What technological innovation would you like to see in the classroom?
ROBERT PLANT: Management practice at all levels is a confluence of theory and experience. Great managers and leaders take that mixture and continually adapt it as their careers progress. Unfortunately, “on the job” experiential learning takes decades and often reduces managers to embrace low-risk, low-reward solutions. An unfortunate side effect of this is that managers can become ill prepared for sudden, high-risk, mission-critical “Apollo 13-type” problems.What is needed in today’s classroom is a management simulator, the equivalent to the technologies used by pilots and medical professionals such as anesthesiologists. Pilots don’t just learn to fly jets by reading a book and discussing it, they use simulators to experience a myriad of possible situations they may encounter.
Imagine your C-Level management team is in a boardroom simulator with telepresence screens displaying real time feeds. Your meeting is interrupted by news videos of an explosion at a critical manufacturing plant 12 time zones away, production impact data is displayed on another screen. The team must react and issue instructions, yet while these are being processed a Distributed Denial of Service Attack is rumored on Twitter and 10 minutes later, if the team has not responded appropriately the DDoS takes out a customer service center. Stock-market reactions are continually displayed on another screen; and as media coverage from a simulated business cable channel rolls, analysts start calling real phones. How well would your management team react?
A simulator such as this, with software scenarios adjusted by professorial facilitators could stress-test your team through the provision of unwinnable “Kobayashi Maru” type simulations. While challenging, the benefits would be significant; your team would bond together and develop executable strategies in attempt to beat the simulation while under real world pressures. Valuable skills they could bring back to a real situation in your boardroom.
Robert Plant (@drrobertplant) is an associate professor at the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Fla.
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