Summary of the Experience

Each of the three episodes focuses on and builds upon the lessons learned in the previous simulation.

EPISODE ONE
THE ASSIGNMENT

The first episode focuses on getting to know your people and building and leading your team.

EPISODE TWO
THE CHALLENGE

The second episode widens your scope around how you lead your team inside an interconnected enterprise, and challenges you to use more sophisticated managerial actions to uncover talents and attributes, discover engagement drivers and align those with key roles and assignments.

EPISODE THREE
THE RENAISSANCE

The third episode further expands your leadership challenges around how you lead your team inside a changing internal and external reality. It takes you into a much more digital and challenging VUCA World (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) where the Factory needs to unleash the creative potential of each employee to contribute to the success of the team and the enterprise.

Infinity takes leaders from ‘Taylorism’ to a technologically enabled VUCA environment across three challenging, immersive, interactive, and engaging episodes. Each episode and the overall trilogy is designed to ensure that the lessons learned are transferred to real life in real time with immediate impact in the workplace.

As a player progresses through the game, the episodes become more complex, challenging, and sophisticated. The player takes on the role of a manager within a large company, leading and managing a team of five people in a factory setting. Each team member has a distinct personality and set of talents and skills. Each has personal and professional aspirations, strengths, and weaknesses.

Players find themselves developing relationships with each of their team members because of the depth of the story line, the nuance of the character development and the research built into the narrative and business structures. The player’s challenges include hiring, discovering and aligning talent to specific roles and assignments, building skills, conducting ongoing conversations with employees, managing turnover as top talent leaves early in the game, and managing transitions. The player must also manage up and across organizational silos, developing and widening their ‘contextual intelligence’ lens.

Throughout the simulation, each of your employees (non-player characters with whom you have interacted in detailed conversations in each episode) gives you direct feedback on your managerial style and choices. They help you to see how your actions and the conversations they had with you impacted them and the team’s engagement. Then the Digital Mentor provides a more researched view of your choices that gives you a higher perspective on what has transpired and provides you with alternatives to Continue and Consider from 4 Leadership Pillars, 8 Leadership Behaviors and 24 Leadership Competencies. Participants are given the opportunity to see themselves, to experiment with new managerial styles and behaviors in a super-realistic, but safe, immersive simulated world. They receive feedback and can evolve their leadership choices and behaviors as they progress through each of the three episodes.

Debrief

The game tracks each player’s progress and provides individual feedback through our proprietary Digital Mentor™ technology. The Digital Mentor provides a customized report that analyzes each player’s decisions (such as feedback shared with employees), and how those actions related to the team’s and the factory’s performance. The feedback happens on three levels:

Playbacks of important conversations between the player and employees. The employees provide direct 360 Degree Feedback on the important conversations the player had with them in that episode. The player very clearly hears the employee’s perspective on their choices and behaviors as a leader, giving insight into their management styles. All five employees—as well as Laura, the boss—provide this feedback to the player in conversation mode.

Deep Leadership and Managerial Research. The Digital Mentor tracks the choices and actions of the leader and compares that to 50 different researched leadership and managerial behaviors. These behaviors are subsets of the four key learning outcomes. Patterns are recognized and a Digital Mentor report is created that begins with the four quadrants and provides an analysis of areas for the player to explore. Each area of feedback is broken into a recognition of the pattern of choices, a comparison to what the research says and some suggestions for further reading on a particular topic if the leader wants to learn more. Finally, it makes some suggestions around what to ‘continue’ doing because the leader is doing very well in these areas; or things to ‘consider’ changing where appropriate in the next episode.

An analysis of the player’s contextual awareness of the broader organization. Based on a player’s game actions, the Digital Mentor will analyze whether he or she is focused on his or her individual role more than what is occurring throughout the factory. For leaders in large companies, too narrow a focus can have a negative impact on performance. Leaders with a broad contextual awareness of how the team’s actions affect the larger business context are apt to better understand how their work influences others and therefore can be more effective.