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.
The most common failure in experiential learning is not a bad session. It is a good session dropped into a programme that had no place for it, followed by a return to a workplace that was not told it happened.
These are the structural decisions — where the session sits, who has to be involved, and how a multi-day programme should be ordered.
Where does this fit in the wider programme?
- Where in the programme should this go?
Where a simulation fits in a learning journey
Opening, middle or close. The same session does three different jobs depending on where it sits, and putting it in the wrong place wastes the most expensive day in the programme.
23 September 2026 — 5 min read - Why does nothing change afterwards?
Why transfer fails, and the one person who decides it
Participants return to a workplace that has not been told anything happened. The variable that predicts transfer better than session quality is whether their manager was involved at all.
24 September 2026 — 5 min read - What order should the days go in?
Sequencing a multi-day programme
Content first then experience, or experience first then content. The order changes what people are able to hear, and one of them wastes the first morning.
25 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.
- 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.
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