Corporate
Crisis Management, Analysis, Networking
and Business Development
INTRODUCTION
Increasingly in business, government and the third sector, the concept of serious gaming is being used as a process to aid decision making, business development or gathering organisational insights. The important thing is testing proposed courses of action in an adversarial environment.
In a Stone Paper Scissors manual game we focus on process as an important outcome. There are, deliberately, no 'winners' as such (any more than there are winners in the real world) – there might be competition and there might be varying degrees of success or failure, but these are measured against what is learnt in the process. In fact recent academic thinking on cognitive development tells us that doing 'badly' is always a far better learning experience and source of insight than 'winning'. We cannot learn unless we make mistakes. And doing this in the 'safe to fail' environment of a game is an ideal way of learning.
We specifically use manual games because they are transparent, flexible, responsive and (above all) cost effective in terms of time to develop and time to play.
Here are some of the things other organisations we have worked with have looked for in terms of outcomes:
Enabling participants to experience a different perspective on a particular set of interactions. For example a cyber security team playing a game as a group of hackers. Or the opportunity to experience some aspect of what it is like to be a partner organisation negotiating with a vendor.
Creating a safe environment to explore methods or approaches without risking getting it wrong.
Using emerging game-play that occurs in an adversarial game to learn about processes and decision making and gather insights about how we manage difficult or complex communications.
No Winners
Participants are measured against what is learnt in the process.
Safe to fail
We cannot learn unless we make mistakes.
Example game
You cannot easily know how you and your colleagues will perform when a crisis occurs.
One option is to wait until the worse happens and rely on them to 'step up' when the moment is right. This might work but it is risky.
The alternative is to work through crisis situations and practice the thinking and decision making skills everyone needs (and probably has). Practice reduces the risk of 'decision paralysis'.
The crisis game is not designed to encourage standard answers to a set problem, but instead create a dynamic environment in which the key skills are practised in real time. The interactive and dynamic nature of the game brings out styles of decision making and communication and allows us, as part of the debriefing and evaluation stages to review and reflect on “...what just happened there?”.
Example Pricing
An off the shelf, team building game, run in the UK, full day: for up to 50 participants approx £1800; for up to 10 participants £900
Bespoke game developed for your organisation, from £3000
There is no upper or lower limit on the number of participants in one of our games.
For further information please contact Stone Paper Scissors on admin@stonepaperscissors.co.uk or contact us using the form below.
For further information please fill in the form below or alternatively contact us by email.
“A big thank you to you and your team for helping me run a successful event at Google, The feedback was really positive.”
“Jim and all - a big thanks to you and your team, a real interesting experience by all and certainly opened up people’s eyes to how an incident should (and should not) be handled.
So thank you for working with us, it’s certainly been a pleasure!”