Pick one. You can change it later if you need to, but the screen looks very different depending on the answer.
Whoever is running the day will read out a five-character code. If everyone is sharing one screen, press Skip instead.
That code is not right.
The code is 2468 until you change it. It stops a delegate wandering into the console — it is not a password.
You play yourself. Your own judgement, your own instincts, your own way of handling pressure — that is the whole point, and it is the only thing being examined. The board you report to is played by professional actors, and they are not neutral.
Whether you can recognise your own shadow before somebody else has to describe it to you.
Everything today resolves to that. It is why the first stage is built to trip you, why the system quietly records things you will not see, and why you will play two stages a second time after the teaching that explains them.
Eight stages following Kotter, each played against a real deadline, each separated by the training that explains what just happened to you. Two stages are re-run after the training that unlocks them.
Every pattern below is one of three basic responses to feeling threatened at work. None of them is a character flaw, and most people have a bit of all three — but one tends to take over when the pressure is on.
You reduce your exposure. You go quieter, share less, defer the decision, or agree in the room and quietly do nothing. Nobody sees you fail because nobody sees you at all.
"If I do not commit to this, it cannot be held against me."
You take control. You press your case harder, act before the group has settled, charm your way past the objection, or commit the room to something it has not agreed. Being right feels like the whole job.
"If I drive this hard enough, it will work."
You seek approval. You raise your own standards past what anyone needs, take work back rather than trust it, or agree with whoever spoke last and call it loyalty. Safety comes from being needed and being liked.
"If I do enough, and upset nobody, this will be all right."
The eleven Hogan derailers below sit in one of those three directions — Horney's clustering. The second column is the EQ-i buffer that has to run out first before the derailer is released; that is the part worth knowing, because it is the bit you can do something about.
It is the mechanics. Each of the eight seats holds exactly one asset the others need. Every decision requires two or three. There is no option anywhere in the day that a single department can execute on its own.
Delivery capacity, client authority, data access, headcount release, budget authority, regulatory clearance, a slot in the plan, or the mandate to tell people. One each.
The Confirm button stays greyed out until the assets arrive. Not a penalty, not a lower score — the decision is simply not available to you. A handful of options can be executed alone. Look closely at which ones.
Seven will ask. You can say yes to two. Everybody in the room is choosing who to help while being chosen, and both halves of that are recorded.
Departments you supplied come back for you. Departments you refused decline you, and the refusal is not explained at the time. Nothing enforces this. It just happens.
The gate is driven by how much moved between departments. Acting alone is always available to you. Succeeding alone is not, at any stage, by any route.
Who gave, who received, who gave nothing. At the end of the day it goes on the screen. It is usually the most uncomfortable slide of the debrief.
Runs as a taught session before stage two, once the room has felt stage one. It is deliberately in that order — the explanation lands differently when you have just experienced the thing being explained.
Ambiguous authority, a public challenge, a deadline you cannot meet — the response fires in about eighty milliseconds, well before the part of you that reasons has been consulted. What you did in stage one was not a considered choice. It was a reaction you then explained to yourself.
The physiological surge peaks and clears quickly. Almost every derailer you saw this morning fired inside that window. This is why the single most practical skill on this programme is noticing the surge rather than managing the consequences of it.
People report what they believe it is safe to report. Punish the messenger once and you lose the early warning permanently — not because people become dishonest, but because they become uncertain. The question is never who was at fault; it is what conditions made this the reasonable thing to do.
If a competent colleague in the same situation, with the same information and the same pressure, would probably have done what they did, then you have a system problem wearing a person's name. This is the discipline that stops Just Culture becoming an excuse for anything.
Just Culture says stop looking for someone to blame. Extreme ownership says start with what you own. One is what you extend to others; the other is what you demand of yourself. Run only the first and nothing improves. Run only the second and nobody tells you anything.
Aviation, surgery, nuclear, offshore — the sectors with the best safety records are the ones where leaders take more responsibility than is strictly theirs and assign less blame than they easily could. It is not softness. It is the only arrangement that keeps information flowing upward under pressure.
