The brief

A business game that we actually called “Case Study”. This was designed for the CEO of a company of about 60 people. The CEO told us that there were several internal problems between departments in the company, and while she wanted to surface them and fix them, she didn’t want to be heavy handed in the way she did that (as that is not how the culture works there).

Our client wanted to:

	Help her internal teams to recognise that there were problems between departments that were affecting their efficiency and their customers.
	Grow internal understanding that they were responsible for the problems and for fixing them.
	Avoid creating a blame session.
	Protect the happy, positive culture of the company (but get the problems fixed!)

The delivery

Case Study – a game designed along the lines of the Cup of Tea (see product catalogue) where participants are set a task to resolve that becomes extremely difficult to achieve. Teams are told that they are all part of a travel company that has lost an attaché case that was supposed to be sent to the Prime minister at an international conference. They have to track down the case and solve the problem.

At every turn they encounter obstacles and problems that reflect the real-life problems that the CEO had identified to us.

The results

At the end of the game the teams identified ALL of the key issues that the CEO wanted to discuss with them, and an excellent discussion took place about how much this game reflected what was going on in their own company. Issues were surfaced and resolved, and the CEO told us some months later that she still had the list of issues on her office wall and still used the game experience as a means of discussing all internal problems in the company.