An Experiential Approach to Leadership Development

What if you could use an escape room to develop more than just teamwork skills? Capsim is transforming the traditional escape room experience to allow participants to develop realistic business skills and deliver results back to their organization.

The Capsim Escape Room™ integrates the traditional team-building exercise with business simulations to create a fun and competitive experiential learning program. Developed around the concept of microlearning, the Capsim Escape Room provides granular and brief training sessions that adapt to the fast-paced culture found in modern-day organizations.

While traditional corporate training programs tend to expand across several sessions and days, this experiential program is designed to be completed in 90 minutes. Participants are placed in an executive’s office to search for clues that are based on learning objectives and impact simulated decisions in R&D, Marketing, Production, and Finance. The escape room enables participants to recognize and close knowledge and skills gaps across business functions.

Capsim’s newest escape room experience is designed to tackle leadership development through proven developmental tools and unique challenges that require hands-on problem-solving and teamwork. Let’s dive deeper into the Capsim Leadership Escape Room™ to discuss how this scenario nurtures individual and team development.

Capsim Leadership Escape Room

The Scenario

Due to poor performance, the previous C-suite was removed from your organization and your team is now in charge! The board expects you to deliver a presentation to the entire company announcing the new strategy, values, staffing expectations, and functional recommendations.

With the help of an offsite consultant, your team must find clues hidden throughout the office to complete activities, solve puzzles, and answer riddles. These clues will guide your decision-making process and will help you complete the presentation.

It’s up to you to determine the future of your company. Will you escape the office in time to deliver the presentation?

The Goal

The Capsim Leadership Escape Room addresses the following four areas of awareness needed for leadership development: self, team, organizational, and business.

• Self-Awareness: participants complete an activity around the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) to improve the understanding of who they are, how they compare to others, and how specific traits and attributes impact their behavior.
• Team Awareness: participants complete an activity around the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to understand their personality preferences. Aggregate MBTI results allow participants to analyze team dynamics to identify strengths and potential blind spots.
• Organizational Awareness: participants complete departmental activities to understand department-specific decisions and make functional recommendations for their simulated company.
• Business Awareness: participants complete an activity around Porter’s Generic Competitive Strategies to allow participants to choose a strategy for their simulated company and increase business acumen.

General Escape Room Outline

1. Onboarding (15 minutes) – receive an overview of the scenario and introduction to the simulation platform.
2. Escape Room (60 minutes) – search for clues that correspond to different business functions, solve puzzles to influence the simulated company’s decisions, and learn how each decision impacts a real-world business scenario.
3. Debrief (15 minutes) – obtain a final debrief on the experience and its relevance to your organization.

The Debrief – Closing the Loop

Once the escape room is complete, participants are given a comprehensive debrief to enable them to translate the experience to their specific job functions and organizations. This debrief provides relevance behind clues and activities, highlights overall performance, and dives deeper into the results from the Hogan HDS and MBTI.

Will You Be Able to Escape?

To learn more about the Capsim Escape Room, please visit corporate.capsim.com. You can also continue the conversation with Kiersten DeBrower, Capsim’s Manager of Training and Development, by using this link to schedule a 30-minute phone call at your convenience.