Harvard Business Publishing asked a group of simulation authors
questions about their experience using simulations (aka "sims") in
the classroom. Their answers show that simulations challenge
students to analyze available information and make critical
decisions to solve a business challenge. While sometimes perceived
as "video games," in fact, the best simulations allow students to
experiment with ideas and outcomes and ultimately master the
application of concepts to real situations.
What
does a simulation do for student learning that other methods
don't?
Prof. Luerhman: A simulation stimulates active
engagement of students. They are playing a role, not just reading
and analyzing. They make decisions and see the results of their
decisions in the response of other players and the outcome of the
sim. Simulations generate much more energy among students than
traditional lectures or case discussions.
Timothy A. Luehrman
Harvard Business School
Author of Finance:
M&A in Wine Country and Finance:
Blackstone/Celanese
Prof. Ernst: With simulations, students can
explore the impact of multiple decisions at the same time.
Simulations also allow students to validate their common sense
relative to a particular situation.
Ricardo Ernst
Georgetown University
Author of Operations
Management: Benihana
Prof. Shih: A simulation forces students to
synthesize and integrate what they read and make actual decisions
based on facts or data presented in the case. Simulations give
students a temporal dimension, an opportunity to experience
outcomes that change based on their inputs over time.
Prof. Roberto: Simulations provide one way to
provide some variety in pedagogy. They also provide that rapid
feedback on student decision-making which is so critical for their
learning.
Prof. Casadesus-Masanell: It's fun for students.
There's not much preparation on their side, and it breaks the
routine of cases. A simulation allows students to be in their own
skin and directly experiment with ideas. It's very different from a
standard class.
Ramon Casadesus-Masanell
Harvard Business School
Author of Strategy:
Competitive Dynamics and Wintel
Prof. Edmondson: A sim requires action, and
decisions. Students are right in the mix, having an experience as
opposed to reading about an experience. Team-based sims have the
added value of getting students to deal with team dynamics-just
like in real life.
Amy C. Edmondson
Harvard Business School
Author of Leadership
and Team: Everest
How do
students react to using simulations?
Prof. Austin: Students don't want to stop playing.
They play very differently. Some crash ahead, make mistakes, run
through a scenario many times quickly. Others move much more
slowly, deliberately, thinking carefully, studying what
happens.
Prof. Ernst: Students enjoy winning. A well
designed simulation includes an element of competition that
encourages them to strive and to impress their classmates (and the
faculty) while learning!
Prof. Shih: Students have told me that sims force
them to integrate and apply material that they have learned. The
opportunity to try things-test a hypothesis and receive immediate
feedback-gives the sim a dimension that you can't get from a case
alone.
Prof. Casadesus-Masanell: When I first started
using a sim, I did not imagine the energy it would bring to the
class. I've taught with sims in MBA and Executive Education and
with both, the level of discussion is different than with
cases-people get much more emotionally involved and
competitive-they get hooked and their understanding of the learning
points increases.
What
surprised you the most about using simulations in your
classes?
Prof. Luerhman: I am most surprised by the breadth
of students' experiences. The more students talk about what they
did in the course of the sim and what they learned from playing it,
the more it becomes clear that the experience is a little different
for everyone.
Prof. Austin: The biggest surprise is that we tend
to get tremendous amounts of learning even when the results are
markedly different in various runs of the simulation.
Prof Ernst: I have been impressed by how much
students enjoy using simulations. It is a clear venue to convey
concepts in a very friendly environment. When followed by a good
debriefing session the learning obtains a different meaning.
For
faculty who haven't tried a sim-what one thing would you say to
convince them to try one?
Prof. Edmondson: The students love it. It's hard
to get them to stop talking about it, they want to do it over and
over, and to share the experience. They have fun, it's engaging,
they laugh, they're surprised. And it's memorable. It sticks. Prof.
Luerhman: Your students will thank you for trying it.
