Nothing Off the Record

A four-round, advanced organizational-behaviour simulation on feedback, voice and transparency. Ridgeline Freight Systems, a fictional Pittsburgh B2B software company with 640 employees, has just lost USD 6.4M in annual revenue after a launch failure that 14 people saw coming and only 2 escalated.

The founder-CEO announces radical transparency in 90 days: every meeting recorded, real-time peer ratings of traits, believability-weighted votes and open performance data.

Playing his Chief of Staff, students (1) weigh the causes of the silence against an evidence file and pick the one metric the programme will answer to; (2) set six design dials (recording, rating visibility, what gets rated, decision rights, information openness, rollout scope) plus training and consent, inside a USD 1.2M budget; (3) handle what six weeks brought: engineers moving disagreement to private messages, a data-backed bias complaint about the ratings, and a legal letter from a carrier recorded without consent; and (4) recommend to the board whether to scale, extend in stages, hold or stop, with zones of privacy, rating governance, a hiring policy and a stop condition.

The founder pre-fills his own plan in every round, and it looks best at week 2: on-record activity jumps while the safety survey and resignations lag. The model then shows the transparency paradox, the cost of rating people instead of ideas, believability weighting without a track record and change by fiat.

Each round students seal a forecast that is opened later; the score combines outcomes (risks that reach a decision-maker, psychological safety, regretted attrition, legal exposure, founder backing) with process (diagnosis, metric choice, forecast calibration, governance).

The debrief computes the decision that cost most, names the mistakes made in this run, reports the five learning objectives as met or not, and gives three questions for class. Built on Dalio, Kegan and Lahey, Bernstein, Edmondson, Morrison and Milliken, Detert and Edmondson, and Kluger and DeNisi. English and Spanish.

Una simulación avanzada para participantes acostumbrados a trabajar con los principales marcos y dilemas de la materia, pensada para formación de directivos y profesionales con experiencia.