The Organization Game: Lessons,Surprises & Revisions

Over the past half-decade we have been tracking the adoption and diffusion of The Organization Game (Miles and Randolph, 1979), as well as the innovations in the use of simulation, by faculty members in schools of management in the United States and abroad. At the time the simulation was created we had become convinced that something was needed to make the abstract concepts and theories of organizational behavior and management more tangible and relevant to students, to provide students with an integrative experience, and especially to get students directly involved in the thorny issues of implementation. We were also convinced that computer-based and in-basket simulations and single-issue exercises, popular at the time, were insufficient to engage all of these items on our teaching agenda. So, we developed a behaviorally-played simulation of a complex organization. This choice was new and different, both for us and for the field.