InformatistBusinessSimulationGame

Business is not about being perfect.  It isn’t even about being right most of the time.  The key to business is to try a lot of things and make a lot of mistakes, but to learn from every mistake made and improve one’s performance over time.  The makers of a new online business simulation game, called the Informatist, realize that making mistakes in a business simulation is much less costly than making them in the real business world.  We learn from our mistakes—and the same learning can go on in the low-risk atmosphere of a business simulation as can go on in real life.

High school and college students don’t get much exposure to real business situations.  In most of the courses they take, they are taught that there is one perfect answer, and that the wrong answer will cost them on their grades.  In science, it’s important in high school to know ‘the facts,’ and understand that facts are immutable things which can only be right or wrong.

In business, the ‘facts’ change depending on the situation.  What was a fact yesterday may be irrelevant today, as competitors, the environmental conditions or market forces change how the ‘facts’ are perceived in the marketplace.  The ‘facts’ of business are difficult to discern.  What is a constant in business, however, are the instincts that good businesspeople learn through their experience.  And there is no experience that teaches more than making a mistake and learning how not to make it the next time.

Doctors have been using simulated patients for years now, which gives them a leg up when they have to encounter the same problems in real patients in the future.  They can learn the toughest procedures without dire consequences—the dummy may be realistic, but you can’t kill it.

Pilots learn in a like way on ’simulators,’ which use fast computers to simulate their flight environment.  In these simulators pilots can make serious mistakes which would result in crashes, injury or even death.  Pilots say that they are able to replicate situations so difficult that they are unlikely to encounter them in real life, but if they do, they are prepared because of the mistakes they learned from in the simulator.

Businesspeople need a simulator as well, in order to make mistakes in a low-risk environment and learn from them.  In the new business simulation online game, called the Informatist (www.informatist.net), high school and college students can create alternate personae that create businesses, invest in capital equipment, buy stocks and grow their businesses.  Students should not expect one ‘right’ answer; rather, they may make a lot of decisions that look bad in retrospect.  But, like physician and pilot simulations, they can make mistakes and learn from them.

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