Five principles, scored throughout. Each one has a specific observable behaviour in the simulator, and each has an obvious cheap alternative that will be available to you every single stage.
The integration score is the thinnest measure in the room. These are the ones the debrief is built on.
You do not have to read all of this now — it is here for the rest of the day.
Three short videos and one reading. The purpose is to protect the morning — on the day itself, nobody should spend valuable time learning which button does what, or hearing Kotter explained for the first time.
4 minutes · screen recording with voiceover · watched at least once before arrival
Left column is what only you know. Middle is what you decide. Right is what the rest of the business is doing to you while you decide it. Thirty seconds on each.
Read the brief, leave your seat and negotiate, come back and commit. Show one full stage at speed, including the deadline running out.
The one rule people must arrive knowing: your department's result only counts if the room clears the shared threshold. Show a gate being missed and the gains going to zero.
Say it plainly. They are not neutral, they are not scripted at you, and you can ask them for things. Do not show the character cards.
Close on this. There is no character to play and no personality to perform. Lead your department the way you would lead it on Monday.
Pre-course, not on the day. The recommendation and the reason are below.
Video, eight minutes, one slide per step. Delegates arrive knowing the sequence. On the day, each stage names its step and offers its lever — recognition, not instruction.
Taught in the room, immediately after the first failure, because the explanation only lands once the experience exists to attach it to.
Short, specific, and tied to what the room just did. Never more than eight minutes at a time.
2 minutes · to camera, ideally from the sponsor rather than the facilitator
Say so in advance. The first round is built so that the room fails together, and knowing that beforehand makes the failure useful rather than humiliating.
No scores go to HR, nothing enters a performance record, and the facilitator's notes leave with the facilitator. Say it explicitly and mean it.
No preparation, no reading, no strategy. The day only works if what the room sees is how you actually operate.
A single side on the two companies: what Aurelia is, what Kestrel is, why each believes it is right. Nothing about the simulation mechanics and nothing about the psychology. Five minutes, and it means stage one opens with the scenario already understood.
Every message you received was written for you. Not for your department — for you, against the pattern your own profile predicts you fall into when you are under pressure and short of information. Eight people received eight different provocations and every one of them felt like the most reasonable thing to be annoyed about in the room.
Ask the person next to you what landed in their inbox. It will not be what landed in yours.
That is the whole point of the day. Under pressure we do not become other people. We become more like ourselves, faster, and with less choice about it. What you just did is your default — and defaults are only a problem when you cannot see them.
One budget and 240 people for the whole change, across all eight departments. The bar shows what is left: solid is what survives, gold is what your own choice would take, and the empty end has already gone to other departments.
Six board members. Each carries one Hogan primary derailer, played straight and never named. Escalate on the ladder when the trigger appears; stand down only on the stated condition. If a team asks you for something on the stand-down list, give it to them properly — that is the reward the day is built to deliver.
Six steps, then you can start the day
In order, all on this page. Each opens as you finish the one before. Amber means not done. Only the situation and the room have to be complete before you can run the day.
The change is the same in every one: two organisations have ninety days to work one way instead of two, and nobody wants to be the side that adapts. The sector decides what the eight departments argue about, what they are called and the vocabulary of the work. The pressure, the scoring and the marking are identical.
Industry Shape of the problemEvery department holds one thing the others need. This decides whether they can see who holds what before they have spoken to them.
Behaviour cardsA mandatory constraint dealt to each seat each round — "you may not speak for the first three minutes", "you must name a barrier inside your own department". They force the behaviour the round is teaching, whether or not the person would have chosen it.
How much of the screenLite strips each seat back to the essentials — the situation, the private brief, the decision, working with the other teams, and the company figure. The measures, behaviour card, pooled budget, board and HR levers and the feed are hidden. Good for a first run, or a room that finds the full screen a lot.
Type over any of these to match the real organisation, or leave them as they are. Whatever you put here is what delegates see.
