If I wanted to structure this blog as a book, here is how I would organize it.

First, I would start with the category of Learning Organizations.

For example, in this order, I would include:

• The flow of skills and The growing grey areas between: practioner, expert, student, and instructor.
• Then zoom out to: The 10 lenses to overcome blind spots and see Opportunities in organizational learning
• And zoom back in: Your organization's learning ecosystem says everything about which members and what content is valued

Then I would go into Sims and Games, and start with How a Business Leader Should Consider Sims.

In this order, I would include:

• Why use sims in ten words.
• Training and education for conviction and commitment, not just compliance.
• Corporate sims: about 100K per finished hour to build.
  
• The balanced scorecard for assessing sims
• Sidebar: Is fifteen minutes the new hour of corporate training?
• What I look for when I judge serious games
• Virtual worlds, simulations, and serious games: A unifying view

I would get more nuanced with Designer Notebook.

For example:

• (Section 2 of) A Quick and Dirty Guide
• Skill sets for serious games and educational simulations
• The importance of playing games for a sim desinger
• Creating a Sim Concept Document.
• While designing a sim, identify the fluid, semi-fluid, and rigid content
  
• Sidebar: The Aldrich framework for assessing authoring tools.
• Case Study: The Action Business School sims
• Most sims fail at the first level.
• Should people "play themselves" in sims?
• Using an interface to motivate people to wait.
• The challenge of making dynamic dialog in a sim.
• Flow states in sim design: when to use it and when to avoid it.

• Including sim designs in bids and proposals
• Case Study: World Anti-Doping Agency project.
• Grappling with an assessment framework.
• A proposed simulation assessment methodology.
• The need for sleep to process information in a simulation centric class
• Conclusion: The need for sim authoring tools and a vibrant marketplace.
• Conclusion 2: Can computer games be art?

For a conclusion, I would bring up The Future of Education

• We are missing something: Education is leadership; leadership is education
• But there is a problem: Education should be more like World of Warcraft... I mean the iPad... No, Facebook. The quest for silver bullets through new popular media/technology
  
• In education, a vision redux.
• Implications: Simulations, Distance Learning, and Social Networking will enable the One Thousand Dollar MBA
• Implications: Assessment + MMORPG + Real World Challenges: How The MESH will Change Education
• Finish: Evolving education will require: new media, new assessment, and homeschoolers.
  

Organizations want their training and learning groups to take advantage of new capabilities and media (including blogs, wikkis, Facebook style apps, and sims), while avoiding any risks of being on the bleeding edge.

They want to develop and share more expertise. To do this, for examples, they might create the capability for:

• Casual YouTube style videos to quickly and cheaply explain some basic information;
• Richer communities of practice; and/or
• More powerful certification or other validated mission critical programs.

Below is a snapshot of the flow and the tools used to deliver the new skills (and please click to enlarge the picture). The four discrete core roles, one in each corner, are: practitioner, expert, student, and instructor.

Thematically, the most interesting areas are the ever-growing grey areas between the various discrete roles:

• Practitioner / Student: Practioners don't want to be taken out of the field to be "students", nor do sponsoring organizations want to pay the cost of practitioners being students. So this grey area is growing. Organizations are using short interventions, including traditional student frameworks, such as webinars; non traditional information sharing, such as podcasts and blogs; and learning-to-do techniques such as simulations and serious games.
  
  
• Expert / Instructor: The time when organizations would take their experts and move them to being a full-time instructor is long gone. But there are more "non-invasive" techniques to share the knowledge of the experts, including webinars and wikis and other methods mentioned above. Further, there are opportunities for experts to share without any involvement from the formal learning groups, such as blogs.
  
  
• Expert / Practitioner: Here, not only are practioners better able to find and teach each other, but practioners also see this grey area as a place to get promoted by establishing themselves as an expert. These communities are both vital and filled with sharp elbows.

The role of the arrows is to show the originating role (at the base of the arrow) and the destination role (at the tip of the arrow). For example, a traditional classroom goes from instructor to student. Where arrows either begin or terminate in grey space, that is a little interesting. Where there are no arrows and just icons, the ideas both begin and end in grey areas.

Settling for the Goal of "Compliance" is No Longer Necessary, nor Even Sufficient, for Ethics and Safety Education

Training programs have traditionally been judged as "good faith" or worse, "check box."

• "Good faith" means that the traditional training group tried pretty hard, using the tools available to them, to create a program that attempted to changed real world behavior;
• "Check box" means that a program was measured primarily by its ability to prove that students were exposed to the content.

Developing Commitment, even Conviction, is Now Possible and Necessary

When it comes to ethics issues, including around financial matters and sexual harassment, and safety issues, including cyber security as well as physical world processes, these tepid metrics are being challenged and found wanting. This is because the training programs have failed everywhere from Toyota executives to texting train conductors to BP safety inspectors.

The new metrics must be around developing conviction and commitment, not just awareness. For example:

• How do people actually behave when no one is watching, and/or when stressed?
• Can people improvise the philosophies to appropriately adapt it to situations not covered in the formal course?

How Simulation-Based Programs Develop Conviction

A well-designed simulation may be the only tool available to meet the conviction and commitment goal in a scalable and measurable way. Simulations can do this through scenarios with the following properties:

1. Allow the student to experiment with their traditional behavior. Allow them to do what they would naturally do. Then show not only the immediate, apparent, and high-probability consequences (which are often positive) of their traditional behavior, but also the long term, hidden, and/or "unlikely" but possible consequences (which can be devastating). Allow the player to experience emotionally the direct devastating consequences.
   
