Forthcoming in International Journal of Information Technology Education, 2004
Advanced Social Simulations: Innovating the way we
learn how to manage change in organizations
Albert A Angehrn (albert.angehrn@insead.edu)
INSEAD, The European Institute of Business Administration
Abstract: Over the last few years the Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies of the European
Institute of Business Administration has pioneered a new approach to teach subjects such as change
management, innovation and diffusion dynamics which has been already successfully adopted by
universities such as Stanford, MIT, or Wharton, as well as by a number of large corporations.
The key to this eLearning approach is the use of Information Technology to model the dynamics of social
contexts (including individual behaviors, group dynamics and cultural factors) to stimulate learning in
complex domains such as the one illustrated in this article: change management. Adopting a ‘learning by
doing’ philosophy, experiences conducted over the last years have demonstrated that it is possible to
stimulate learning by enabling groups of managers to experience the challenge (and the frustration - let's
not forget that more than 70% of large change/innovation projects fail!) of being responsible for the
implementation of major change projects in realistically simulated organizational contexts.
The resulting advanced simulations have shown to provide a powerful alternative approach to
complement, substitute and extend traditional teaching approaches in a critical field such as change and
innovation management, offering an opportunity to apply models from social and organizational dynamics
to design advanced 'Experiential Adventures' with significant pedagogical effectiveness.
This article first provides the motivation for applying new educational approaches to address critical
subjects such as change management. It then illustrates the concept of social simulations through an
extensively validated example, and finally discusses the applicability of the presented eLearning approach
to the effective development of competencies of managers, but also of other target learners, such as
engineers, citizens, or young adults, for which the extended exposure to modern video games generates a
particularly high receptivity to this computer-enhanced approach to learning about effective interaction in
social contexts.
Keywords: Simulations, eLearning, Change Management, Innovation, Social Interaction and Diffusion
Dynamics
1. The Bad News: Massive Project Failures and Change Competencies Gap
Let’s be clear. In spite of the considerable energy, time, resources, knowledge and efforts we
allocate to them, the vast majority of change projects in our organizations fail pretty
miserably. Failure, in this case, means that the targeted performance improvements are not
achieved, as the new ways of operating and the new systems and mindsets supposed to
enable such transitions are not integrated and adopted to the extent that our organizations
can really profit from them in a tangible and sustainable way.
Several studies indicate ‘resistance to change’ as the most important factor for this 70%+
failure rate of large organizational change projects - with other reasons ranging from
insufficient executive sponsoring to unrealistic expectations and ineffective leadership. This
fact reflects the typical situation characterising organizational change initiatives: On one side
we have a few top managers, the ‘change strategists’. Their change initiatives emerge almost
spontaneously from extensive exchanges (typically with their peers), information gathering
(typically from reading management literature or attending courses and conferences) and
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deep reflections (typically still resulting from long strategic planning sessions). The change
plans they generate are usually well conceived and in line with the organizations’ vision and
objectives. It’s not here that the actual problem is.
The main problem emerges when we start moving from the still relatively comfortable area of
‘knowing’ (what would be best for our organizations and a plan describing how to best
accomplish it) to the one of actually ‘doing’ it, a phase from which ‘change strategists’ wisely
stay away [1], delegating it to teams of internal or external ‘change agents’. Their mission is
what reveals to be the most delicate challenge of each change project, namely its actual
implementation, as it is at this stage that resistance enters the scene, the resistance of the
‘change recipients’, i.e. of all those who will be directly and indirectly, marginally or deeply
affected by the change initiative.
So, besides the high failure rate, the second bad news resulting from a realistic assessment of
change management practice in organizations (both private and public, by the way) is related
to competencies [2]. While we definitely don’t lack ‘knowledge’ (in forms of books, articles,
seminars and courses on the subject) on how to address change initiatives, we must
unfortunately acknowledge that our capability to successfully translate them into practice,
facing the different sources of resistance which will inevitably emerge (and that we often
unintentionally contribute in fuelling), is not as well-developed, and that it is unlikely that yet
another interesting lecture, presentation or case discussion might make the difference.
2. The Good News: Building Competencies which Really Matter
There is no doubt that successful change management requires an in-depth understanding of
the dynamics of both diffusion and resistance of innovation in a given context. Unfortunately it
is not just ‘theoretical’ understanding which is required in this case, but also the practical
experience necessary to efficiently diagnose the attitude of key individuals, to identify and
leverage both formal and informal networks, as well as the specific cultural factors which
determine success or failure when selecting and implementing change initiatives in a given
organizational context.