Prof. Austin: I'd say "Just wait until you hear
the students' discussion after they've used the simulation." It's
exhilarating, really, the issues the sim gives them access to. This
is a really important point: The educational power is in the
debrief. A sim is not the same thing as an online course. Rather,
it's a way to get students talking about what you need to teach
them.
Robert D. Austin
Copenhagen Business School
Author of Project
Management: Scope, Resources, Schedule
Prof. Shih: Try it, play it on a
demo account, and recognize that your comfort level will rise
quickly with a little bit of experience. I have talked to a number
of faculty users of Harvard Business Publishing sims, and I observe
that once they took the plunge, they quickly saw the pedagogical
value and their comfort level rose quickly.
Harvard Business School
Author of Strategic
Innovation: Back Bay Battery
Prof. Roberto: I believe that a good simulation
offers opportunities for rich discussion and powerful learning even
if the results don't work as predicted in the instruction's manual.
I also believe that a diversity of outcomes represents one of the
strengths of a good simulation.
Michael A. Roberto
Bryant University
Author of Leadership
and Team: Everest
原文链接：http://hbsp.harvard.edu/list/simulations-feature
Business simulation is simulation used for business
training or analysis. It can be scenario-based or
numeric-based.
Most business simulations are used for business
acumen training and development. Learning objectives include:
strategic thinking, financial analysis, market analysis,
operations, teamwork and leadership.
The business gaming community seems lately to have
adopted the term business simulation game instead of just gaming or
just simulation. The word simulation is sometimes considered too
mechanistic for educational purposes. Simulation also refers to
activities where an optimum for some problem is searched for, while
this is not usually the aim of an educational game. On the other
hand, the word game can imply time wasting, not taking things too
seriously and engaging in an exercise designed purely for fun. The
concept of simulation gaming seems to offer the right combination
and balance between the two. Simulation gaming is also the term
that the educational gaming community has adopted.
Games and Business
simulation games
Partly, the terminology of business simulation games is not well
established. The most common term used is business
game but several other terms are also in use. Here we will
define the most common terms used in context of (computer-based)
business learning environments.
Klabbers (1999) notes that gaming is sometimes associated with
something that is frivolous, just for the fun of it. This hampers
its scientific endeavor and the more serious connotations of gaming
in the scientific arena. The term game is used to describe
activities in which some or all of these characteristics are
prominent:
- human, humanly controlled, opponents, whose actions have an
effect upon each other and upon the environment,
- an emphasis on competitiveness and winning,
- an emphasis on pleasure, humour and enjoyment,
- a repetitive cycle of making decisions and encountering a
result, allowing the hope of improvement and ‘doing better next
time’.
Games are played when one or more players compete or cooperate
for payoffs, according to an agreed set of rules. Players behave as
themselves though they may well display exceptional behavior. Games
are social systems and they include actors (players), rules and
resources, which are the basic building blocks of social systems.
In each game, the players (actors) interact with one another, while
applying different rules, and utilizing different resources.
Tsuchiya and Tsuchiya note that the simulation gaming community
is still struggling to establish itself as a discipline, although
35 years have passed since the International Simulation and Gaming
Association (ISAGA) was established. To be a
discipline, simulation gaming needs a theory, methodology, and
application and validation. Of these, forming a theory is the most
difficult challenge. Similar comments come from Wolfe and Crookall.
Referring to prior research they conclude that the educational
simulation gaming field has been unable to create a generally
accepted typology, let alone taxonomy, of the nature of simulation
gaming. According to them this is unfortunate because the basis of
any science is its ability to discriminate and classify phenomena
within its purview, based on underlying theory and precepts.
Without this, the field has been stuck, despite its age, at a
relatively low level of development.
In most cases, the terms business (simulation)
game and management (simulation) game can
be used interchangeably and there is no well-established difference
between these two terms. Greenlaw et al. determine a business game
(or business simulation) as a sequential decision-making
exercise structure around a model of a business operation, in which
participants assume the role of managing the simulated
operation. The descriptions given for a management game, for
example, by Forrester and Naylor do not differ from the previous.
