It is well known by systems thinkers that the behavior of complex systems (for example, the company as a whole or the operations subsystem) depends upon their structure (the set of system variables and their interrelationships). In our opinion, the methods and tools presently used for production and operations management (pom) teaching are insufficient to cope with an ever more complex reality. Over the last few years, the research group GIdEao, following an original idea (Machuca 1992a, 1992b) has been developing transparent‐box business simulators (TBBSS) based on systems thinking and system dynamics models; the aim was to maintain the advantages of the existing didactic tools while mitigating their drawbacks. The most distinctive feature of TBBSS (as opposed to the traditional black‐box business games) is that the structure of the system to be simulated is always accessible to the users, who can thus reflect on the causes underlying the results obtained and thereby improve decision‐making and the learning process. We will show how to work with TBBSS, and we will comment on the results obtained in an empirical experiment which aims to measure the influence of TBBSS on the learning process.
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