Leading Change with Emotion — Hanseatic Naturkost

A four-round, intermediate change-leadership simulation set inside Hanseatic Naturkost GmbH, a EUR 480M Hamburg organic-food manufacturer (1,900 employees, 2 sites) that publicly committed to a 42% Scope 1&2 emissions cut by 2030 — and just missed its first milestone (3% achieved vs 6% needed). The science is solved; the people are not.

A pulse survey shows the classic value-action gap: 71% of employees say they care about sustainability, yet only 22% have changed any work behavior. Worse, a leaked memo about "efficiency measures" has 48% of production staff reading decarbonization as code for automation and layoffs, 34% are guilt-fatigued and have tuned climate messaging out, and two of three works-council reps are skeptical.

Playing the sustainability lead, you have EUR 600,000 and one quarter to lift the behavior-change rate from 22% toward a board target of 50% participation — without re-triggering anxiety.

Grounded in Myriam Bechtoldt's research on discrete emotions in climate-mitigation behavior, the simulation runs four decisions: (1) diagnose the emotional landscape, mapping which discrete emotion — fear, guilt-fatigue, apathy, hope, pride — is blocking which segment, and distinguishing the value-action gap from outright opposition; (2) choose a communication frame — fear/urgency, guilt, hope/efficacy, or pride/identity — pricing each frame's effect on the message-effectiveness index per segment and naming its emotional risk, because fear and guilt spike attention but deepen avoidance while hope and efficacy build durable engagement; (3) manage an anxious town-hall and works-council, choosing emotion-regulation moves — validate before reframe, reframe threat as agency, offer credible rather than hollow job-security reassurance, give people control through choice; and (4) design the EUR 600,000 engagement initiative across peer champions, visible quick-wins, gamified challenges, recognition, manager-led conversations, and a transparent progress dashboard, building for persistence rather than a one-off spike.

The math rewards matching frame to emotion, validating before reframing, credible reassurance, and a feedback-loop-backed engagement design — and punishes the five classic errors: treating it as an information deficit, defaulting to fear/guilt, answering feelings with spreadsheets, hollow over-promising on job security, and buying a one-off participation spike with no mechanism to make behavior stick.

Final KPIs track Behavior-Change Rate (%), Emotion-Regulation Score, Message Effectiveness, and Resistance Risk.

An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.