Running the room
The game is not the intervention. What a facilitator does with the forty minutes after it, with two hundred people, or when the session goes sideways — that is the intervention.
A simulation is a machine for producing behaviour you can point at. It does that part on its own. What it cannot do is convert what happened into something a participant will still be acting on in November, and that conversion is entirely the facilitator's work.
These are the parts that go wrong most often, written for someone who has run sessions before and wants the specific mechanics rather than the philosophy.
How do I run this well?
- How should a debrief be structured?
How to debrief an experiential session so the learning sticks
The game is not the intervention. The forty minutes after it are, and most facilitators spend them summarising instead of asking.
8 September 2026 — 5 min read - How do I hold a room this big?
Facilitating two hundred people without losing the room
Past about sixty participants, everything that worked in a classroom stops working. The fix is structural, and most of it happens before anyone arrives.
17 September 2026 — 6 min read - What do I do when it stops working?
What to do when a session goes wrong mid-round
A team refuses to play. The timing collapses. A senior participant takes over the room. None of these are rare, and all of them have a move.
18 September 2026 — 6 min read
If you are choosing rather than running
- team building activity for 200 people, large group facilitation
Running a real session for 200 people or more
- change management workshop, resistance to change training
Getting a team through a change they did not ask for
- cross-functional collaboration workshop, silo busting
Two teams that have to work together and do not
The other four
- How do I show this worked?
Proving the session did something
Reaction scores come back between 4.2 and 4.7 every time and tell a sponsor nothing. These are the measurements that survive being questioned.
- What am I actually buying, and what should it cost?
Buying a simulation
Two quotes for the same brief can sit a factor of ten apart. The spread is not margin, and a buyer who can name the drivers negotiates better.
- Which format fits this brief?
Choosing the format
Physical or digital, in a room or on a call, twelve people or five hundred. Each of those choices changes what the session can produce, and none of them is a preference.
- Where does this fit in the wider programme?
Designing around the session
A simulation is one day. Whether it changes anything is settled by the weeks either side of it, which is the part nobody designs.
Book a call with Fernando
Thirty minutes on whether the catalogue fits your market. No pitch deck — bring the clients you are trying to win.
- With
- Fernando Mendes
- Timezone
- GST (Dubai, UTC+4)
- Length
- 30 min