The price of a managerial error is high, and cataclysms and crises raise the stakes. The ability to act in conditions of uncertainty can be pumped in simulators – virtual “laboratories” for decision-making
About the experts: Petr Tutaev, head of the Simulizator development team; Dara Melnik, head of the research group at the Education Transformation Center of the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO.
Decision-making with a lack of information, contradictions in matters of pragmatics, ethics and the interests of various players can and should be trained. It is safer and more efficient to do this in an artificial play space – ideally, regularly, like going to the gym.
Simulations are a fairly ancient form of learning. They originated from initiations, that is, rites of initiation of new members into society. Modern educational simulations are associated with the gamification trend. Education can be built as a test, and the test as a game: for example, a line employee of a bank gets the opportunity to manage all his assets in a virtual space.
Who else can train virtually through activities:
- Specialists in the natural sciences and technical fields
They are most suited to the format of virtual laboratories like those offered by the Danish company Labster. They allow you to work with reagents and equipment that mimic physical counterparts.
This is how you can conduct experiments in real life – impossible, unacceptable or dangerous: to influence the orbits of the planets or change the human genome.
- Managers
Here, instead of the physical world, you need to work with social reality – manage people, compete and cooperate. The task of managerial “laboratories” can be performed by educational simulators.
- Military
The market for simulation, simulation and virtual reality software for military enterprises was estimated at $2018 billion in 10,25 and continues to grow.
- Medical workers
In our country, there are about a hundred centers of simulation medicine for the training of doctors, and their number both in our country and in the world will grow due to a change in the status of the patient and the high cost of medical error.
What are the simulators
They can be roughly divided into skill-building simulations—for example, flight simulators for pilot training—and situational simulations.
One of the most sensational in recent years is A Day in the Life of a Refugee, which was used as part of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Participants had to pretend to be refugees and operate for 75 hours in conditions of involuntary relocation, lack of resources for basic needs, and extreme vulnerability. It’s an immersive experience in the real world, but the virtual experience can be just as powerful.
Growing trend in business and universities
Virtual simulators, usually in combination with the subsequent “debriefing”, are actively used in top educational institutions around the world: at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Sloan School of Management at MIT in the USA, the French INSEAD and many others. The Frank Batten School of Leadership and Management at the University of Virginia has a center for the development of virtual simulations and management games.
Some universities are also actively implementing the format. Among them are RANEPA, HSE, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Ural Federal University. Simulators are used in the training of managers at the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO and the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University.
Most of the existing simulators are aimed at the formation of one specific competence or illustration of one idea or principle. For example, Stanford’s Venture Capital Game divides participants into entrepreneurs and venture investors. The simulation is focused on the economic effect of investments.
In the well-known game Tragedy of the Tuna, teams of participants represent countries with fishing fleets that need to prevent a critical decline in the tuna population by balancing income and sustainability. This is where the idea of the “tragedy of the commons” unfolds – the conflict between the interests of individuals and the common good.
What should be simulators for managers
Now there is a growing demand for modeling complex social systems: a city, a region or a university. Thus, in the Russian simulator “Universities World Rankings”, which simulates the development of a university, over the past three years, about two thousand university managers have taken part.
The rise in popularity of these games is due to several factors.
- Complex control objects are most often represented as a “black box”. Even the most thoughtful university rector sometimes does not know how exactly the processes of education and research are connected, how the interests of students and teachers are intertwined, and why everything is organized in this way.
- High dynamics of the modern world creates a need for the same dynamic, even “action-packed” forms of education.
- Learning through action is the standard for most developers of modern educational programs.
Similarly with the request for collective training: in complex simulators, participants usually work in teams with people in different positions. Team play allows you to form a general picture of the object “from above”.
How are these simulators arranged?
They feel like immersion in reality and reflect its contradictions. They cannot have the only right decision, because any decision has a price and negative consequences. For each of the players, the “best” solution will be different, and you need to learn how to find a compromise.
If we are talking about a regional development simulator, then business, NGOs, authorities and the average citizen will have completely different interests. At the same time, the manager needs to take into account both them and his personal code of ethics. For example, the goal might be to turn a single-industry city into a world-class city, or a startup into a global technology company. Such simulators put managers in situations in which it is impossible to act according to familiar patterns, and are aimed at developing what one manages, and not just about maintaining functioning.
The trend for increasing dynamics is countered by a counter-trend for slow and thorough reflection. Management simulations should not consist of a continuous stream of decisions and actions. A significant part of such games is usually reserved for discussion of motivations, reasons and results of actions. In this case, the participants have not only memories of the drive, but also conclusions.
In the future, management simulations may be improved by taking readings of the psycho-emotional state – for example, heart rate. It is not only the quality of an individual decision that is important, but also the state in which it is made. Action taken in a state of annoyance or panic cannot be systematically effective. Simulators should, among other things, teach how to work on the reaction.
Management simulators also have their limitations. The design of the game is based on real cases, and what is needed is not so much a set of situations as an understanding of the reasons behind this or that scenario of events. Not every manager can identify general principles in his practice that will serve as material for teaching others. Despite the storm of the digital revolution, as many years ago, management is, first of all, learning from people to people.
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