Scenario one · The Challenge
The Calderbrook Group
Eighteen months as Chief Executive. Five disciplines. One strategy that only holds if you do.
The Calderbrook Group makes control systems and industrial services. Four thousand two hundred people, a hundred and forty years of history, and a balance sheet that has started to tell the truth about both.
The board approved the Northgate Plan eight months ago: exit the two legacy divisions, build the services arm, rebuild the margins. They approved it in calm conditions, over good coffee, with everyone nodding. Then they hired you to carry it, and calm conditions ended the week you arrived.
What comes next arrives the way trouble actually arrives, one thing at a time and never at a convenient one: a quarter that lands short, a star performer who turns out to be a bully, an activist with eight per cent of the register and a fondness for open letters, then a fire, a leak, and a survey you wish you had not commissioned.
What is at stake
Every choice tests one of the five RESOLVE disciplines, and every discipline you let slip makes the next month harder. The forecast you smooth, the inspection you defer, the problem you tolerate: all of it comes back, and it comes back more expensive. Reach month eighteen with the disciplines intact and you will have proved something worth proving. Get there having quietly traded them away, and the score will tell you what it cost.
Calderbrook leans hardest on Relentless Honesty and Behavioural Integrity, the disciplines that fail first and drag the rest down with them.
You will pick a difficulty and, if you want, challenge a colleague to the identical run before you start. It plays in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.