A boxed game available gratis from [email protected]
Created by BT to introduce social environmental and ethical dilemmas to
business school students, company employees and NGO workers, this game
requires players to take on the role of executives and stakeholders and
make decisions about strategy. Making use of question cards and
PowerPoint presentations, its main purpose is to provoke discussion
among players on how they might resolve ethical dilemmas, and enough of
these are provided to ensure plenty of variety.
The scenarios are in themselves fun to explore, but the underlying
point is serious – all organizations are faced with a range of
dilemmas, and it’s not easy to agree a course of action that everyone
thinks is best.
Participants work in teams, ideally of six people. The game comes with
a CD that allows the presenter to display the opinions of each team on
PowerPoint, prompting discussion of the issues involved. This makes it
important that the presenter knows enough about CSR to lead the debate.
BT suggests each session should last about an hour, but having tried
the game with academic colleagues and non-academic friends, I suspect
more time will often be needed.
Overall this is a worthwhile way of engaging newcomers to CSR, but it’s
not watertight in all areas. Each dilemma, for instance, has only three
possible outcomes, and while there is an obvious need to structure the
discussion to make it manageable, one of the points about CSR is that
there are multiple courses of action, each with its own merits and
problems. The game is also essentially set up as ‘business versus its
stakeholders’ even though CSR is about how a business can work with its
stakeholders. This presents a skewed perspective, although given the
nature of the game, this itself can become a talking point.
No one I played the game with was particularly impressed, and some
thought it rather simplistic. I think they were being too harsh, but
much does rest on getting the right facilitator.
David Crowther, professor of CSR, De Montfort University, UK
