For your team · Leadership Crucible
Leadership & Organizational Behavior · Leadership & Organizational Behavior
Navigate leadership transitions, organizational dynamics, and ethical pressure across 5 high-stakes years.
Leadership Crucible drops each team into a leadership role at an organization mid-transition. The first year is a transition — a beloved long-tenured predecessor has just departed, direct reports are still loyal to them, and the board is watching. Over 5 years the team makes decisions on talent, ethics, communications, and operations while organizational dynamics (board politics, cultural friction, employee morale) compound. Random events skew personal: a key hire threatens to leave, a board member leaks to the press, an ethics issue surfaces. What distinguishes this sim is the Crisis Escalation Chain — a poorly handled crisis doesn't just hurt this year, it spreads across pillars and returns harder in future years — plus an Adapt window each week where teams can revise up to 2 decisions after seeing the crisis event.
Every team is scored on four pillars that compound across the sim. They aggregate into a composite the leaderboard ranks by, and the professor can see per-pillar deltas in the gradebook.
How energized and bought-in the team is. Empathetic, people-first decisions score higher.
How well decisions hold up to scrutiny and consequences — the Adapt window compounds into this pillar.
Whether employees, board, and external stakeholders still trust leadership to do what they said.
Whether the day-to-day still works under all this change.
Poorly handled crisis events don't end at year-end — they spread. Tier 1 contained, Tier 2 spreading, Tier 3 systemic, with compounding damage across pillars. Trajectory-tiered: teams improving get de-escalated events; teams declining get escalated ones.
After the crisis event fires, teams get a bounded second chance to revise up to 2 decisions. The core teaching moment — read the situation again and decide what to change.
SaaS, Bank, Nonprofit, Hospital — each industry reframes the leadership challenges with its own company foundation, board makeup, direct reports, and crisis mix.
Pre- and post-decision written reflections drive individual-contribution scores — 40% participation, 40% reflection, 20% timeliness. Leadership courses live or die on whether students could articulate their own stance.
5-week intensive · 8-week standard · 14-week semester.
Designed for ~15-30 students in teams of 4-6.
MBA leadership courses, executive education, undergraduate org behavior, ethics & leadership capstones.
The only sim built around a Crisis Escalation Chain and an Adapt window. Decisions are people-and-culture-shaped rather than strategic — what to say, who to keep, how to lead through messy moments — and poor handling this year returns harder next year.
One of many pre-authored prompts from the sim’s Year 1 closelibrary. Grounded in the team’s actual decisions and used as a scheduled teaching moment.
Year 1 closeThe predecessor's ghost
Your direct reports keep referencing the person who was in your seat before you. Was that a signal to preserve their approach, differentiate from it, or something more nuanced? Which of your Y1 decisions was shaped by the predecessor's legacy — and did that shape it well?
Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle via LTI 1.3. Students launch from your LMS with single sign-on; one-click grade publish posts scores back with the rubric breakdown as the comment.
Per semester. No platform fee, no per-section charge, no seat minimums. Institutional invoicing available.