That’s why, over the last years, major efforts in both educational and corporate contexts have
flown into the design and the validation of alternative approaches to the development of
change management competencies. Such approaches are based on a ‘learning by doing’
philosophy, making it possible for groups of managers to experience the challenge (and the
frustration) of being responsible for the implementation of major change projects in
realistically simulated organizational contexts.
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Take for example the “EIS Simulation”, which has been gradually adopted to enhance change
management courses in top universities such as Stanford, Columbia, Northwestern, Carnegie
Mellon, Wharton, London Business School or INSEAD [3]. As a first step, imagine to be asked
by the head quarter of your company (a large multinational corporation called EuroComm) to
join a team of change agents for a very delicate mission. You’ll be sent to Teleswitches, a
newly acquired company, to convince the members of its very successful but very
independent-minded top management team that it’s high time to harmonize their information,
cost accounting and reporting systems to the ones of the whole group to increase
transparency and guarantee consistent procedures corporate-wide. You’ll have up to 6
(simulated) months to accomplish your mission and introduce this major innovation at
Teleswitches.
It’s during this mission that you’ll have the opportunity to show your skills as member of an
ideally diverse change agents team. You’ll first have to develop a joint strategy, and then put
it into practice, gradually coming in touch with, getting to know, interacting, and hopefully
successfully changing the attitude of 24 ‘virtual change recipients’. These characters represent
the actual top management team of the target company. As you are going to realize quickly,
their attitude and behavior has been designed to reflect realistically the variety of reactions
people display when confronted with significant change (particularly when this change comes
from ‘outside’). During your mission, you’ll have the opportunity of selecting and launching a
large number of change management and communication initiatives, realizing that people will
react very differently (collaboratively, defensively, apathically, etc.) depending on when and
how you will intervene, on their personal attitude towards the change you aim at introducing,
on their role within the company, on their perception of your role, on their risk profile, their
sensitivity to distributive and procedural fairness, their need for self-determination, their
internal relationships and tensions, and many other factors which might change over time as a
function of what you will or will not do in order to drive change in ‘their’ company.
Besides experiencing individual reactions, you’ll also be able to realize (and sometimes too
late) the power of formal and informal networks, the fact that managers with well-sounding
formal titles might end up not being the most influential, that positive as well as negative
attitudes towards change follow a number of not always straightforward diffusion patterns,
that habits and cultural specificities might play a bigger role than we might expect, and that
failing to realize all these factors in time might seriously diminish the effectiveness of your
well-thought change initiatives and even threaten the whole project. What might have started
with an optimistic strategic planning session with your fellow change agents might even
become, during the actual implementation, a stressful and frustrating nightmare.
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Back to reality. Adopting a simulation approach to address the development of change
management competencies has revealed to have a number of important advantages [4].
First, such games make it possible for managers to have a first hand experience of how
difficult it is to move from ‘theory to practice’ or ‘from strategy to implementation’. What can
appear straightforward in the planning phase ends up being much more complex when we
start interacting with actual (or simulated) people, as their reactions might not necessarily
correspond to what we expected. Like in reality, it is not unusual to see change agents teams
abandon their initially well-thought strategies after just a couple of (simulated) months or
even weeks, realizing that we always operate with assumptions which might not necessarily
match the organizational context in which the change has to be introduced.
Second, such simulations allow us to bring managers in touch with a wide variety of attitudes
and behaviors (the ‘stereotypical’ managers they have to convince) as well as to gain insights
into diffusion processes (from linear to epidemic) operating across the formal but also informal
networks of power and influence present in every organization.
Third, such realistic management games provide a ‘play-ground’ in which one can
collaboratively experiment with the use of different tactics, generating rich discussions about
their appropriateness and the most effective way of facing different forms of individual and
organizational resistance. Finally, a ‘game’ approach is a non-threatening, risk-free way of
assessing one’s strengths and weaknesses when confronted to high-pressure situations in
which managing expectations, persistence, and team dynamics play a crucial role in
determining the success or failure of projects ultimately aimed at having a significant impact
on people’s habits, mindsets and cultures.
3. The Trend to Follow: Experiential Adventures in People Dynamics
Until recently, simulations in the management development context have been mainly limited
to domains in which knowledge could be modeled in quantitative terms, such as in finance,
economics, but also marketing and certain aspects of general management, in which
managers’ effectiveness ultimately boils down to ‘decide on the right numbers’. Simulations
like the one described above addressing change management situations don’t ask managers to
operate with numbers, but rather challenge them to effectively diagnose organizational
contexts as well as to design and implement effective strategies to interact with people in
professional contexts. The underlying models are hence not quantitative but rather reflect the
insights gained in disciplines such as personality and social psychology, social network analysis
and dynamics, providing new ways for validating such models and for designing effective
educational experiences oriented towards developing inter-personal skills and the capability to
productively contribute to team and community dynamics.