However, Elgood determines that in a management game profit is not
the dominant measure of success. Keys and Wolfe define a management
game as a simplified simulated experiential environment that
contains enough verisimilitude, or illusion of reality, to include
real world-like responses by those participating in the
exercise.
Gredler divides experiential simulations into the following four
categories:
- Data management simulations,
- Diagnostic simulations,
- Crisis management simulations, and
- Social-process simulations.
Business simulation games are most often of the first kind. A
participant in a data management simulation typically functions as
a member of a team of managers or planners. Each team is managing a
company allocating economic resources to any of several variables
in order to achieve a particular goal.
Business strategy games are intended to enhance students’
decision-making skills, especially under conditions defined by
limited time and information. They vary in focus from how to
undertake a corporate takeover to how to expand a company’s share
of the market. Typically, the player feeds information into a
computer program and receives back a series of optional or
additional data that are conditional upon the player’s initial
choices. The game proceeds through several series of these
interactive, iterative steps. As can be noted, this definition does
not consider continuous (real-time) processing an alternative.
In business simulation games players receive a description of an
imaginary business and an imaginary environment and make decisions
– on price, advertising, production targets, etc. – about how their
company should be run. A business game may have an industrial,
commercial or financial background (Elgood, 1996). Ju and Wagner
mention that the nature of business games can include
decision-making tasks, which pit the player against a hostile
environment or hostile opponents. These simulations have a nature
of strategy or war games, but usually are very terse in their user
interface. Other types of managerial simulations are resource
allocation games, in which the player or players have to allocate
resources to areas such as plant, production, marketing, and human
resources, in order to produce and sell goods.
According to Senge and Lannon in managerial
microworlds – like business simulation games – unlike in
the actual world, managers are free to experiment with policies and
strategies without fear of jeopardizing the company. This process
includes the kind of reflection and inquiry for which there is no
time in the hectic everyday world. Thus, Senge and Lannon argue,
managers learn about the long-term, systemic consequences of their
actions. Such "virtual worlds" are particularly important in team
learning. Managers can learn to think systemically if they can
uncover the subtle interactions that thwart their efforts.
Naylor in 1971 gives quite a detailed view of the contents,
structure, and operating of management games. Today, this
description by Naylor is still valid for most of the business
simulation games. Business simulation games are built around a
hypothetical oligopolistic industry consisting of three to six
firms, whose decision-makers or managers are the participants of
the game. Each firm or team is allocated a specific amount of
resources in the form of cash, inventories, raw materials, plant
and equipment, and so forth. Before each operating period the
players make decisions. Naylor mentions that these decisions can
concern, e.g., price, output, advertising, marketing, raw material
acquisition, changes in plant capacity, and wage rate. This
information is read into a computer that has been programmed on the
basis of a set of mathematical models that provide a link between
the operating results and operating decisions of the individual
firms, as well as the external environment (the market). On the
basis of (a) a set of behavioral equations, such
as demand and cost functions, and a set of accounting formulas that
have been programmed into the computer, and (b)
the individual decisions of each firm, operating results are
generated by the computer in the form of printed reports – for
example, profit and loss statements, balance sheets, production
reports, sales reports, and total industry reports – at the end of
each operating period. Usually the environment can be changed by
the administrator of the game by altering the parameters of the
operating characteristics of the game. In each case, the firms find
it necessary to react according to the magnitude and the nature of
the change imposed by the external environment. Naylor mentions
that some of the more complicated and more realistic games even
permit multiple products, plants, and marketing areas, stochastic
production periods, stochastic demand, labor negotiations, and the
sale of common stock. For more information about this topic see
Lainema (2003).
