Sunday, July 3, 2016

Thiagi on Simulation design in training

Bases of Simulations
Misconception: Simulations reflect reality.
Reality: Simulations reflect someone's model of reality. There is an important difference between reality and a model of reality. This difference has critical implications for the design and use of training simulations.
Let's assume that you want to simulate the quality-improvement process in a service organization. Exactly what features and processes you select for the simulation will depend on your professional discipline and personal preferences. For example, if you are a behaviorist, you may interpret the process in terms of stimuli from customers, responses from employees, and reinforcers from managers. If you are a humanist, you may look at the customer-service process in terms of customer expectation, employee empowerment, and manager motivation. If you are a sociologist, you may focus on organizational norms and individual roles. If you are a lawyer, you may emphasize contractual obligations, legal violations, and policy issues. If you are an accountant, you may compare the costs of providing different levels of service with the short- and long-term payoffs of satisfying a customer.
In addition to these professional filters, your model of reality depends on your personal preferences and personality characteristics. If you are an optimist, you may directly correlate better services with profitable bottom lines. If you are a pessimist, you may introduce such random variables as policy changes, governmental regulations, customer vacillations, and environmentalist agitations.

These concepts of multiple realities and of selective emphasis have important implications in the design of a simulation. You have to explicitly document what variables and relationships are included in your model and why you choose to include them (and to exclude others).

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