BoardSim
Your participants take the seats of a listed company’s board and meet at the close of every quarter to review results and supervise a management team played by artificial intelligence. The executives have characters, information they would rather not share, and a level of trust in the board that moves with how they are treated.
A simulation about supervising, not about deciding
A board does not run a company. It appoints the person who does, sets what they are paid for, decides what it will not allow, and finds out what it is not being told. Those are four different skills, and none of them is exercised by a simulation where you set the price and press next.
Seven seats with real powers
Chair, lead independent director, the audit, remuneration and risk chairs, a shareholder representative and the independent directors. Only the audit chair can commission a review or appoint the auditor; only the remuneration chair can move the pay plan. A seat is a constraint, not a label.
A meeting with five phases
The pack is published; each director files an individual position before the group forms one; the committees meet; the board sits with management; resolutions are moved and voted. Positions lock when the meeting opens, because a view formed after the discussion is a different thing.
Problems with a way in
Each case hides eight problems, and every one has a documented path to discovery: request the right evidence, ask the right person in the right room, or earn enough candour that somebody volunteers it. A board that never asks is told by an event instead — far too late.
Governance and results, never added
The board effectiveness index scores how the board governed. Shareholder return, cash and incidents are reported beside it and are never inputs to it. A board can govern well and be unlucky, and making participants sit with that gap is most of the teaching.
Boards know what matters. They do not think they are doing it well
In IESE’s 2026 survey of 130 companies, directors rate strategic competence at 95% and integrity at 96.7% — and rate the quality of their own board discussion at 63.6%. That distance, between what a board believes it values and how it actually behaves in the room, is exactly what a simulation can show somebody and a lecture cannot.
The scoring model was built backwards from published evidence: each of its six dimensions traces to a survey finding, and the research brief behind the product cites every one. When a client asks why these six, the answer has a source.
Five phases, then the company moves
One round is one quarter. The board reads, forms individual views, meets in committee, sits with management and votes — and then the engine runs the company forward on what it decided.
The board pack
Published ahead of the meeting, with the quarter’s figures, the risk register, the proposals management wants approved and whatever the instructor set the signal level to hide inside it.
Individual positions
Each director records their own view and their questions before the group has one. This is what makes it possible to tell a director who was right early from one who agreed late.
Committees
Audit, remuneration and nomination, and risk meet separately, and executives answer things in a committee that they will deflect in plenary. Knowing where to ask is part of the skill.
The board meeting
Management presents and the board questions it, in writing, with the executives answering in character. The board can also go into executive session and talk without them in the room.
Resolutions and votes
Approve, condition, reject or defer — and record why. A vote against with a reason attached is worth something; one without is the thing the scoring exists to mark down.
Eight people who answer, deflect, and occasionally tell you the truth
Chief executive, finance, operations, commercial and people officers, the board secretary, internal audit and the external auditor. Each has a written character, facts only they hold, and a trust in the board that rises and falls with how the board behaves.
They do not simply hand it over
What an executive knows is placed in front of them only when the board has earned the right to hear it. Pressing a chief financial officer in plenary gets a deflection; asking the same question in the audit committee does not.
They never invent a figure
Executives are handed the reported numbers and answer only from them, and every reply is checked against those same numbers before a director sees it. Showing a board a fabricated figure would be worse than showing it a dull one.
Trust is a corridor, not a maximum
Press too hard and management goes quiet and stops volunteering anything. Never press at all and the board has been captured. Both ends are scored as failures, and watching a cohort discover where the middle is is the best twenty minutes of the debrief.
Four ways it reaches the board, and what each is worth
Finding the receivables problem in the quarter it starts and finding it three quarters later both end with the board knowing, and they are not the same act of governance. Choose a route and a delay and see what the board earns for it.
Credit decays by 25 points for every quarter of delay. This is what stops a board coasting until the last meeting and then sweeping every problem up at once.
Six dimensions, weighted to a hundred
Nothing in the index rewards volume. Questions, executive sessions and information requests all hit a ceiling quickly, because a board that learns to farm the metric by asking forty questions has learned the wrong thing.
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy | 20 | Share of the meeting spent on the future rather than on last quarter’s arithmetic, and whether the board asked for alternatives |
| Oversight and integrity | 20 | What was discovered and when, how much of the pack was actually read, whether investigations were independent |
| Leadership and succession | 20 | Measurable objectives, the shape of the pay plan, whether the chief executive was evaluated without management present |
| Independence and judgment | 15 | Whether approvals carried conditions, how the board handled the classic governance scenarios, whether it held its own risk limits |
| Board dynamics | 15 | How evenly the room spoke, the quality of recorded dissent, executive sessions held |
| Owners and stakeholders | 10 | Shareholder trust, general meeting outcomes, related-party handling, regulatory standing |
Each director also receives a private profile — preparation, contribution, willingness to challenge, committee work — and, if you enable it, a peer rating collected in the final quarter. Directors rate themselves too, and that self-rating is deliberately kept out of the score and shown back as a gap.
