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Methodologies Proprietary Methodology

Floor Simulations

In-person, board-and-floor experiential labs designed to surface leadership decision patterns, influence dynamics, and behavioural defaults under constructed business pressure. Real pressure. Real choices. No safety net.

Physical Simulation In-person Only Full Day

Floor Simulations are ProventusHR's in-person experiential labs designed to surface leadership decision patterns, influence dynamics and behavioural defaults under constructed pressure. Participants operate with incomplete information, competing priorities and real-time stakes. Deployed within LEAP journeys, SLT offsites, high-potential programmes and as standalone diagnostic labs.

The Day in Practice

What Happens in the Room

01

30 minutes

The Brief

Teams receive their mandate. No team holds the complete picture. Goals, constraints, and time limits are established. The scenario is operational from the first decision.

02

3 to 4 hours

The Simulation

The scenario runs. Facilitators observe without intervening. Decisions are made, alliances form, and information flows or does not. The environment is constructed. The behaviour is real.

03

15 minutes

The Pause

The simulation stops. Participants sit with their decisions before the debrief begins. Facilitators consolidate observation notes. This silence is part of the design.

04

2 to 3 hours

The Debrief

The most consequential part of the day. Facilitators work from what was observed, not what was reported. The gap between intended and actual leadership is surfaced, named, and owned.

The learning does not happen during the simulation. It happens in the debrief, when a leader encounters the record of their own decisions.

The Design Principle

Pressure Without Consequence. Consequence Without Safety.

The paradox at the centre of Floor Simulations is deliberate. The environment is constructed , a business scenario with invented names, fictional stakes, and artificial constraints. But the behaviour it produces is entirely real. When a participant chooses to withhold information from a competitor team, overrides a colleague in a decision moment, or freezes under time pressure, they are not performing. They are leading.

This is what makes the debrief so productive. The facilitator is not working from a case study or a self-report. They are working from observed behaviour. The gap between how a leader believes they lead and how they actually lead in a high-pressure moment is frequently significant. Floor Simulations make that gap visible in real time, to the participant and their peers.

The learning does not happen during the simulation. It happens in the debrief, when the participant encounters the record of their own decisions and is guided to name the pattern they did not know they had.

Incomplete Information

No participant has the full picture. Decisions must be made on partial data , exactly as in real leadership.

Competing Priorities

Team objectives conflict with organisational objectives. Individual interest conflicts with collective interest.

Real-time Pressure

Time is constrained. Decisions cannot be deferred. The simulation does not wait.

Observed Behaviour

Facilitators observe and note throughout. The debrief works from what was seen, not what was reported.

When to Deploy

Three Contexts for Floor Simulations

01

Within LEAP Journeys

Surface the dynamics the cohort does not yet see in itself.

Floor Simulations are a core element of the LEAP Cohesion and Emergence ARChitectures, surfacing influence dynamics and complex decision patterns within the developing cohort.

02

Senior Leadership Offsites

A diagnostic tool for SLTs navigating complex terrain.

For senior leadership teams navigating strategic transitions, post-merger integration, or sustained performance pressure where an external lens on team dynamics is needed.

03

Standalone Diagnostic Lab

One day. Observable data. A design brief for what comes next.

A one-day diagnostic producing observable behavioural data that informs the design of a subsequent development intervention. Replaces assumption with evidence.

Observable Patterns

What Floor Simulations Reliably Surface

Influence Dynamics

Who actually leads the team, regardless of title or seniority. The informal hierarchy that operates beneath the org chart becomes visible within the first hour.

Information Hoarding

When and why participants withhold what others need. Information hoarding is almost never a conscious strategy. The simulation surfaces the trigger conditions under which it happens.

Decision Quality Under Pressure

How quickly good decision-making degrades when time is short and information is incomplete. The simulation creates the conditions. The debrief names the pattern.

Role Clarity Breakdown

The moment when accountability becomes ambiguous and parallel decisions collide. Role clarity breakdown is the most common source of execution failure in senior teams, and one of the most difficult to observe in normal operations.

