Using the Everest Team Simulation to Teach Threshold Concepts

Resource Description

Leadership and Team Simulation: Everest V2 grew out of scholarly research into management failure in extreme settings. Drawing on insights from his research into the 1996 climbing tragedy on Mount Everest, Michael A. Roberto collaborated with Amy C. Edmondson to write a simulation in which students could learn experientially about management decision making and leadership by climbing the world’s tallest mountain (Roberto, 2002). The original simulation proved so popular that Roberto and Edmondson wrote a second updated version, released by Harvard Business Publishing in 2011.

The story line of the Everest Team Simulation centers on a commercial expedition to climb Mount Everest. The mountain is now so commercialized that clients pay more than $100,000 for a guided climb, with a record 234 climbers reaching the summit on a single day in 2012 (Walsh, 2013). Echoing this real-life trend, the simulation organizes students into five-person teams that hike the virtual mountain together by playing different roles on a commercial expedition. These roles include the following: (1) Team Leader, who guides the commercial expedition; (2) Physician, who conducts medical research on high altitude sickness; (3) Marathoner, who strives to test his own physical endurance; (4) Photographer, who is contracted by a magazine to take photographs of Everest; and (5) Environmental Scientist, who plans to clean up the rubbish that litters the mountain postcommercialization. A sixth role, Observer, is also available for classes that are not divisible into groups of five students. Roles may be chosen by students or assigned by the instructor.

The story line proceeds over a virtual 6-day period. Beginning at base camp, teams make decisions over successive rounds of play to hike to the five camps that line the path to the summit. During each decision round, team members can choose to ascend to the next camp, rest at the current camp, or descend to the previous camp and may elect to stay together or to separate. Decision making is complicated by weather conditions, the physical health of team members, access to medical supplies as well as oxygen and other resources, time constraints, team goals, and individual goals associated with each role. To aid decision making, students receive information on their screens during each round of play that they can choose to analyze individually or collectively as a team. After a maximum of six rounds of play, the story line ends with a successful summit, safe harbor at a camp below the summit, or rescue due to frostbite, altitude sickness, or other illness. Individuals and teams are awarded a final score based on points for each goal achieved.

The design of the simulation supports the story line through a simple architecture of Prepare, Analyze, and Decide sections. After logging into the simulation, students access the Prepare section containing their role description, goals, and points awarded for achievement of each goal. This section also features how-to-play and introductory videos. Students are able to refer back to this Prepare section at any time during the subsequent rounds of play. The Analyze section is updated each decision-making round with new information on weather, physical health, food and other supplies, hiking speeds and other pertinent factors. In the Decide section, students enter their decisions for the current round for processing by the simulation.

The simulation operates on a web-based platform. Harvard Business Publishing supplies the course instructor with a URL and user names and passwords to provide to students to access the simulation. The instructor’s institution can make a single payment for all students enrolled in the course to play the simulation or individual students can pay online via credit card. Each student requires a laptop or tablet with high-speed Internet connection, and all team members must be logged into the simulation at the same time. Teams may be physically co-located, with students working together in the same room, or virtually co-located, with students communicating via the simulation’s inbuilt text chat function and/or phone. The simulation requires approximately 1.5 hours of seat time, although teams who extensively discuss their decision making each round may require up to 3 hours.

Course instructors interested in incorporating the Everest simulation into their teaching are well supported. A detailed Teaching Note simplifies the setup of the simulation, and the administration back end includes an auto-assign function to expedite assignment of teams and roles. Instructors have the capacity to pause the simulation in the middle of the game in order to facilitate discussion on techniques that teams might use to improve performance in the remaining decision rounds. To facilitate classroom debrief sessions, instructors are provided with a set of Microsoft Powerpoint slides populated with team scores. Instructors can download results for multiple teams and can compare goal achievement for students assigned the same role in different teams using debrief histograms.

Roberto and Edmondson created the Everest Team Simulation to achieve learning objectives linked to their areas of research expertise in leadership and group decision-making processes. Consistent with the theme of this special issue, the Everest Team Simulation also has the potential to be implemented in a way that facilitates student learning of threshold concepts in introductory management courses.

Using the Everest Team Simulation to Teach Threshold Concepts

Threshold concepts are concepts that involve seeing things in a new or transformed way (Meyer & Land, 2003, p. 1). They can be troublesome for students to learn because they may seem counterintuitive or require awareness of the “underlying game” of the ways of thinking in a discipline (Land, Cousin, Meyer, & Davies, 2005). Wright and Gilmore (2012) proposed that undergraduate introductory management courses are underpinned by the threshold concept that “management is a practice informed by theory” (p. 614). Novice students begin these courses with a commonsense understanding of management as something managers do in organizations, and may become “stuck” moving to a discipline-based understanding of management as a body of knowledge applicable to management practice. Building on the work of Davies and Mangan (2007), Wright and Gilmore (2012) argued that learning activities and assessment in introductory management courses should be designed to move students from a preliminal state (yet to approach the threshold, commonsense understanding of management) to a liminal state (stuck at the threshold, engaged in rote learning of management theory) to a postliminal state (across the threshold, discipline-based understanding of management as both theory and practice).

