Simmetrics is a fast-paced strategic thinking exercise that illustrates how quickly small errors become expensive! Working under a strict time frame, teams need to manage their time efficiently and work together to reduce errors by planning and strategising for the present, and uncertain future, tasks in order to improve their performance. he activity represents the situations in which a simple mistake, made early in a process, can become a very costly and wasteful problem if it is not picked up and dealt with at an early stage, and in its original form was developed to consider error reduction within a UK financial services customer contact centre. Since then the activity has been further developed to consider other process improvement areas including time management and sustainable business development. Throughout the exercise, decisions are being made under time pressure. It is not possible to evaluate every option, so a set of ‘working principles’ is of value.Can the team establish the operating guidelines so that they demonstrate improved performance at every stage in the exercise? Simmetrics asks teams to build a strategy which is flexible and responsive – they need to keep as many options open as possible, as the demands of each round are not wholly predictable. They also need to be sure that every individual understands the strategy so that personal decisions are well judged. Simmetrics demonstrates convincingly how thinking ahead and planning for a range of possible scenarios enables the participants to maintain control of a situation which could otherwise control them. RSVP Design: World leading Experiential learning tools