History
The first use of games
for education and development was the war game simulations in China
in about 3,000 B.C. These games bore a vague
similarity to the early 17th century chess. In the Western world,
war games date back to at least the German Kriegspiel of the
mid-nineteenth century (Faria and Diskinson). Faria and Dickinson
note that different war games have also been conducted in Japan
before the Second World War and war games have been long used by
the British and the Americans to test battle strategies. Military
officers trained with war games in the 1930's and 1940's started
the use their military training in managing civilian businesses.
Some of the business game evolution can be traced to a 1955 Rand
Corporation game, which simulated the U.S. Air Force inventory
management within its supply system. Greenlaw et al. state that
business simulation exercises may be considered an outgrowth of
earlier developments in three fields: military war gaming,
operations research, and educational role-playing.
According to Naylor, the use of games in business and economics
goes back to 1956 when the American Management Association
developed the first so-called management decision-making game,
called the Top Management Decision Game. Faria and Dickinson and
Greenlaw et al. also find this the first widely known business
decision-making simulation, although Greenlaw et al. date the
origin of the game to 1957 and further specify that it was the
first non-military competitive business game. Greenlaw et al. note
that the Top Management Decision Simulation stimulated the design
and use of dozens of other games. In this simulation five teams of
players operated firms competing in a hypothetical, one-product
industry. Teams made quarterly decisions covering price, production
volume, budgets, research and development, advertising, and sales
force and could request selected marketing research information.
During the period 1955-1957 only one or two new games appeared each
year (Faria, 1990).
A rapid growth in the number of business games occurred over the
years from 1958 to 1961. Greenlaw et al. had made a summary of some
business games available by the beginning of the 1960’s. The
summary includes 89 different business games or different versions
of a certain business game developed by industrial firms, business
associations, educational institutes, or governmental units. Naylor
mentions already in 1971 that hundreds of management games have
been developed by various universities, business firms, and
research organizations. These management games have been used both
for research purposes and for training people in diverse
disciplines such as management, business operation, economics,
organization theory, psychology, production management, finance,
accounting, and marketing. Also Faria (1990) and Dickinson note
that the number of simulation games grew rapidly in the 1960’s.
McRaith and Goeldner list 29 marketing games, of which 20 had been
developed by business firms and nine by academians for university
teaching. In 1969 Graham and Gray listed nearly 200 business games
of different varieties. Horn and Cleaves provided a description of
228 business games. Faria (1989) mentions that over 200 simulations
were in use in the USA in over 1.700 business schools. Overall,
taking advantage of computer games in education increased
enormously through the 1960’s to the 1980’s, see for example Ju and
Wagner.
At the end of the 1980’s Faria (1990) estimated that there were
approximately 228 games available in the USA, and that there were
around 8.500 instructors using business games. At that point Faria
also believes that there is a large and growing number of business
schools instructors and business firm users of simulation games.
Still, Faria estimated that only 12.5 % of all US
business firms with training and development managers used
computerized business games.
The penetration of business gaming in academia is fuelled by the
following factors: the increase in student numbers, the increase in
new courses, increased adoption of methods supporting diverse
learning styles, and the increasing availability of technology.
Dickinson and Faria state that in US over 200 business games are
being used by nearly 9.000 teachers at over 1.700 colleges offering
business programmes.
Larsen and Lomi describe the shift of the objectives of
management gaming. They state that until the early 1980’s
simulation was used to forecast the behavior of a variety of
sub-system level variables, ranging from the cash flow and
financial performance of a company, to the inflation and
unemployment rates of an economy. They state further, that during
the last 15 years a new way of thinking about simulation emerged.
Instead of focusing on predicting, simulation progressively became
a tool to help management teams understand their company and
industry’s problems and opportunities. Simulations could prepare
for the future and reduce the sensitivity of possible strategies to
changes in alternative frames of reference – or mental models.
