Learning by Doing — Designing the Capstone

A four-round executive-education design simulation set at Spree Executive Academy gGmbH, the custom L&D arm of a Berlin business school. With nine days to redesign a rejected two-hour lecture, you must architect the capstone of Nordwind AG's “Leading Through Disruption” programme for 24 senior managers — under a hard 20-minute active-session cap, with a EUR 1,800,000/year contract and EUR 360,000 of fee tied to a 60-day transfer score that must climb from a baseline of 58 to ≥ 70. Built on Grasselli's experiential/action-learning principles and Kolb's learning cycle, the simulation makes you (1) diagnose why “telling” fails on transfer and define a measurable transfer indicator, (2) select an experiential format — live role-play, decision-forum case, or computer-based crisis sim — trading engagement, fidelity, transfer potential and feasibility against the cap, (3) cast a mixed, partly skeptical cohort (three skeptics, two quiet experts, one dominant VP) and budget the 20 minutes between exercise and debrief, and (4) design an 8-minute structured debrief plus a 60-day transfer-measurement plan, then defend it. The math rewards experiential design discipline — protecting reflection, casting deliberately, measuring transfer not satisfaction, and subtracting objectives — and punishes the five classic errors: reverting to telling, over-scoping the exercise, starving the debrief, random casting, and optimizing happy-sheets. Final KPIs track the projected Transfer Score (vs. the 58 baseline and 70 target), Engagement across the cohort, Debrief Quality, and Time-on-Task discipline against the cap.