Terry Maloney
Overview
Movendo Consulting has been running a leadership development program aimed at international talents for a major player in the chemical industry for the last 6 years. The participants engage in a highly interactive Experience-Oriented Learning journey that is designed to foster leadership competences in line with company values in a globalized setting.
Topic
One of the cornerstones of the program is the development of the ability to see and cooperate across business unit boundaries and act with the overall company benefit in mind. To this end, Ecopoly has been used with great success to simulate the dilemma of teams and business units needing to take decisions locally to gain a good result whilst still ensuring that the overall company result is maximized.
The experience of playing Ecopoly allows participants to explore the following themes:
• Holistic thinking in decision-making.
• Thinking and acting across departmental boundaries.
• Responsible handling of resources.
• Setting sustainable goals.
• Achieving sustainable business development in line with company values.
This is achieved in the simulation by participants taking decisions that create tension between the team’s own result and the results of others in the organization.
Transfer to the real World
| Elements in the learning project | Elements in the real world |
|---|---|
| Mother planet | Company HQ, board, senior management |
| Planets | Business units, country organization, function |
| Ecopozone | Any limited resource, such as budget, access to information, etc. |
Staging
a. Performance
The simulation provides a space for learning in which focusing on the needs of others in the wider system allows the creation of a win-win outcome that benefits the wider organization as whole. To achieve a closer connection to the organization as such, we adjusted the Ecopoly setup as follows:
The teams represent several departments that are responsible for their own income statements. The company headquarters provides them with a budget to run their activities (which in the original version is called Ecopozone). In each budget year lasting 5 minutes, the departments can apply for additional budget and the goal is to achieve the “maximum budget within the existing organizational system.” However, in so doing, the teams in the different departments run the risk of taking too big a “slice of the cake,” with the consequence that the overall system may break down.
To meet the running costs of their department, the team have to return 3 budget units to headquarters every year. The departments are made aware that there is a process in place to regenerate the overall amount of funds. Any funds that were not applied for and therefore left in the headquarters are doubled at the end of the year and are available for budgets in the following year. While the applications are processed in a random order, they will be approved as long as budget is available in the particular year. If all departments aim too high, the available funds are reduced to zero and the organization goes into insolvency.
b. Progression
Teams usually approach the simulation with different strategies. Some teams apply for a high amount of budget early on while others apply very conservatively to ensure the three budget units they need to finance their own running costs. Between these two extremes we observe a lot of experimentation to define a suitable strategy.
Only in the fifth year are the departments allowed to negotiate with each other. As they have to return two additional budget units to travel to this finance conference, some departments even decide to continue without aligning with the others. In the meeting it becomes clear what can be achieved through coming to an agreement concerning decision-making. Only win-win strategies (in which all sides benefit) assure the survival of all.
Reflection
After the presentation of the results, participants first reflect on the factors that drove their decision-making during the simulation.
Then the connection to company values surrounding cooperation and teamwork is created by exploring how the simulation could be approached if the value of “cross-company collaboration” is the main driver of behavior. Finally, consequences are drawn by the participants for application of their learning in their own leadership context.
Conclusion
Although the many variations of the “prisoner’s dilemma” game are quite well known, this simulation works in a reliable way to generate the reflection and learning around holistic thinking that is desired by the client. Over the last few years, it has been very well received by participants and company representatives alike and continues to be a cornerstone of leadership development.
One of the “Aha!” moments we often experience is that participants encounter the limits of competition. While the benefits of competition are quite clear in organizations, experiencing the consequences of bankrupting an entire organization just by applying for too much individual budget makes a big impression and leads to deep reflection.