Larsen and Lomi further note, that the emphasis of computer-based
simulation models has shifted:
- from predicting the future, to understanding how multiple
possible futures might be linked to decisions and actions that must
be taken today, and
- from designing the best strategy, to analyzing how robust our
preferred strategy would be under different assumptions about how
the future might unfold, or about how the past actually produced
the events that we perceive.
Scenario
simulations
In a business game or business simulation game, a
scenario is played out in a simulated environment and the learner
or user is asked to make decisions on how to act in the
simulations. Often multiple choice alternatives are used and the
scenario is played out following a branching tree based on which
decisions the learner makes. Throughout or at certain intervals
feedback is provided. These are similar to role-play simulations.
Numeric
simulations
A numeric simulation can mimic a whole company on a high level
or it can be more detailed and mimic specific organizational units
or processes. In a numeric simulation the learner or user makes
decisions by pulling levers and dialers as well as through
inputting numbers. The decisions are processed and the outcomes are
calculated and shown in reports and graphs, eg. price and volume as
well as number of employees can be decisions and the outcome can be
viewed in e.g. an income statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement. Feedback is given throughout the simulation or
at certain intervals, such as when a year has passed. Many numeric
business simulations include elements of competition against other
participants or against computer generated competitors.
The Simulation
Gaming Process
Business simulation game developers regard their artefacts to be
learning environments. When arguing for this, they most often refer
to David
A. Kolb's influential work in the field of experiential learning. During the last decades
also ideas from constructivism have influences the learning
discussion within the simulation gaming field. The activities
carried out during a simulation game training session are:
- Theoretical instruction: the teacher goes through certain
relevant aspects of a theory and participants can intervene with
questions and comments.
- Introduction to the game: the participants are told how to
operate the computer and how to play the game.
- Playing the game: participants get the opportunity to practice
their knowledge and skills by changing different parameters of the
game and reflecting on the possible consequences of these changes.
Permanent contact with the participants is advisable, as well as
keeping the training going to maintain a positive atmosphere and to
secure that the participants feel engaged.
- Group discussions: Each of the participants is given a
possibility to present and compare their results from the game with
the results of others. The participants are encouraged to present
their results to others. The teacher should continually look for
new ways of enriching the discussions and to help the participants
to find the connection between the game results and the problems in
real world. The quality of this group discussion plays a relevant
role in the training as it will affect the participants’ transfer
of knowledge and skills into the real world.
The last phase in the list above is usually called debriefing.
Debriefing is the most important part of the simulation/gaming
experience. We all learn from experience, but without reflecting on
this experience the learning potential may be lost. Simulation
gaming needs to be seen as contrived experiences in the learning
cycle, which require special attention at the stages of reflection
and generalization.
Thiagarajan lists six phases of debriefing, presented as a
flexible suggestion and not as rigid requirements:
- How do you feel? Gives the participants an opportunity to get
some of their strong feelings about the simulation game off their
chest.
- What happened? Makes it possible for the participants to
compare and to contrast participant recollections and to draw some
general conclusions during the next phase.
- What did you learn? Encourage the generation and testing of
different hypotheses. Ask the participants to come up with general
principles based on their experiences from the game and to offer
evidence to support or to reject the principles.
- How does this relate to the real world? Encourage a discussion
of the relevance of the game to the participants’ real world
workplace.
- What if…? Encourage the participants to apply their insights to
new contexts.
- What next? Participants use their insights to come up with
strategies for the simulation game and for the workplace.
Van Ments notes that the aim of debriefing is to: deal with
factual errors and to tie up loose ends (including scoring); draw
out general conclusions about the session; and deduce general
lessons which can be extrapolated to the real world. Furthermore,
the participants should not be allowed to conclude what was learned
without receiving feedback (Gentry, 1990). The participants need to
articulate their perception of what was learned, and the instructor
needs to put things into a broader perspective. Gentry also
expresses that process feedback is much more valuable than outcome
feedback. As games are less-than-perfect representations of the
real world, it should be the decision process used that needs to be
applauded or critiqued, not the gaming outcome.
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