Selling Simulations to Stakeholders

Looking for ways to build consensus for simulations among key stakeholders within your organization? Here are four tips for crafting a compelling business case.

By Kevin Himmel

One of the most difficult things to do—even for simulation veterans—is to explain what happens in a comprehensive, technology-based business simulation to someone who’s never experienced one.

If you’re faced with this challenge and are looking for ways to build consensus for simulations among key stakeholders within your organization, here are four tips for crafting a compelling business case:

Establish a common definition. Even though simulations have been around for years—and their value is well-recognized in virtually every corner of the training arena—few C-level executives truly understand what a full-scale business simulation is, how it works, and how it might help them achieve their strategic goals.

In many ways, that’s entirely understandable. There are so many simulation iterations out there—and so many different, often conflicting, definitions floating around—that it’s easy for even the most seasoned learning professional to get lost. That’s why it is so important not to assume that everyone knows what you are talking about, and to begin your pitch by crafting a clear, commonsense definition that your stakeholders can readily grasp (see sidebar, “Simulations Defined”).

Focus on the storyline. A storyline is the basis for everything that happens in a simulation, whether you’re focused on sales, accounting, management or some other area of the business. The storyline, if constructed properly, is research-based and grounded in real-world experience. It mimics actual business dynamics, and it follows a narrative that includes the peaks and valleys associated with your company’s typical business cycle.

Its power lies in its ability to show participants how certain decisions and actions affect the business over time, while incorporating the normal ups and downs, challenges and distractions that workers encounter on the job every single day. In short, simulations are nothing like typical training scenarios—and that’s what you need your stakeholders to understand.

Stress linkage to strategic objectives. In many ways, the ability to directly link a learning intervention to a company’s strategic objectives represents the epitome of training’s highest aspirations. If you can then point to the metrics that measure the extent to which training is having an impact on the bottom line, so much the better.

This is where simulations are of distinct advantage. Whereas traditional e-learning is about tasks and tests, screens and modules, sims are about drawing your learners into a storyline that explicitly shows them what they can do on an individual, team, departmental and business-unit level to help the company achieve its goals.

Stress this fact to your execs, and explain how you intend to work closely with them to develop the simulation with your company’s core business strategies and objectives in mind. Then, provide examples of how you intend to incorporate the very metrics that the business employs to measure its own performance into the sim by linking these metrics to a storyline that is built around your company’s most pressing priorities and strategic goals.

Pilot smart. If your executive team members are willing to invest in simulation technology, they’ll want reassurances that the simulation will yield the results they seek. That’s why conducting a pilot prior to full-scale rollout of your simulation is so important. In addition to maximizing stakeholder buy-in, your pilot can yield several other benefits, too. Inviting members of your senior executive team to be the first ones to “try out” the sim, for example, is a proven strategy for convincing them of the simulation’s value and for building a core team of champions who can promote the simulation to others in the organization.

You can also capitalize on the work done in your pilot to train the trainer. Recently, we piloted a business simulation for a big-four accounting firm and brought in a video crew to film executive team members as they experienced the simulation themselves. We also taped one-on-one interview testimonials with each participant. Later, we sliced and diced the footage and put everything together into a professional-quality teaser video that captured the energy of the experience and detailed how the simulation worked, what the learning objectives were, what happened within each round, what participants learned and experienced, and what results were achieved.

Then, we used the video to not only sell the simulation internally but also to train the dozens of partners who would be responsible for facilitating the simulation for their teams. Showing the video at the beginning of training went a long way toward helping those who were unclear about their facilitation duties to get comfortable with the simulation, understand how it worked, and learn how to become successful facilitators.