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Developing realistic ‘games’ enabling managers to experience complex situations involving
people and interactions in social contexts is one of the most challenging frontiers of
management education [5-6], because technically it enables active experimentation with
advanced eLearning technologies such as distributed 3D [7], and conceptually it involves the
development of ‘Learning to Learn’ and ‘Learning to Change’ competencies whose complexity
has been explored extensively in the individual and organizational learning literature,
and is for instance at the core of the work of authors like Argyris and Schoen [8-10].
In a future which is not so far, advanced interactive authoring tools might enable management
educators and corporate trainers to design tailored educational experiences in which managers
are challenged to address complex situations like the one described above, but reflecting for
instance the specificities of a family business context, or the challenge of introducing
Knowledge Management systems and processes in large organizations (two simulations
addressing these specific contexts have been developed along the lines described in this article
and are currently under evaluation), or the diffusion of innovation and new forms of crosscultural collaboration in highly distributed organizations, where the power of face-to-face
interaction has to be substituted or complemented by new ‘online’ ways of capturing people
attention and gradually raise their interest and willingness to adopt new behaviors and ways of
working.
The potential application domain of such educational games is not limited to management
development only. For instance, the same concepts underlying the EIS Simulation are
currently used in the context of a research project sponsored by the European Commission
[11] aimed at designing a ‘community game’ helping the heterogeneous members of urban
communities to better understand innovation dynamics in their own contexts. Involving the
citizens of a town into simulation games of this type is expected to provide the stimulus for a
broader reflection on how and why such communities adopt or reject innovation.
Finally, this new type of simulations can help us addressing efficiently other contexts related
to people dynamics, for instance by enabling managers to experience difficult meeting
situations in which virtual characters display different types of non-cooperative behavior, or in
which dysfunctional group dynamics – if not well-handled – might threaten the outcome of
important decision-making or negotiation sessions. Ultimately, the models underlying these
new management development tools might also be embedded in current computer games
played by children and young adults. In fact, role-playing and interactions with virtual
characters in such games are still typically limited to shooting and fighting (a highly
discussable approach to induce change) and might definitely profit from integrating equally
challenging and entertaining, but more socially acceptable ways to have an impact on people
attitudes and behavior, both on- and off-line.
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4. References
[1]
J. Pfeffer and R.I. Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap, Harvard Business School Press,
1999.
[2] A.A. Angehrn and J.E.M. Atherton, A Conceptual Framework for Assessing Development
Programmes for Change Agents, CALT Working Paper 1999-1, 1999.
http://www.calt.insead.edu/eis/documents/Conceptualframework.pdf
[3] A.A. Angehrn, The EIS Simulation User Manual, 2004. http://www.calt.insead.edu/eis/
[4] J.-F. Manzoni and A.A. Angehrn, Understanding Organizational Dynamics of IT-Enabled
Change: A Multimedia Simulation Approach, Journal of Management Information
Systems, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 109-140, 1997.
[5] A.A. Angehrn, Y. Doz and J.E.M. Atherton, Business Navigator: The Next Generation of
Management Development Tools, CALT Working Paper 1995-1, 1995.
http://www.calt.insead.edu/eis/documents/BN Paper.pdf
[6] A.A. Angehrn and T. Nabeth, Leveraging Emerging Technologies in Management
Education: Research and Experiences, European Management Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3,
pp. 275-285, 1997.
[7] A.A. Angehrn and T. Nabeth, C-VIBE: A Virtual Interactive Business Environment
addressing Change Management Learning; Proceedings of the IEEE International
Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, Madison, Wi, USA, 2001.
[8] C. Argyris, Overcoming Organizational Defenses, Boston, Allyn &Bacon, Boston, 1990.
[9] C. Argyris, Teaching Smart People How To Learn, HBR, May/June 1991.
[10] C. Argyris and D.A. Schön, Organizational Learning II, Organization Development Series,
ed. E. H. Schein and R. Beckhard, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1996.
[11] EdComNet Project: A humanistic Urban Communal Educational Net, European
Community IST-2000-26037.
Author’s Coordinates:
Prof. Dr. Albert A. ANGEHRN
Professor of Information Technology and Entrepreneurship
Alcatel Chaired Professor of Net Economy and E-Management
Director, Centre for Advanced Learning Technologies (CALT)
INSEAD, The European Institute of Business Administration
Bd de Constance, F-77300 Fontainebleau, France
(P): 33 -1 - 6072 4361 (4004) (F): 33 -1 - 6074 5545 (5544)
(E): albert.angehrn@insead.edu (W): http://www.insead.edu/calt
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