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.
Format questions get answered by logistics: where people are, what the budget is, how long the room is booked for. Those are real constraints and they usually decide it.
What is worth knowing is what each format costs you in the outcome, so the constraint is a trade you made knowingly rather than one you discovered in the debrief.
Which format fits this brief?
- Physical or digital?
When a physical game beats a digital one
Screens scale and travel. Objects create a different kind of evidence, and there are specific briefs where cardboard outperforms software.
12 September 2026 — 4 min read - How do I make a virtual session feel like a session?
Running a virtual session that is not a webinar
A camera grid is not a room. Everything experiential depends on — peripheral vision, overheard argument, the pause before someone speaks — has to be rebuilt deliberately or it is simply absent.
21 September 2026 — 5 min read - How many people should be in the room?
What group size actually changes
Twelve, forty, two hundred. The same simulation produces a different intervention at each, and the number in the brief is usually treated as a logistics detail.
22 September 2026 — 5 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.
- How do I run this well?
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.
- 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.
- 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