The Everest Team Simulation can be implemented in introductory management courses to facilitate this movement across the threshold space. We implemented the simulation in our undergraduate course at an Australian university through the following four-stage process. First, the instructor used lectures and readings to introduce students to management theory on the topics of planning, control, and leadership. Exposure to the building-block concepts, models, and frameworks that constitute management theory was intended to move students away from a commonsense to a more discipline-based understanding of management. However, lack of an experiential context for management practice can cause novice students to be overwhelmed by the abstraction of theory and become “stuck” in seeing the threshold concept of management as theory that informs practice (preliminal → liminal).

Second, students participated in the Everest Team Simulation in class time. Students were asked to bracket their exposure to management theory and engage with the simulation in a preliminal state. That is, rather than being required to think and act like a management scholar, students experienced the simulation in the context of their assigned role (experiential context for threshold learning). As students discussed and negotiated within their team during each decision round, they were asked to record the factors that influenced their individual and team decision making in a personal logbook. Influencing factors concerned both the complexities of the situation and interpersonal dynamics and communication.

Third, students reviewed their log book and identified problems in their simulation experience that they perceived had the potential to be solved or explained using management theory related to planning, control, and leadership. For example, a physician might face information uncertainty when administering medication to sick climbers, while a leader’s mismanagement of the task of accurate weather prediction might cause a team to suffer frostbite and be rescued. Students then searched in the scholarly management literature for journal articles that provided further insights to help them make sense of and solve their identified problems. As students reviewed their simulation log, searched the management literature, and wrote up their analysis in a 2,000-word assignment, they began to navigate the liminal space by appropriately contextualizing their problems in the realm of management theory and research. They “saw” how their performance in the simulation could have been improved by the application of theory about (1) the environmental conditions under which different planning and control approaches are effective and (2) the individual, group, and situational variables that influence leadership effectiveness. By reworking their simulation experience in the context of the discipline’s knowledge base as published in peer-reviewed academic journals, students gained a deep understanding of how management theory could be used to inform practice (preliminal → liminal → postliminal).

Finally, as new management theories on topics such as external environment, strategy, and organizational structure were introduced in lectures that follow the simulation, the instructor encouraged students to make connections between each new theory and their simulation experience. For example, during the lecture on organizational structures, students were asked to recall the extent to which their team’s decision making was centralized or decentralized and the impact this had on flexibility to respond to changes in weather and physical health during the simulation. This recollection provided students with an experiential context for deepening their understanding of the theoretical relationship between organizational structure and environmental turbulence. By continuously reflecting on their simulation experience in the context of new management theory, students gained a more integrated understanding of management as a web of theoretical concepts that can be used to inform and improve their own practice (preliminal → liminal → postliminal).

Constructive Analysis and Comparison

The Everest Team Simulation has several strengths for teaching threshold concepts in introductory management courses when compared to simulations that are more narrowly focused on business. The Everest Team Simulation does not require any specialized business knowledge so it is ideally suited to providing an experiential context for navigating the threshold concept of management as a practice informed by theory. Our first-year undergraduate students found playing the Everest simulation to be a fun and nonthreatening classroom experience. Students also provided the feedback that their personal struggles in climbing Mount Everest offered a simple but engaging context for applying management theory postsimulation and helped the threshold concept to come into view. More sophisticated business simulations require student teams to run, for example, a $40-million company for 5 years, making decisions in research and development, marketing, finance, human resources, and production. While these types of simulations facilitate experiential learning of how the different parts of a business fit together for advanced students, they have the potential to add to the confusion of novice students who are “stuck” on the threshold concept in an introductory management course.

Other strengths of the Everest Team Simulation relate to the flexibility of its integration into introductory management courses. These courses cover a wide range of foundational management topics, and the story line of the Everest Team Simulation has relevance for many of these topics. We set an assignment task on the simulation related to the topics of planning, control, and leadership. Alternatively, we could have asked students to consider other issues that emerged in their simulation experience, such as ethics or strategy, and scheduled the simulation during our teaching of those particular topics. This flexibility in scheduling is helped by the shortness of the required seat time. The Everest Team Simulation easily slots into a single week of teaching in a semester-long curriculum, whereas specialized business simulations are frequently more time-intensive and may extend over multiple classes.

The Everest Team Simulation has two potential limitations when teaching threshold concepts in introductory management courses. First, the graphics of the simulation are rudimentary. However, we did not find that this limitation affected student engagement to the extent that it reduced the simulation’s usefulness in moving them across the threshold space. For most students, the novelty of the Everest story line compensates for the lack of sophisticated computer imagery, while the Prepare section of the simulation includes an absorbing interview with the amateur mountaineer James Clarke to make the setting more vivid.

Second, the decision choices in the simulation do not have a high level of complexity and individuals can choose to take action without interacting with their team members. This is a limitation for teaching threshold concepts because it reduces the richness of the experiential context for the application of management theory. We managed this limitation by scheduling the simulation in a 3-hour time slot under the instructor’s supervision. The instructor regularly moved around the teams to encourage them to spend time discussing their goals, sharing information, and recording their decision processes in their simulation log. The instructor also prompted students to consider the real-world aspects of climbing Everest and to think about the similarities and differences between managing in extreme settings and other business contexts.

General information about the Everest Team Simulation and a free trial is available on the Harvard Business Publishing website (http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/product/7000-HTM-ENG). Educators who require more specific information about how the simulation was used to teach the course threshold concept can access the assignment task description, log book template, and marking rubric on the Journal of Management Education website.