Twelve-to-twenty-minute games and instruments spanning negotiation, business decisions, procurement strategy, spend analytics, operations, inventory and sustainability. Drop them into a lecture, a workshop, a team offsite, or a coffee break.
Short, self-contained sessions that need no prep. Pick the one that matches what you want out of the next twenty minutes.
Two mirrors: the biases sitting behind your decisions, and how you actually handle disagreement.
Six decisions, each framed two ways. Did your answer hold?
The same call, put to you twice in different wording. Answer both on instinct — what is scored is whether you stayed consistent. Three minutes a frame, so nobody loses a pair to the clock.
How you handle disagreement — twelve situations, one map.
A validated-tradition self-assessment: the dual-concern model of Blake & Mouton, the same five styles measured by Jay Hall's Conflict Management Survey, Thomas-Kilmann's TKI and Rahim's ROCI-II. Allocate ten points across five responses in each of twelve situations, and leave with your dominant style and your position on the goals × relationships plane.
Two named frameworks — one worked on a case, one you point straight at a purchase of your own.
Where does this spend live on the 2×2?
Place ten purchase categories on the supply-risk vs profit-impact matrix. Each placement reveals the recommended lever.
Bring your own purchase. Leave with a defensible weighting.
Name what you are buying and the criteria that matter, set how much price is allowed to count, then compare the rest one pair at a time. You leave with an award model you could publish — and a consistency score saying whether your own judgements agree.
Rank six everyday products by carbon on instinct, then do the arithmetic and see where your gut was wrong.
The rest of the catalogue. All of it is fully playable and you can still assign any of it to a class — it is simply rougher, longer, or more specialised than the set above. Open this if you want a specific topic: forecasting, inventory, project scheduling, trade policy, working capital.
Open strong — the first number you say does most of the work.
Five micro-scenarios. Pick your opening offer and see how anchoring shapes the deal you eventually get.
Don't split every issue 50/50 — trade away the ones you don't value.
A four-issue negotiation where you and the counterparty value the issues differently. Build a package across several rounds; the counterparty concedes on what it doesn't care about and holds what it does. Find the trades that grow the pie instead of dividing it.
Find the savings hidden in the data.
Five rounds: where to consolidate, where to tender, where the maverick spend is, where you're over-exposed to a single supplier, and how much you'd realistically save.
Pick a method, tune the dials, survive the regime shift.
Four canonical methods — Naive, Moving Average, Simple Exponential Smoothing, Holt's trend — all on one live time series. Switch methods and retune α / δ / n any week. A regime shift mid-game separates adaptive from anchored. Debrief replays your stream through every method so you see what would have won.
Your supplier missed the deadline. Your line stops in 96 hours.
Five decisions across one week of fallout. The first move branches; the next four follow a single timeline. Once you escalate, you can't un-escalate cheaply.
The tariff is announced, not applied. Move now, move later, or hold?
Eight quarters, four sourcing regions, a news ticker that mixes real trade shocks with rumours that never land. Re-allocate volume as the world lurches — every move costs requalification.
Five workstations. Average capacity 3.5. Why doesn't the chain deliver 3.5?
Goldratt's dice game in your browser. Predict throughput, then watch statistical fluctuation and dependent events conspire against you. Three rounds, three insights.
Diagnose the chart. Then prescribe the fix.
Two phases of quality management. First spot the out-of-control signals on a live control chart (Western Electric rules). Then tune the process — recentre the mean, reduce variability, hit Cpk ≥ 1.33 within budget. The lesson: in control ≠ capable.
Sales wants stock. Finance wants none. HR wants no churn. Pick two.
Twelve months of seasonal demand, three dials a month: workforce, overtime, build-ahead. Chase the forecast or level the plan — then a viral spike tests whichever you chose.
Order too few, lose sales. Order too many, throw out cash.
Twenty nights running a sandwich cart. Set tomorrow's order before you know demand. The critical ratio is hiding in plain sight — find it before round 20.
Four warehouses or one? Same demand. Watch what happens to safety stock.
Side-by-side: a decentralised network and a centralised one, same total demand and variance. Slide the service level. The √n law shows up uninvited.
Crank service to 99.9% — and watch the inventory bill go vertical.
Set the reorder point on a live demand-during-lead-time curve, then run cycles where stochastic demand either gets served or stocks out. Re-tune between cycles to balance holding cost against lost sales — and discover why the last few points of service cost the most.
Find the order quantity. Then a supplier dangles a discount.
Slide the order quantity over the classic three-curve cost chart to find the economic order quantity. Then a price-break table appears — decide whether the quantity discount is worth inflating your order past Q*.
A longer classic that runs on its own site rather than here.
Every game and tool here is built on a named, published framework — not on house opinion. Here is the source for each, so you can check the ground it stands on before you put it in front of a class or a board.
Made for teachers and students. Anonymous play, no account needed.
Teaching a class? Set up a class dashboard →