General Manager
Before I propose a simulation, I want to know whether practice is the missing ingredient. A team can understand the right decision and still work in a system that makes it difficult to carry out.
Imagine a service manager who repeatedly escalates routine requests. The initial brief says the manager needs more confidence. On inspection, the approval policy is unclear, the system blocks the proposed remedy and two senior leaders give different instructions. Rehearsing a confident conversation will not resolve those conditions.
This is an illustrative case, not a report about an Altaius client. It describes a distinction worth making before spending a training budget: is the gap in capability, in the conditions for performance, or in both?
Replace labels such as “poor ownership” with a specific event. What request arrived? What information was available? What action was expected? Who had the authority to take it? What happened instead?
Look at an appropriate sample of real work with the necessary permissions. Ask the people doing the work to explain the constraints. A sponsor's interpretation is a useful starting point, but it is not a complete diagnosis.
Needs analysis matters in the research too. Lacerenza and colleagues' leadership-training meta-analysis identified needs analysis among the design features associated with stronger outcomes. That supports investigating the need; it does not validate the diagnostic questions below as a formal instrument. [1]
These questions can reveal several causes at once. They should open an investigation, not turn into a quick label attached to an employee.
For the illustrative manager, the next step might be to publish an unambiguous approval boundary, fix the system permission and align the two leaders on escalation rules. Name an owner and a completion check for each operational action.
Then test whether a learning need remains. The manager may still need practice explaining a boundary to an upset customer, identifying an exception or deciding when incomplete information requires escalation. Those are concrete tasks around which a useful practice environment can be built.
If the new policy is still being debated, a facilitated scenario can help the policy owners discover disagreements. Be explicit that this is policy exploration. Do not score learners against an answer the organisation has not agreed.
I would capture five fields before commissioning the intervention:
This is a proposed working record, not a validated assessment. Keep personal data proportionate to the purpose and distinguish an observation from an interpretation.
Practice-Native Learning is Altaius's approach to building learning around consequential practice. Its value in a project depends on choosing work that people need to rehearse and reviewing what happens when they do.
The responsible brief can therefore be smaller than the original request. Instead of “fix leadership ownership”, it might be “practise explaining and applying the newly agreed service-recovery boundary, including when to escalate an exception”.
That gives the simulation a clear job. It also leaves the organisation accountable for the conditions that allow the practised behaviour to happen at work.
Practice-Native Learning: the Altaius methodology
Transform leadership capability with scalable, culturally intelligent simulation and measurable insights.
