REPLY Running beer game in 1.5 hours (SD6660)

[SDMAIL Ralf Lippold]

Posted by  Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold at web.de>

Hello everybody,

thanks a lot for your hints insights on speeding (or not) the beer 
game in class :-) .

At the moment I am taking all your advices into account. As came 
already several times in your answers is the necessity to run it 
smoothly -especially at the beginning when everybody is stuck in 
their mental models that makes them to do more steps at once than 
expected and "messing up" the "flow" of the game.

A good thing to do is to visualize all single steps with tape (where 
the no. of the step is written on) at the appropriate space on the 
board. We experienced that (during a workshop a couple of weeks ago) 
as a good thing to make things easier and gain more time for discussion 
especially on different policies to undertake to avoid the overshooting 
of the system.

Actually the beer game offers more to learn than we think (especially 
connecting to other fields). As we had a workshop around "lean thinking" 
some weeks ago most of the participants hadn't played the beer game but 
had heard of it. As we started with the first run, we quickly ran in deep 
discussions on HOW to solve the shortcomings that are inherent in the 
system and the setting itself (we were in deep thoughts for about 7 (!) 
hours that weekend). This time the fixed class schedule just allows 90 
min of playing. I am quite positive that some folks are getting the deeper 
ideas and ways of learning that emerge out of playing the beergame with 
the right amount of debriefing discussion (thanks George for your comment). 
So there will be future runs (word of mouth is kicking in).

Further experiences and hints from you, as you are more experienced players 
than myself, would be great.

All the best from Leipzig

Ralf

PS.: Happy to have stepped in the field last year while the lean fire was 
glimming (for about 10 years) until it was sparked to a real fire by the 
connection with SD :-)

PPS.: The unknown structure of the beer game itself and time constraints 
are often the barriers to start playing the beer game in companies or 
university courses (not directly connected with SD, e.g. logistics management). 
For many people the long term benefit as learning and accumulation personal 
knowledge (and the sharing of it), understandíng the complex underlying systems 
and building of trust is not obvious and so "by gosh" they don't play it.

Posted by  Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold at web.de>
posting date  Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:44:01 +0100