Cross-team Collaboration Failure

Where organisational silos reproduce themselves in miniature. The simulation puts participants from different functions into shared pressure and surfaces the precise breakdown point between cooperation and competition.

Escalation Behaviour

Who escalates, who absorbs, and who freezes. Escalation defaults are rarely visible in day-to-day operations but become highly predictable under the pressure conditions a Floor Simulation creates.

Simulation Designs

Three Signature Simulation Architectures

Each simulation is bespoke in its final design. These three architectures are the structural frames most frequently deployed, adapted to the client context.

Architecture 01

The Summit

Strategic alignment under competitive pressure

Three leadership teams operate against each other for a shared resource pool with conflicting mandates. Each team has a legitimate case. The resource cannot satisfy all three. What surfaces is how leaders negotiate, concede, and protect under genuine organisational pressure.

Primary patterns surfaced

Strategic thinking, cross-functional trust, prioritisation under ambiguity, positional vs. principled negotiation

Architecture 02

The Merger

Two cultures, one integration deadline

Participants are divided into two organisations with distinct operating rhythms and cultural norms, now reporting into a single leadership structure. The simulation compresses six months of post-merger friction into a single day, surfacing the points at which integration fails and the conditions under which it succeeds.

Primary patterns surfaced

Cultural negotiation, information hoarding, authority transition, psychological safety across unfamiliar teams

Architecture 03

The Handover

Leadership succession under operational pressure

An outgoing leadership cohort must transfer institutional knowledge to an incoming team while maintaining live operations. Time pressure is real. Institutional knowledge is unevenly distributed. The simulation surfaces the dynamics of ego, knowledge as power, and the tension between continuity and necessary change.

Primary patterns surfaced

Knowledge hoarding, succession anxiety, role identity, enabling vs. dependency in leadership transition

Frequently Asked Questions

What Clients Ask About Floor Simulations

A Floor Simulation runs a full day including the debrief. The simulation itself may occupy three to four hours. The debrief is never compressed, it is where the learning is produced, and cannot be timed in advance with full precision.
Floor Simulations work best with cohorts of 12 to 30 participants. Below 12, the competitive and collaborative dynamics the simulation is designed to surface are less pronounced. Above 30, the debrief becomes difficult to manage without splitting the cohort, which reduces the shared reference point that makes the learning collective.
No. Floor Simulations are in-person only. The physical dimension, the space, the movement, the real-time non-verbal signals, is not replicable in a virtual setting. For distributed cohorts requiring a similar kind of experiential pressure, Computer Simulations are the appropriate methodology.
A Floor Simulation typically requires two facilitators: one managing the simulation mechanics and one observing team dynamics and preparing the debrief. For cohorts above 20 participants, a third observer adds significant debrief depth. The observation notes are the raw material the debrief is built from.
Floor Simulations are physical, in-person, and surface the embodied dimensions of leadership: how leaders move, speak, delegate, and react under pressure in a shared physical space. Computer Simulations are screen-based and surface decision-making patterns under business pressure in a data-rich environment. Both are experiential but they access different leadership capacities.
Floor Simulations consistently surface six patterns: decision-making under incomplete information, delegation behaviour under pressure, dominance and silence dynamics in team settings, how leaders respond when their judgement is challenged, whether leaders optimise for team or individual outcomes, and how quickly leaders abandon their strategic position when tactics fail. These patterns are difficult to observe in a workshop and impossible to fake in a simulation.
A team-building activity is designed to create positive shared experience. A Floor Simulation is designed to surface patterns that would otherwise remain invisible. The debrief is not a celebration of what the team did well. It is a structured examination of why the team made the decisions it made, and what that reveals about how they lead. The goal is insight, not cohesion.

Explore Floor Simulations for Your Organisation

A 45-minute discovery conversation to establish the leadership tension being addressed and the right simulation design.

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