What Is a Leadership Simulation?

What Is a Leadership Simulation? — Webinar Transcript

Hosted by Krista Campbell, Director and Product Leader at Insight Experience, with Andrea Margarite, Associate Consultant

You are here today for the live event hosted by Insight Experience, to talk about what is a leadership simulation. I'll be your host today. My name is Krista Campbell, and I am a Director and Product Leader at Insight Experience. That means I work on the design and delivery of our leadership development offerings, predominantly for more senior audiences. I currently sit in Boston, Massachusetts.

I am joined by my colleague Andrea Margarite, who is an Associate Consultant here at Insight Experience. Andrea also works on supporting the design and delivery of our offerings.

About Insight Experience

To begin, I want to talk for a few minutes about Insight Experience and who we are. Insight Experience was founded in 2001, so we are delighted this year to be celebrating our 25th anniversary. We focus on experiential leadership development learning that enables participants and leaders to see the connection between their everyday leadership and the business outcomes they drive.

Part of our core expertise is the facilitation capabilities that we bring to our clients. All of our facilitators come from top MBA programs across the country and across the world, or have been in the trenches of leadership at Fortune 500 companies. They can really speak the language of business with the leaders we work with.

At Insight Experience, we deliver these kinds of immersive experiential training wherever you are. We meet your leaders where they are in their journey — whether that's in person for one day, in person for three days, virtually for a couple of days, or virtually for an hour or two at a time. We work with clients and leaders to design experiences that really meet them where they are.

In our 25 years in business, we've had the pleasure and the privilege of working with a wide range of companies across industries and across the world. In that process of working with these clients, we have been recognized across the industry. Most recently, we've been awarded by the Brandon Hall Group with a technology excellence award for our new AI grading capability. We can grade the communications that our participants write using AI tools to give them tailored feedback based on the text that they've entered.

That's just a little bit about us in case you're not familiar with Insight Experience. Now let's jump into what is a leadership simulation.

Let's Do a Simulation Exercise Together

Here at Insight Experience, because we are an experiential learning company, I am going to have you *do* rather than tell you what we do. We're going to actually do a scenario together today.

Meet Kelly

To do that, I'm going to invite you to meet Kelly. She graduated from Penn State in 2020 — she probably didn't have the graduation ceremony she had hoped for that year — but nevertheless, she has persisted, and she has recently been promoted to Senior Analyst.

You can see here we've got some information about Kelly and her current capabilities. One thing about simulation-based learning is that sometimes we have metrics or quantitative measures for things that we don't normally have a quantitative measure for in real life. We do that very intentionally so you can gauge improvement or decline on a given dimension and also benchmark against your peers.

Here you can see that Kelly — I would say she's pretty motivated. She's got an 86 for her motivation. Her people skills and business skills, I would say, are roughly average — 65 and 70. We also have some qualitative information about Kelly. We know she's eager and she's capable, but she's still got room to grow and improve. She's recently promoted, and we know that she's got the motivation to do better and to keep growing her skills.

The Scenario

What I'm going to do next is show you a scenario that Kelly has brought forward to you. You are all stepping into the shoes of Kelly's manager. You'll want to listen carefully because I'm going to have you make a decision about what to do with Kelly in this situation.

You are now Kelly's manager, and here is the situation at hand:

Kelly is leading a work stream for an important, time-sensitive deliverable going to senior leadership. Her role is to synthesize input and recommend a clear path forward. She comes to you and says:

"I'm stuck on the recommendation. I've met with two senior stakeholders and they're pushing in completely different directions. One wants a fast, low-risk option we can roll out quickly. The other is pushing for a more ambitious approach that would require more coordination across teams. I can't realistically recommend both, and whichever way we go, one of them is going to feel like we didn't listen."

Decide your next steps with Kelly.

It's a time-sensitive ask. You've got stakeholders with a competing point of view, and you need to decide how to support Kelly. You've got options A through E. You can only pick one, and you might feel constricted by the fact that you only have five and I'm making you pick one — but pick the one that's closest to what you would want to do in real life.

The options range from deciding the direction yourself and telling Kelly what to recommend, all the way through to coaching Kelly and having her re-engage stakeholders on her own.

Why Did You Choose What You Chose?

Before I show you what happened as a result of your decision, let me ask — why did you choose what you chose?

If you decided to tell Kelly what to do and decide the direction yourself, why did you do that? If you decided to work with Kelly, why? What was your rationale?

