees or participants.

Brit, I see you asked a question: how deeply do you go into the simulation decision-making section? If the question is how much time we spend on it, I’d say in a typical program about a third to maybe 40% of the time is allocated to some type of simulation-related activity. That could be the simulation decision-making itself or the simulation learning discussions. Another way to answer is that a simulation decision round typically lasts, on average, about 90 minutes. It can be as short as 60 minutes and as long as 120 minutes. It really depends on the nature of the simulation we’re using for a client and its scope and complexity.

The next one is: how much time would the training take in total? Is it one session, or can it be broken up into smaller chunks? The answer, tongue in cheek, is yes. For our in-person programs, they can run anywhere between a day and a half and three days. But they can be broken up into smaller chunks, and typically we do that for virtual programs. You could have a session in week one that lasts anywhere from two to three hours, followed by another session the next week, and so on. As an example, last week I taught a virtual class for a client that ran Monday through Thursday, and each session was three to four hours long. There are a lot of ways to slice and dice the format and schedule of a program. Brit, I hope I answered your question.

Any other questions? All right, I don’t see any other questions, so I’m going to wrap things up. As I mentioned, we’ll send you a copy of this recording and a PDF of the deck I just shared. I also encourage you, if you’d like more information or have a specific need, to reach out to us. We’d be happy to have an additional conversation to understand your questions or any specific needs or plans you have to develop a business acumen offering for your organization.

So that’s it. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate your time, and I look forward to maybe having additional conversations with you all. Thank you.