The Practice of Change

Capturing the Brain Drain

For the simulation's public-hearing phase, Rea finds herself in a high-school classroom. Onscreen, Evans Bay's mayor sits on her left; on her right is the leader of the retailers' association, which wants to bury the PCBs in a hazardous-waste dump. Evercell's rep sits in the front row, eyeballing Rea suspiciously.

The video continues, and a young priest stands up and complains that the city can't even collect the garbage in his mostly immigrant neighborhood. Again, Rea must make a decision: Tell him to stick to the topic, assert that the EPA does not handle the city's garbage, or promise to take a look at the problem.

Rea's instinct says to choose the last option, but she clicks on the first choice, just to see what happens. A square window pops up at the top of her computer screen and a video clip of a community activist appears. The activist describes how cutting someone off -- even when you're in the right -- sounds defensive and can cripple the larger goal of building consensus.

This is the most innovative part of the simulation: At crucial junctures throughout the narrative, Rea can tap into a storehouse of more than 450 videotaped interviews with senior EPA staffers as well as community activists and other state officials who have dealt with the agency. Each year, about 1,500 employees leave the EPA. This data bank, rare among simulations, is a way to capture that brain drain and use it to help improve the performance of frontline staffers.

As Rea digs deeper into the sim, she finds that the decisions she must make become increasingly untenable -- which is entirely intentional. Roger Schank, 53, director of ILS and creator of the model for these simulations, believes that people learn best by making mistakes and figuring out what went wrong. (Schank recently spun off a corporate arm of ILS, called Cognitive Arts, which custom designs simulations.) By giving her the opportunity to fail faster, "Evans Bay" is helping Rea to scale that learning curve -- and become a battle-tested agent of change.

Coordinates: Roger Schank, Cognitive Arts, www.cognitivearts.com; EPA, www.epa.gov

The Change Effort: To figure out how Toronto-based Optus Corp. can move fast, even while it's bingeing on a menu's worth of big-time acquisitions.

The Simulation: "Shifting Sands," a multimedia, facilitated simulation from InCourage Inc., a company based in Georgetown, Ontario with clients that include Sony Corp. and Nortel Networks.

It's almost a mantra for the new economy: Great things happen to companies that finish first. But recently, the frazzled senior leaders of Optus, a unit of the Canadian communications giant MDC Corp., have begun to wonder whether the company is growing too fast for its own good.

Launched just 13 months ago, Optus custom designs documents for financial-services companies and retailers, turning bills and financial statements into marketing tools for such customers as Aetna and Citibank. Optus has been moving at warp speed since day one, acquiring a new company every quarter and boosting its employee base by nearly fivefold. For this year's final quarter, Optus expects to double its revenues to $40 million (Canadian), and predicts it will hit $100 million by the end of 2000.

But the stress of such go-go growth is beginning to chip away at all the good news. Maxed-out managers are frantically trying to integrate new hires into the company and still keep pace with new customers' do-or-die deadlines. Senior leaders lie awake at night, wondering how to handle all the new business when the staff always seems to be a few steps behind. How can they help get their new people up to speed without slowing the company down?

President and COO John Hantho, 38, jokingly describes the company's behavior as "fire-ready-aim." Looking for a way to help his senior team quell the panic, focus on the problems, and learn to deal with change as an everyday constant, Hantho has decided that the members of the senior team should make a virtual crossing of the Sahara Desert.

This past October, two facilitators from InCourage guided the 10-person team through "Shifting Sands," a multimedia team-building experience that helps groups prepare for organizational change. "Shifting Sands" is an on-site, full-day sim that, in part, re-creates scenarios from an actual 1977 expedition, in which a Canadian named Steve Donahue joined three other men in an auto caravan from North Africa to the southern border of the Sahara, crossing about 1,000 miles. Donahue is now a professional speaker who uses his travel adventures to talk about change.

At the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Leadership Centre, in suburban Toronto, Team Optus watches a CD-ROM-based slide show of Donahue's crossing. At different cruxes in the expedition, facilitators Tim Dixon, 34, and Peter Bailey, 36, stop the narrative and challenge the team to make critical decisions that will either propel them farther across the Sahara or bury them in their tracks. This is not a game: The team is looking at real pictures, it's encountering real events, and it's making life-and-death decisions that are every bit as compelling as the real-world decisions that Optus must make every day in the marketplace.

Spanning several microclimates, ecosystems, and cultures, the Sahara is a true-to-life metaphorical testing ground for all the change that's confronting Optus. Here are three of the ways that "Shifting Sands" has helped the team make some critical changes of its own.