What we heard from participants was all about empowering Kelly — helping her work through others, building autonomy, helping her gain confidence. What's going to happen the next time Kelly finds herself in this situation? As one participant said, "I don't want to tell her how to do her job, and I don't want to do it myself." Coaching Kelly is a longer-term solution. Supporting her along the way, helping her build those skills. Leading through inquiry to help her build and empower her.

So we heard lots of coaching and development in these responses.

The Trade-Off

Now, this was a time-sensitive ask. Is there a risk that you've accepted in making the decision to coach Kelly?

Yes — it's going to take time. That's the investment. That's the tension we're managing as leaders. It's much faster to make that decision yourself and just tell Kelly what to do. And as you pointed out, that long-term empowerment — what might that mean for the future? For both her future and for your future?

There's always a risk. It's that short-term versus long-term tension.

As one participant shared: "I'm willing to take the risk to create the environment where the process of decision-making is grounded rather than rushed."

The Results: What Happened

Now let me share the results. All participants were choosing options C, D, or E — to really engage Kelly in the process. None of you decided to take that monkey yourself, make the calls, and do the alignment work yourself.

So as a result of those decisions — and all of the possible decisions — what happened to that project, and what happened to Kelly?

**Time to deliverable:** How many days did each option take? Making the decision yourself — fast, you can get that done in a day. But taking the time with option E, coaching Kelly to reengage and then actually having her go back to those leaders — that takes more time to get the deliverable finished and back to your senior leadership.

**Impact on Kelly:** You all spoke to this very eloquently. Choosing either of the options to do this yourself, to take this project off of Kelly's plate — that really missed an opportunity to build her people skills and her business skills. And look at what those two options did to her motivation. You took that project away from her, and she lost pretty significant motivation as a result. She'd been working on this, she'd been engaging with those stakeholders, and taking that away impacted her motivation.

The options that you chose really helped in supporting and building her skills in different ways. Working together, doing that coaching, asking questions — all helping Kelly think through this process, practice the skills that she needs, and keep her involved in this discovery and in this deliverable. All of those skill areas improved.

Again — managing that short-term versus long-term tension. Speed versus the time it takes to coach and build your next generation of leaders.

And here's what's cool: if something similar happens next time and you do some similar coaching, that time might go from six days down to perhaps three days, because she's going to have that much more experience and skill from the work you did together already.

So there you go — you can see the impact of your one decision on both the business deliverable and on your development of Kelly.

The Business Cycle of Leadership

Here at Insight Experience, we call this dynamic the Business Cycle of Leadership. It says that how you lead — how you show up as a leader with your communications, how you spend your time, your priorities and focus — ultimately impacts the effectiveness of the operating decisions implemented by your team. How equipped and capable are your employees to actually execute on the priorities and the strategic vision of the company to ultimately drive business outcomes?

That's the dynamic that we've already started to talk about with Kelly — building that capability so that she can support and drive business results now and in the future.

What You Just Did Was a Leadership Simulation

You all just did an albeit mini leadership simulation. That arc — from scenario to decision-making to reflection on your results — that is the magic and the art of a leadership simulation.

Formally Defining a Leadership Simulation

So let's formally define what we mean by a leadership simulation at Insight Experience.

Leadership simulations balance the analytical and the interpersonal. I'm sure many of you have done business simulations where perhaps you were managing widgets or building some kind of product. I know in my undergraduate schooling days, we did a business simulation where we had to manufacture and sell laptop computers. My team went all in on building the best factory we could. We had so much manufacturing capacity, but unfortunately, we had so much overhead that we ran that business into the ground. It was really a business acumen–focused experience.

At Insight Experience, we brought in that definition and we balance the analytical decisions that you make with the decisions about coaching your leaders, interacting with them, spending your time intentionally, and communicating with your team.

The New York Times had a great feature recently that talked about the skills — the human skills — that AI can't yet replicate. Like influence. Like presence in a meeting to move someone along in a conversation. Leadership simulations are great practice fields to help cultivate those kinds of skills.

How Do You Learn as a Leader?

With that definition in place, I want us to zoom all the way out and think about how you actually learn to lead. What does that process look like? How do we learn these skills of leadership?

There are a couple of different ways. We learn through observation — watching others, deciding what strategies we like and what we don't like. We learn through experimentation — just trying something and seeing what lands with the group. Of course, we learn through formal training. We learn through research — there are hundreds, if not thousands, of great books out there to help us be better leaders and reframe our thinking. Perhaps one of the best ways we learn is through failure — trying something that just didn't work and learning from that process. And finally, coaching and mentoring — finding someone to help us really intentionally cultivate a skill.

