Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The Big Fat Lesson I Learned From Simsoc or The Simulated Society



Have you Simsoced lately?

That's me, E.C.-----> blond hair/grey sweater; figuring out how I was going to get out of the horrible predicament I found myself in.

Simsoc, or "Simulated Society" was part of our Leadership Training from which we graduated last week.

Simsoc Simulated Society, according to the participation manual is:

"A dynamic group simulation game that forces participants to cope with the daily problems of governing society. Assuming a variety of roles, the players grapple with issues like abuse of power, justice, diversity, trust and leadership as they negotiate their way through labor-management strife, political turmoil, and natural disasters."

Entrepreneur Chick found herself unemployed as well as did everyone else in my particular geographic location- in this case, The Red Room.

It struck me as so weird that all my classmates, after looking, horror stricken, into their instruction envelope at the start of the game and finding themselves unemployed, nearly all but two of us, myself and Diane said, "We need to get a job right now! We need jobs! Where can we get a job? Who's going to hire us? Oh my gosh, if we don't get jobs we're going to die in 2 more rounds!"

I'm sitting there thinking, what? A job? No, no. I'm NOT getting a job. So I say, "No, we need to start an enterprise." Which is the game's equivalent to a business, "an enterprise". I was more than a little miffed to see the manual state that as an option, we can chose to start a "high risk enterprise". That's the only option, "high risk". More about that in a moment.

"How are you going to start an enterprise with no money?" my team mates shot back. Okay, I suppose it's a valid question. But in the "real world" I do it all the time! You just come up with an idea and find out if it's valid, nail down the peices you need to put the puzzle together-usually a lot of business meetings- figure out your price point, figure out exacly how you get paid, figure out your break even point, and start putting the deal together- raise the capital. Shazam! Cashflow!

When you know what you're doing and you've done your due diligence, rolled out a test market, an "enterprise" does not have to be "high risk". But even in the game, the simulated society, the rules were already predetermined and there was nothing I could do about that.

But do you not see how society as a whole is simply taught to "Play it safe", "Don't take a risk", "Oooooooh, my. That's too risky- better not?" I was irritated with the game for a long while for that reason and wondered a great deal when lunchtime was and what we were going to have.

8 comments:

  1. I'm preparing to enter into SIMSOC next week. Thanks for the tip. As a natural go-getter and leader, I will always opt to make my own money.

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  2. I was yellow. Yellow Rules!

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  3. I think it is horrible you would put this out there for others that have not gone through this program to view. I went through Simsoc years ago and it never would dawn on me people would ever post what the day was.
    Unfortunately we live in a society that everyone searches the Internet for the answers.
    People getting ready to go through the program are now searching for this.

    If you are a true leader you would remove this so that you can truly lead and allow others to learn about it the old fashion, school of hard knocks.

    From a proud red.

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    1. Lol as someone having to go through this soon with severe anxiety about the unknown, Her post helps so much. So shh

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  4. Thank you for the info.I start the simsoc game tomorrow

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  5. Great leaders adapt to the new resources ( including the internet) and utilized them to help others.

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  6. I played this game in 1994 at a weekend honors orientation retreat for freshmen. Also finding myself on the red team, my goal was to organize a revolt and take over yellow and green teams. To the one who thinks it's "horrible" to share what little information about SimSoc is revealed in this blog, SimSoc's been around since the late 60's. Participant manuals can be found in used book stores across the country and on the Internet. There are no spoilers here.

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