2-day Management Development with a 1-day business simulation

Someone on a LinkedIn forum recently asked: "What kinds of topics would you like to see covered in a 2-day Management Development workshop?"

My reply was as follows:

"I recommend that the first day be a team-competition business finance simulation–a good one will engage all the participants. It will be extremely useful (in different ways) to people with or without a financial background in making them better decision-makers,. And it  will provide a platform and common experience for the second day's activities.

"How the teams made decisions can be tracked and debriefed and used for Leadership or Team-Building work the second day. DISC profiling and 360 analysis can be done on a shared experience which is fresh in everyone's mind. Communication issues, accountability, whatever is important in a company can be looked at from the experience of running a simulated company.

"And specifically the Income/Outcome simulation is invaluable for in-company workshops (as opposed to open enrolment ones) because - although it starts with a simple generic company model - the workshop ends by modeling the financial statements of the client company in the game board format that the participants have been playing with all day. That allows for a fresh view of the health, structure, ratios and strategic position of the company, and a discussion of the concerns of senior management, and appropriate metrics and future direction.

"I acknowledged my vested interest as President of Andromeda Training, but I still hold to the truth of what I said: that I would do a good team-competition business simulation for the first day, and use that to launch into detailed company-specific issues on the second. And, yes, the business finance simulation that can accomplish that most appropriately is Income/Outcome, because of our unique Visual Finance module as the wrap-up to our part of such a program."

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My 2 cents.