What's interesting is that all of this cannot be accomplished without the power of reflection. Because really, as leaders, we learn by doing all six of those things, but then we reflect on what that means for us. What does that mean for me? What did I actually learn from that training, from that coaching feedback, from my mentor, from that book I read?

Simulation-based learning — leadership simulations in particular — accelerate the time for us to do that reflection. In a given leadership simulation experience, you might be making three-quarters' worth of decisions in a matter of two days. You go through that whole process of working with others, seeing the impact of your decisions, and reflecting on what that means for you and your business, in a much more accelerated way than we ever could in real life.

More Benefits of Leadership Simulations

Let me name a few more benefits of leadership simulation–based learning experiences. I've already spoken to compressing the time to seeing your results, but at Insight Experience, we believe in the power of group-based learning. All of our experiences involve working with a team of peers to ultimately come to a set of decisions. You're creating a shared experience where there's debate and discussion. Leaders are expanding their network. They're applying the content that they're learning in a way that's being reinforced in an interesting, realistic, and relevant way.

And as I always like to remind groups when we do these leadership simulations: you could make the worst possible decisions in a leadership simulation and your business would not lose any real money. It's a safe, risk-free environment to ultimately try new things, experiment, and get feedback on what works and what doesn't.

What the Experience Looks Like for Learners

So now we've started to define what a leadership simulation is. I want to show you what does this leadership simulation experience look like at Insight Experience.

This is what the experience looks like from the learner's perspective. First, we start with an introduction. Our participants will either read a case study or watch an introductory video — they get oriented to the business that they are running. Then very quickly, we move leaders into decision-making.

This is a group-based decision-making process. We work to make the groups as different as we can — from a functional perspective, from a tenure perspective — so that there's rich debate and discussion about what is the right course of action. What should we do with Kelly? People are story-sharing: "Here's what happens in my experience," or "I don't know about that — I've tried that before, and here's what happened."

Once leaders have submitted their decisions, we read them in as facilitators, and that allows us to have a discussion from the front of the room, where we can take all of the different decisions and have a comparative conversation. Given all of the same information, teams tend to make different choices. And so we get to have a conversation about how different strategies lead to different business outcomes.

Just like in our Kelly example, where I showed you what would happen across all five options, we can learn from other teams about what would have happened for the options that we didn't choose.

All of this is in service of those insights and that application and that important reflection process — what does this mean for me as a leader? What can I be doing differently, or more of, back on the job as a result of this experience?

The Simulation Software

This is a sample home screen from our leadership simulation software. Teams log into this — it runs online — and you can see the variety of decisions that we have teams make. Things that are more interpersonal, like setting priorities, communicating, and having interactions with your team. And things that are more analytically focused, like executing strategic projects for the business and actually hiring and allocating resources across teams. Again, you can see that balance between the analytical and the interpersonal.

Practicing Critical Conversations

We sometimes joke in the simulation space that we risk leaders walking away from our sessions thinking that good leadership means clicking a decision on a screen. So what we do is bring the simulation to life at very intentional points in an experience to actually have leaders practice having critical conversations — with their direct reports, or with senior leaders, or with their peers.

I'll ask you to reflect on this question: when was the last time you had to have an important conversation with someone, and you grabbed a colleague and said, "Hey, I need to have an important conversation with so-and-so. Can you just come and join me for that conversation and sit there and watch and then give me feedback about how I showed up?"

We almost never do that. The leaders I work with have told me that very few of them have ever done that. And so simulations allow us to create that safe space to get input from your peers about those critical conversations, in the course of managing all of the different priorities and decisions that you have to make in the business.

Specific Examples of Learning Goals

Now let's go into a couple of specific examples. We've talked about the kinds of decisions, but what are some of the learning goals that we can help companies reinforce?

Example 1: The SCALE Framework

One recent example: our client wanted to be able to measure and play back to their leaders how well they were able to See, Collaborate, Act, Learn, and Elevate — how well they could SCALE themselves. What we were able to do is actually model which decisions in the simulation experience mapped to those five behaviors. How did, across three rounds of simulation decision-making, their decisions actually demonstrate those five capabilities?

You can see in this sample data set that this team leaned in very heavily on the Learn dimension and perhaps leaned in less on the See and Act dimensions. That was a feedback loop that participants got at the end of each round of decision-making about how their leadership behaviors showed up in the decisions they made. Leadership is not separate from decision-making — it happens in the course of decision-making and in the course of making your business choices.