Type the real names if you are using them — delegates check in by picking their own from the list, so the names have to be here first. Leave the seat numbers as they are if the room would rather stay anonymous; everything works the same, and at the debrief the room knows who was in which chair. Then set each person's pressure pattern, which decides the private message their seat gets in round one.
Click a seat to hand it to the system. It still takes part, using the pattern you set for it.
Only needed if people are on separate devices. If everyone is round one screen, skip this step.
Each board member carries one difficult habit and one way of standing down. They need the cards, and half a day of rehearsal before a first delivery. Delegates must never see them.
Shortens the clock and makes the actors harder work. Keep it in the middle. Push it into unfair and people give up rather than showing you anything. You can change this at any time from Run the day — this is just the starting point.
Ten minutes with a provisional at five is the standard, and what the material is written for. Shorten it for a half-day; lengthen it for a group that needs longer to talk to each other.
Housekeeping. None of this is needed while a session is running — it is here so it is out of the way during the day.
Rooms stay for sixteen hours. If you set one up earlier, or the page was refreshed mid-session, rejoin it here rather than starting again.
Kept for ninety days. You see the sessions run from this machine, and only those — they hold delegate names and what was noticed about them. To hand a session to a colleague, send them the saved file; searching by code will confirm a session exists but will not open somebody else's.
Your notes, marking, findings and scores live on this machine and nowhere else. Refresh the page and they are gone. Save at each break — to a file you keep, or alongside the room so it can be recovered from any machine for the next ninety days.
The code you type to reach this console. Change it if delegates have seen it, or if you share a machine.
Fills the console with invented observations so you can show somebody what it looks like, or practise the debrief. Never leave it on for a real session — everything it produces is made up.
You can. It is the right call for a shortened session, a group who have done this before, or a rehearsal. Worth knowing what you give up:
If you are short of time, running the practice round and cutting a later stage costs you less than this does.
Three ticks per person, per round. T they showed it. R they spotted it themselves. V they pulled it back. Names and patterns are set during setup.
T it showed under pressure R they spotted it themselves V they pulled it back inside the round You set these by clicking. A gold outline means the software set T from the option they took — change it if you saw otherwise.
The software records what was clicked. It cannot see who was talked over, who went quiet, or who did the right thing without being asked. Type it here while it is fresh — it goes in the log with the time against it.
Raised automatically as things happen. Players never see these. Tick one off once you have seen it put right. What matters most is which ones come back after the teaching.
Two questions, one point a round. Left to right: are people helping each other. Bottom to top: is the work actually getting done. The trail is what matters, not where any single dot sits. Read it for the room and never for one person.
Written automatically from what has actually happened. Keep the ones that ring true, drop the ones that do not, and add your own words to any of them. What you keep becomes the debrief.
Everything you kept, in the order you would say it.
Shortens the clock and makes the actors harder work. Keep it in the middle band.
Set the level each board member is playing. Drops automatically when a team makes a valid stand-down request.
Make an empty seat do something specific — to set up a point you want to make, or to stop it doing something unhelpful. It commits immediately and the room sees it.
Each one is ten minutes, with a short review after it.
Choose who it goes to, then send. By default each message goes to the seats whose pattern it was written for — that is the point of them — but you can aim any message at anyone.
Every event costs something whether they act on it or ignore it. There is no free option and no right answer.
Some of these are real problems and some are noise. You can see which; the room cannot. Watch who checks before they act.
Makes one team's decision sound annoying to everyone else. The blame goes on the system, never on the person who sent it. Pick how many rounds it lasts.
Click a stage to load it. Running a stage again after the teaching is what turns this from a test into training. Put the comparison on the screen.
For what the system cannot see — someone owning up, someone quietly smoothing things over, a good call that got no credit. Every change is logged and shown at the end.
Rows give, columns receive. An empty row means a team that never helped anyone.
Run after stage six. Score what they give, not what they get.
How they think they came across against what the room thought.
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