Over the part few years I have been running in-house business games with a number of major enterprises who form executive teams for a global enterprise for a three year period over a single (intensive) day. So far 15 teams, of different levels of seniority, have fully completed the games. Based on observing and analyzing performance in these games I believe I have uncovered 5 critical differences between top performers and the rest in the areas of leadership and decision-making.

I had a fascinating conversation with Rini Das, CEO of Pakra Games, where we discussed my work on business games and how it related to the theories and practices of bioteams which Rini subsequently published here.

ISEE Systems, a leading developer of business simulation tools, have published reviews of two of the new Bioteams online/offline collaboration games developed using the ithink platform. These team games enable companies to share their own best practice (learn from others) in a way that really sticks and to put staff into difficult but realistic decision-making situations where if they make a mistake it does not cost the business!

There are two neat tools you can use to quickly turn excel spreadsheets into online simulations, what-if models and dashboards. They are Simulate from Forio and Crystal Presentation Design (formerly known as xcelsius) from SAP. Here's the lowdown.

Bioteams readers might be interested to know that I have just launched Cohort - an Online Change Management Game which challenges players to explore different strategies to gain the support of a group of senior executives for a major change initiative. The game is designed to be used in leadership development workshops with up to 20 participants playing competitively in teams.

I develop custom business games for team-based experiential learning workshops which usually have a significant computer element. This whole area is strewn with pitfalls, good intentions and misconceptions and there is a huge risk that the game becomes too complex or an end in itself or the graphical aspect of the user interface becomes all consuming at the expense of the learning.

Many business models used by enterprises have never been calibrated using the organisation's own historical data which seriously undermines their usefulness. This is generally not due to the lack of historical data but because of the way the models have been designed. So can you build business models which do not suffer from this fatal flaw? Absolutely!

Building Community and Computer Simulation are two of my hot topics. So it really grabbed my attention when Channel 4 Education announced a forthcoming game, Fallen City, to let us explore how our cities might be mended by empowering communities.

I have been thinking for a long time about developing an online game for High-Performing Teams which was complex enough to be useful but simple enough to be usable! I am pleased to introduce the A4 Team Game (Alignment, Attitudes, Attention and Autonomy) which can be configured for different team challenges and runs on the desktop, the web or even embedded in other applications.

One of the challenges for teams is that the achievement of some of their goals are not fully under their own control - they need to be achieved in partnership with, or even in spite of, external parties (stakeholders) who are working to their own agendas and priorities. The Stakeholder Collaboration Game allows teams to simulate increasingly complex scenarios involving multiple goals and multiple stakeholders.