Example 2: Thoughtful Time Allocation

This one is perhaps a favorite of mine. Leadership simulations allow us to reinforce the value of thoughtful time allocation. What I'm showing you on the screen is what teams inherit in one of our simulation experiences in terms of how their predecessor spent their time. And, you know, I like to joke — looking at this, they're your predecessor for a reason. This person was spending 50% of their time managing urgent issues. That's a lot of time managing urgent issues.

In the course of the simulation decision-making, teams have the opportunity to decide how they want to spend their time. And it is modeled, so it's not always exactly what you intend — emergencies do happen, urgent issues do come up — but what we can show leaders at the end of three rounds of decision-making is how their actual time evolved.

You can see here that teams now have a very different profile of how they actually spent their time. The relationship I like to call out is between the time spent coaching direct reports and working with your employees and the time spent managing urgent issues. Teams that invested heavily in the team development categories got significant time back — almost 12 hours of their week, assuming a 40-hour week. Their team was better equipped to handle those urgent issues, so they never even hit the leader's desk. We can reinforce those kinds of important leadership behaviors through this modeling.

Example 3: Teach, Not Tell

One final example: helping leaders to teach, not tell. One of our clients really wanted to highlight for leaders, during the course of this experience, how many of the decisions that they made were teaching decisions — those empowering decisions about building the next generation of leaders — versus telling.

You can see in this data set that teams did a pretty good job across two rounds of decision-making. You can imagine us sitting in a room of 40 leaders, and team six is hooting and hollering — they're so proud of how many teach-not-tell decisions they made. And then we show them: but there were 41 possible opportunities. So we leave them with affirmation — you did great — and a challenge: as leaders, can we be doing even more of this teach-not-tell behavior?

Other Learning Areas

Those were just three examples of how we can help leaders make the connection between their decisions and the business results they drive. Other topics that participants can learn from leadership simulations include strategic communication, coaching, business acumen, influence, and setting direction — all of those important interpersonal skills.

What Makes Insight Experience Different

What makes Insight Experience different from other leadership simulation providers? We use a three-part methodology that we call ART to build and develop all of our leadership simulation experiences.

**Artful Design:** All of our simulations are really rooted in your business. They are custom modeled with the financials and the context that are going to be relevant and realistic for your company and your leaders — not adapted from a generic template.

**Robust Facilitation:** Our facilitators are seasoned business leaders from top business schools. They speak the language of business. They know how to help you unpack a P&L and really help you make those connections about what happened in your business.

**Targeted Connections:** At Insight Experience, we believe in the power of the model to really make it clear and realistic for leaders. We can model the strategic, financial, and people dynamics at play in any given business context, so leaders can explicitly see how those choices lead to their outcomes. We can model the impact of not making a decision. We can model one metric's impact on another. Our robust modeling capability, refined over the last 25 years, really sets us apart from others in the industry.

Measuring Impact

You might be thinking, okay great, but what does this mean for my business? How can we measure this? How can I share this back to my senior stakeholders?

We can do this in a couple of different ways.

**Participant reactions:** Largely through NPS scores. I'm sharing some recent examples with you in manufacturing, retail, and digital media — just from the last couple of weeks.

**Learning lift:** Through pre- and post-assessments. A medical device company that we've worked with saw their leaders achieve a 47% increase in improvement in strategic communication across three days in the program.

**Behavior and results:** One of the healthcare companies we work with saw their retention rates rise above industry average — and watched that happen as a result of their program alumni sticking around.

Insights and Analytics

Beyond measuring impact, we also do what we call insights and analytics work. As a program sponsor, we can do an analysis for you based on the decisions that your leaders made — what does that mean for future learning, for gaps in their current skills?

One of my favorite examples: which environments did your leaders scan? In one program, we had 25 teams, and very few of them scanned their macro environment. Most teams stayed focused internally on their organization and their direct environment, but put less focus on the strategic broader environment in which they're operating. We were able to play that back to that client organization to really help reinforce the power of strategic thinking and the importance of continuing to develop those skills in their leaders over time.

Closing

Thank you all. You were incredibly engaged in our exercise with Kelly. If you have any specific questions about your business, shoot us an email at info@insight-experience.com, check us out online, and follow us on LinkedIn. We also have a blog that we publish to every other week, so you can subscribe for consistent thought leadership from our cast of facilitators and designers. Contact us with any additional questions, comments, or concerns. Thanks so much.