Character Under Pressure — The Aurora Car-Seat Decision at Northwind Mobility

A four-round, advanced leadership simulation set inside Northwind Mobility Inc., a London, Ontario child-safety and mobility manufacturer (CA$310M revenue, 1,400 staff, 9% EBIT) acquired 18 months ago by a value-oriented holding company with an aggressive cost-cutting board. Three weeks into the role, the newly promoted Division President faces a values-vs-deadline collision: the flagship next-generation convertible car seat, Aurora — carrying 40% of division growth and CA$62M of first-year revenue — is six weeks from a committed 25 November retail on-shelf date when the Head of Engineering & Quality flags that its side-impact foam passed the regulatory minimum but failed Northwind's own internal margin-of-safety standard in 3 of 40 high-temperature sled tests. A late cost-down foam substitution saved CA$1.8M but narrowed the safety margin. The seat is legal to sell yet below the brand's 'beyond the minimum' safety promise. Fixing it costs CA$4.2M and slips launch 7 weeks, missing the holiday window — an estimated CA$22M in lost first-year sales plus a likely end-cap loss. Shipping unfixed risks a CA$30–80M recall-and-reputation downside that would be existential for a safety brand. Playing the President, you must resolve the dilemma not by gut but by deliberately weighting the dimensions of leader character (Crossan's Leader Character Framework — Judgment integrating Courage, Temperance, Accountability, Justice, Humility, Integrity, Collaboration, Humanity, Transcendence and Drive). Across four rounds you (1) frame the dilemma through the character lens rather than as ship-vs-delay; (2) decide and justify the action using four named dimensions in balance, accepting an explicit trade-off; (3) hold or adapt the decision under live confrontation from a hostile board chair, the whistle-raising Head of Quality and a big-box retail buyer; and (4) read the outcome on four KPIs and separate decision quality from luck of outcome while proposing how to build character capacity. The math rewards balanced, transparent, accountable judgment and penalises the five classic errors — treating legality as the standard, delaying on a hunch with no articulable character logic, letting one dimension dominate (heroic Courage without Humility), punishing the courage of the whistle-raiser, and judging the team purely on the financial outcome. Final KPIs track Character-Balance Index, Decision-Quality Score, Stakeholder Trust and Deadline Risk.