The Client

Institute of Directors, Independent Consultants Sub-Group

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The Challenge

As part of its benefit package, the Institute of Directors holds special interest meetings designed to support networking and provide a platform for collaboration between members.

The Independent Consultants Sub-Group mainly comprises senior managers who have left corporate roles to offer independent consultancy across a range of sectors and specialisms. The group meets on a monthly basis to discuss opportunities and plan joint marketing ventures.

A tired format and rigid agenda had led to falling attendance and the general demise of the group. The group leaders proposed to trial a guest speaker slot to stimulate interest and introduce an element of fun into the otherwise dull meeting and re-engage the group.

The formal agenda would be cut to accommodate a specialist talk which would last for half of the two-hour meeting. The talk would need to appeal to the disparate interests of the group of up to 20 people and should ideally deliver some education benefit.

dseConsulting was invited to fill the speaker slot for the first of the new format meetings and, if successful, the revised format would be adopted for subsequent meetings.

dseConsulting Solution

Focusing on the engaging, fun element of the brief, dseConsulting developed a bespoke business game using the principles of Agent Based Modeling & Simulation (ABMS).

In the game, up to 4 teams, of up to 5 players per team, each takes the role of a supermarket, with internal operational and strategic functions, competing for sales in a virtual town of 6,000 households.

Each team is required to make a series of decisions around pricing, inventory levels and manufacturing capacity, which will affect their sales.

Each household is modelled as an independent agent making autonomous decisions about how much to buy and from which supermarket, based on their perception of each supermarket's current offer and availability.

During the meeting, dseConsulting facilitated a 90 minute game, during which some teams adopted much debated disruptive approaches to competition, followed by a discussion about which of the strategies adopted worked, which didn't and why.

The Business Benefit

The game fulfilled the brief of providing a more interesting meeting, with all teams learning from the exercise, and much more interaction between re-engaged group members.

Some of the teams made some fundamental business errors, including competing only on price and forgetting margin, failing to speak to colleagues in other internal departments and failing to observe the competing teams' strategies to understand what was working.

The game generated animated debate about the strategies adopted by the winning and losing teams. It also highlighted the need for continual development and the benefit of discussing real life strategies with other members of the group.

Finally, the game also raised the prospect of consultants using simulation tools in their own work to illustrate best-practice for business management techniques.

"A great session, well enjoyed by all participants. You certainly got people talking and introduced us all to a new way of working through client problems."
Barabara Whitney, Director

dseConsulting has since been invited to guest at other events, presenting on the same subject, and the game has now be used on a number of occasions.