Mission Mastery by Brian Dive

Author:Brian Dive
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6.5.2 Use of Simulation in Commercial Organizations

Simulation is a well proven method for developing behavioural skills in commercial originations

6.5.2.1 The Case of Factory Supervisors

Some years ago I was involved in designing a programme for long serving factory supervisors. The company felt they needed to be brought up to date with the latest thinking on a number of aspects of their leadership skills and behaviour. The challenge was that the programme had to cover leadership, motivation, teamwork and planning. But most of these supervisors had left school without many qualifications and certainly had not sat in a class room for at least 30 years. They were used to action as they moved around their respective plants. Just the thought of a lecture or even interactive discussion would probably put them to sleep.

I recalled reading earlier about Coverdale training techniques, based on using game theory, as a method of teaching. Ralph Coverdale was a psychologist and management consultant in the 1960s and 70s who believed that skills could not be taught like knowledge, but rather had to be learnt from experience, which was the basis for his training approach. He was one of the first people that I am aware of, to talk about the importance of experiential training in a civilian context. So we knew we had to devise some activities that would challenge these supervisors both manually and mentally at different stages of the training process

The task we chose was straightforward. The participants were divided into three small teams and told they would be in competition with each other. So far, so good. Then we produced the materials for the game. They could not believe it. These consisted of three items: sheaves of balsa wood each stamped with a cut-out of a fighter plane, razor blades and plasticine.

The task was: “Build as many planes as you can in the next forty minutes. If they pass quality control by flying twenty feet past a measured target, they can be sold for $100,000. The team with the most money in the bank wins.”

This caused quite some merriment with comments like: “This beats work”; “Can we take them home afterwards?”; “Am I on the right course?”; “How am I going to explain this to my shift?” Virtual chaos reigned for half an hour or so. After 25 min we gave a rain check on the “planes sold” to ramp up the sense of competition. It certainly raised the activity levels and the noise level went through the roof as “test pilots” jostled to get into the queue to test fly their planes and if necessary start urgent price negotiations for scrap if their plane failed the QC standards. We then called ‘time’ and announced the results identifying who came first, second and third.

The real work came next. The question put to the course was: “You all had the same instructions, the same materials and yet your teams performed differently with many planes failing the QC test. Discuss why and explain how you would avoid this in future.

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