2. Visualize the "invisible system" - the flow of events that people can't normally see, but leads to any devastating outcomes.
   
3. Allow students to repeat the scenarios (which means they can't be too long, or rely too much on linear content), and then "discover" for themselves the right way of doing things.
   
4. Include the little feedback signs to teach players what are signs in the real world that indicate a straying into risky behavior.
5. Put the student in novel situations that require improvising based on their earned knowledge.
   
6. Present tailored, not generic, after action reviews/debriefings.
   

The enterprise value of employees (or students in universities) with conviction is so great that the old training goal of compliance seems absurd.

• People who learn conviction are not capricious. They stick to these convictions, even in times of boredom, greed, and stress.
  
• They are also ridiculously powerful at holding others accountable to the same higher standard.
  
• And they apply the material to broader areas.

A generation of training people have been getting by with "good faith" and "check box" (and by "getting by" I mean losing budget and credibility, while mostly holding on to their jobs) using various automation techniques. But all stakeholders and regulators can, and increasingly will, demand more. In fact, we will see more terminations and lawsuits around reliance on old methodologies.

Now that sims are available and proven, they must be used. And, what is true of ethics and safety today will also be true of management and leadership in the near future.

See also: Education is Leadership; Leadership is Education

Serious Games can be used to develop conviction and competence, through the increased use of engagement, practice, emotion, and richer content. When I judge sims and other serious games, this is for what I am looking.

A) Interactive World (30%)

From a design perspective, the highest level goal is to create and then present a small, self-contained simulation “world,” “environment,” or “content model” with appropriate rules, real-time rich interactivity, and visual and action based feedback. The player of the sim “learns” though practicing on and interacting with various subsections of this environment.

This simulation world’s rules are framed by the learning objectives of the program. The creation of this simulation often requires novel and multi-layer visualizations and interfaces (although where computer games provide useful models, they should be adopted). These worlds may be abstract, or real world, or a combination of the two.

This racing game (from EA's Need for Speed series) shows multiple simultaneous perspectives, including first person, strategic map, and heads up display of key variables (speed, engine speed)

When a player fails, the reasons for the failure have to be visualized and otherwise self-evident.

B) Entice Mode (5%)

The program will launch a short, non-interactive video style presentation that will expose users to basic rules, show some core interactions, and make the user excited about and comfortable with the upcoming experience. It is possible that some users will skip this content all together, while others will watch it two or three times to get a feel for the content before engaging.

Arcade Games such as Marble Madness demonstrated game play and explained rules to entice onlookers.

C) Role of Coach (5%)

The Serious Game should use some type of “coach” character. The “coach” avatar can be used to create a connection with the user by kicking off levels and concepts, providing debriefings, and giving tips and encouragement. Finally, the coach will present any pedagogically traditional content that will be used to augment the experience, such as bulleted summaries and diagrams of concepts. However, the best sims can predictably develop knowledge in players without explicitly teaching them anything.

An Example of a Coach Avatar

D) Level Structure (5%)

Each level should begin with a briefing, and after the player engages the sim, end with a customized debriefing either explaining the success of failure. If the sim does not have discreet levels, a character or even note found can serve the same function more seamlessly.

E) First Level (10%)

The sim should not start off with significant passive explanation (the Entice mode should bear much of that). Rather, the player should be allowed to engage the interactive section as quickly as possible. The design goals of the first level, rather than highly instructional, are as follows:

1. The player has to get a general feeling for the interactivity.

2. A player can finish it quickly (in less than one minute).

3. The directions and goals are unambiguous, with immediate feedback and a clear sense of success or failure. It should be set up through a brief cut scenes, and very high feedback, such as in-game tips/directions.

4. There is a reset button (to encourage exploration and reduce fear of failure).

5. There is room for some exploration, and/or promise of more interesting things to come. In fact, through the design and any instruction, players should be encouraged to simply exist in a safe, subsection of this world, exploring and testing the rules on their own. The world should feel like an open-ended sandbox. To accomplish this, players can either replay the first level as often as they want, or they can achieve the stated goal, but linger before they move on to the next level.

F) Small Challenges that Allow for Creativity (10%)

Then give players small challenges in this world that can be solved using a variety of different techniques. (Minimize the use of single solution challenges.) Let players express themselves if possible. Open up the world a bit.

G) More Complicated Challenges (15%)

Increase the depth and length of the challenges until they are more game-like and elaborate. Make challenges harder, and also combine the application of various other skills. Imagine the skills within a player as a cone that gets bigger throughout the levels.

The games can be synchronous, or the game can provide artifacts (such as screen shots of solutions, awards, or scores) that a student can share in a community.

The game may require stories for contexts. Where it does, offer a few different alternative story “skins” to appeal to the most players as possible. Easter eggs may be included to increase the value of community.

H) Replay with a Focus on Different Approaches to Win (5%)

Encourage players to replay the same levels over again, but try new approaches. Levels should be available for replaying after they have been won, and open-ended challenge levels should be available after the player is done with a story mode. This often requires the use of explicit “trophies” or “achievements” to be given for the successful application of new approaches.

I) Rigorous Assessment (15%)

Finally, present the player with rigorous challenges to solve. This part of the program may only use a traditional presentation of material that lines up with the destination application, such as in a test or real world problem.

See also: Using Serious Games and Simulations: A Quick and Dirty Guide

For more information, see: The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games - How the Most Valuable Content Will Be Created In the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google (Wiley, 2009)