Reputation Under Fire — A Scandal at Marlowe & Crest

A four-round, advanced organisational-behaviour and crisis-leadership simulation set inside the 48-person Energy Transition Practice of Marlowe & Crest, a 600-person Manchester management and engineering consultancy (£92M revenue, 18% margin) whose only real asset is its reputation for integrity and its hard-won 'speak up' culture (engagement 78). At 16:40 on 6 October 2026 a national newspaper journalist emails the Practice Director: in 48 hours she publishes an investigation alleging the flagship £40M public-sector programme (≈9% of firm revenue) overstated carbon-savings figures and that a junior analyst was pressured to 'round up' results — quoting an anonymous current employee. Within three hours an anonymous internal channel ignites: 'leadership knew', 'the analyst is being thrown under the bus', 'heads will roll'. Left unmanaged, gossip spreads to ~70% of the team within a day and engagement is forecast to fall 78 → below 60; the named analyst is considering resigning, and two senior consultants (£1.4M combined billing) signal they will leave if the firm spins the story or scapegoats the analyst. Playing the Department Head, you (1) diagnose the coupled external-reputational and internal-trust threats, separating what is true, contested and unknown before any public word; (2) choose the public posture (deny / acknowledge-and-investigate / limited statement / no comment) and a client pre-brief, stress-tested so the public line can survive your own investigation — denying before verifying is the cover-up trap; (3) manage the internal rumour mill, protect the named analyst with due process, and decide whether to engage the anonymous channel — silence feeds gossip, over-disclosure contaminates the investigation; and (4) sustain energy, retain the two at-risk seniors with promises you can actually keep, and commit a credible methodology-governance fix. The math, grounded in Roulet's work on negative social evaluations, gossip and wellbeing intelligence, in SCCT and in Edmondson's psychological safety, rewards internal-external consistency and punishes the five classic errors — denying before verifying, internal silence, scapegoating the analyst, over-disclosing during a live investigation, and treating reputation and wellbeing as separate sequential problems. Final KPIs track a Reputation index, Engagement (78 baseline), Rumour Spread (lower is better) and Wellbeing & Trust.