General Manager
I would rather begin a custom simulation brief with one difficult decision than with a long list of leadership competencies. “Improve stakeholder management” is an ambition. “Agree a revised delivery commitment when two departments cannot meet the original plan” gives a design team something to build and examine.
At Altaius, our starting proposition is to identify one high-impact business challenge, then scope a dedicated practice environment around it. The brief is where that proposition becomes specific enough for subject-matter experts, designers and sponsors to disagree usefully.
A good brief makes the target decision, available information, authority and evidence explicit. It also identifies what training cannot resolve, such as an unavailable resource or a policy conflict that requires a management decision.
Invite a subject-matter expert to describe an anonymised situation where two plausible actions had different consequences. Ask what information a capable person would seek, what a novice might overlook and which attractive response would create a problem later.
Do not assume one expert's preferred style is the only acceptable approach. Where policy allows several sound responses, record that range. Where experts disagree about a rule, resolve the rule or make the uncertainty an explicit part of the learning task.
Keep private customer or employee details out of the authoring pack unless their use is necessary and properly authorised. A fictionalised case should preserve the decision structure without pretending to document a real outcome.
Use the following fields as a working document, not a validated instrument:
For an illustrative delivery-negotiation exercise, the target might be: establish which customer requirement is essential, check the capacity constraint and agree an authorised next commitment. That is more testable than “show excellent communication”.
I would ask for one playable situation with an opening, a meaningful decision, a consequence, a review and another attempt. The first acceptance session should include both subject experts and representative learners.
A polished opening scene alone cannot show whether the feedback is defensible. A transcript alone cannot show whether the learner understood the available information. Inspect the entire loop before commissioning more scenes, characters or language variants.
For Arabic and English, include terminology, direction of reading, relevant workplace conventions and reviewer responsibility in the brief. Do not treat translation as the final step after the interaction has been fixed.
Lacerenza and colleagues' leadership-training meta-analysis drew on 335 independent samples and supported attention to needs analysis, feedback and practice among other design factors. It provides a reason to take the brief seriously. It does not validate this worksheet or predict the effect of a particular custom simulation. [1]
The sponsor should therefore distinguish acceptance of the build from evidence of learning and from later business outcomes. They are related questions, but one successful demonstration does not answer all of them.
The useful output of the briefing stage is a shared, inspectable decision model. If the team cannot explain why a consequence follows a learner's action, I would resolve that before adding production detail. Practice-Native Learning needs a credible piece of work at its centre.
Practice-Native Learning: the Altaius methodology
Transform leadership capability with scalable, culturally intelligent simulation and measurable insights.