Two companies that fail in opposite ways
A board trained on the first case learns to hunt for a hidden fraud — and then finds nothing in the second, because in the second nothing is being hidden at all. Running them in that order is the lesson.
Earnings management
A Latin American consumer and industrial conglomerate. The chief executive is borrowing revenue from next quarter through distributor shipments, and the sales incentive that drives it is still paying for volume. The signals are in the pack and the evidence is one request away. The board’s job is to catch him.
Control
A Spanish listed food processor. Nothing is falsified. The founding family’s holding has pledged most of its stake and therefore needs the dividend; the payout ratio tracks its loan schedule; supplies are bought above market from a related cooperative. The board’s job is to notice that the company is being run for one shareholder, in the open, and to say so.
“What if you had decided differently?”, answered rather than argued about
Every board in a session faces the same company, the same executives and the same events, so the differences at the end are entirely their own. This is where the session earns its place in a programme.
Counterfactuals that are not rhetorical
The engine replays a board’s own history with one decision changed and the same events firing, so the difference is the decision and not luck. Only alternatives that were genuinely on the table are offered.
The discovery timeline
Every hidden problem, its first signal, when and how each board found it and what the delay cost — side by side across the whole cohort.
Trust trajectories
How each executive’s trust in its board moved and which behaviours moved it. Boards that pushed too hard and boards that never pushed both end up outside the corridor, and the two curves side by side make the point without anyone having to argue it.
In one room, or across a fortnight
The same simulation runs as a facilitated classroom session or as a distance format where the phases open and close on a clock. Executive programmes rarely have seven directors free for six consecutive quarters, and the asynchronous mode exists for exactly that.
Facilitated, in the room
You control the pace: publish the pack, open the meeting, close the quarter when the resolutions are in. Typically one quarter per session, or several in an intensive day.
Asynchronous, over days
Set how many hours a quarter runs and the phases open and close themselves. The quarter closes on its deadline and lays out the next one. You can always end a phase early when a cohort has finished.
With or without the AI
Turning the language models off is a supported mode, not a fallback: directors choose from a question menu and the executives answer from the case. No running cost and no network dependency, for programmes where either is a constraint.
You can take a seat yourself
Take over any executive at any moment and answer as them. Questions to that executive queue for you rather than being refused, and your answers are recorded as yours. Worth saving for the final round of an executive programme.
Programmes where somebody will one day sit on a board
It assumes no accounting or finance background beyond reading a set of figures, and it rewards judgement rather than technique — which is what makes it work with mixed cohorts.
Executive education
Governance modules, board-readiness programmes and director certification. The natural home, and the format the asynchronous mode was built for.
MBA and executive MBA
A capstone that asks a different question from the usual one. Most capstones ask whether a team can run a company; this asks whether they can supervise one they did not choose.
Alongside an operating simulation
It pairs naturally with a general-management simulation: one week your participants run the company, the next they supervise one. Seeing both sides of the same table is a stronger lesson than either alone.
What programme directors ask first
Six quarters is the default and four to eight are supported. In a classroom, plan roughly ninety minutes per quarter including the meeting and the debrief of that quarter; in an intensive format two or three quarters fit in a day. The closing debrief needs a session of its own and is the one you should not compress.
Up to seven directors per board, and as many boards in parallel as the cohort needs. Every board faces the same company under the same conditions, which is what makes the closing comparison meaningful. Four to seven per board works best; below four the committee structure stops meaning anything.
No. They need to be able to read a set of figures and notice when something does not fit. The simulation is about oversight and judgement, not about modelling, and mixed cohorts of lawyers, engineers and general managers work well — which is also what a real board looks like.
Assign the seats, publish the pack, run the room and close the quarter when the resolutions are in. The executives run themselves. From the console you can see what every board has discovered and what it has not, which is what lets you steer a debrief without reading transcripts.
English and Spanish, both the interface and the case material. A cohort can run in either, and the instructor console is available in both regardless of what the participants chose.
Yes. A case is a structured document — the company, its figures, the management team, the buried problems and the evidence that reveals each one — and we build them with institutions that want their own company in the seat. Talk to us about what you have in mind.
Put your participants on the other side of the table
Tell us the programme, the cohort size and the format, and we will show you a quarter running with the executives answering live.
Commercial
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(+34) 877 245 676Technical support
info@kudzupartners.comBoardSim
The board is where the questions get asked
Or where they do not. Six quarters is long enough for a cohort to find out which kind of board it is.