HR DEVELOPMENT

Few people have never played the classic board game Monopoly, a fast dealing property trading game. Though just a game, Monopoly involves negotiation, resources management and strategy formation. More compelling is the game called Zodiak, which applies an even more sophisticated approach toward corporate training. It’s a fast, fun, and effective tool that combining � nance and strategy to help hone business acumen.

“Zodiak is about triggering a change in employees’ ways of thinking,” says Dr. Grant Donovan, the master facilitator of the Zodiak Workshop. He recently visited Hong Kong to provide a demonstration of the Game for a host of senior human resources and corporate training executives from different-sized corporations.

A doctoral graduate in performance psychology from the University of Western Australia, Dr. Donovan has worked extensively in Australia and East Asia as a corporate performance coach. He has been a Zodiak programme facilitator more than 300 times since 1996 for Qantas, Kimberley Clarke, Colgate-Palmolive, World Vision, Coca Cola and many other major � rms.

Aligning employee performance with company’s objectives

“Many employees work hard to get the job done,” says Dr. Donovan. “But whether or not the tasks they perform actually help businesses make money, doesn’t really matter that much to them.”

He adds: “Assuming that there are 5,000 people working for you, if each employee wastes one dollar per day, in the span of 300 working days a year your company will waste a total of $1.5 million just because your employees don’t understand how wasting that one dollar each day impacts the bottom line of the company.” This illustrates the critical impact of people’s collective actions.

“That’s why top performing companies ensure that not only senior management but also rank and � le employees become financially literate,” he says. “Only when they understand how companies make money will they likely make good decisions at their levels.”

In today’s complex, competitive and fast-paced business environment it’s important that your managers, frontline employees and sales professionals understand what drives profitability, how assets are used, how cash is generated, how new strategies and initiatives impact � nancial success and where they themselves ‘fit’ into the achievement of company goals. With this kind of understanding their day-to-day decisions and actions will drive right results.

Zodiak: The game of

business � nancebusiness � nance

Not just a board game…

and strategy

Talent Management Summer 201336

Learning through discoveryDeveloped in 1990s by a finance expert, a marketing

practitioner and a kindergarten teacher in Australia, Zodiak is a game through which more than one million people across 400 organisations worldwide have learned the fundamentals of � nancial literacy and business acumen.

Today this board game is one of many different training methods that comprise the discovery learning approach initiated by Paradigm Learning, a non-traditional training company which, since 1994, has been committed to providing creative classroom games and simulations that are fun, fast, cost-effective and easily customerisable to different business strategies. Currently their corporate training programmes have been delivered to more than half of the Fortune 500 companies, including Bank of America, Southwest Airline, Johnson & Johnson, and many others.

Research has demonstrated that people learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process. Over the years, “discovery learning” has been proven to appeal to all types of learners because it accelerates knowledge and skills acquisition while also ensuring long-term retention.

“Zodiak learners hear, think, and move things around during the game,” says Dr. Donovan. “This enables a faster learning process rather than just simply sitting and listening.”

“By hearing and seeing things, you only learn 5% and 10% respectively,” he adds. “By doing something during the learning process, you can acquire 75 to 90% of the knowledge and skills.”

Begin with a business simulation Zodiak is a one-day classroom experience that begins

with an exciting half-day business simulation. Learners receive all the instructions from a learning guide. The board game is set up with four learners serving as partners in a business venture. During the game they take up and change different roles across � nance, production as well as sales and marketing, comprising a cross-section of the management team.

As new owners of a struggling Zodiak company, learners sign for a bank loan, attract investors, purchase equipment and materials, and deliver products and services just like normal businesses do. They are also required to fill out � nancial statements from quarter to quarter. Along the way, terms like cash � ow, return on equity, working capital, cost of goods sold and assets come into stark reality.

Indeed, these sophisticated business simulations are designed around the types of managerial challenges most frequently encountered by Fortune 1,000 companies.

While playing in a game environment, learners engage quickly when they can run the business and take ownership of the company. The conversation among partners stimulates and add to each other’s thinking, eventually taking the learning to next level.

“Traditional corporate training tends to emphasise staff members’ personal development, which brings only insignificant returns on corporate investment,” says Dr. Donovan. “The Zodiak workshop engages learners who then go back to their respective companies to make an impact on cost savings, efficiency enhancement and eventually affect improvements on the overall financial performance of the business.”

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HR DEVELOPMENT

Ms. Chu works in learning and development at the Asia-Pacific corporate office of a multi-national technological engineering corporation with a regional workforce of about 40,000 to 50,000 employees. She attended the half-day workshop demonstration hosted by Dr. Donovan in Hong Kong. It was her first time to play Zodiak and she noted how impressed she was by the lively and engaging learning environment.

She said - “The whole process was interesting and highly interactive, which allowed for a better understanding and retention of what we learned. Financial concepts and strategic development were simplified and made easier to understand for different levels of learners.”

She thinks that the workshop would be beneficial for managers, engineers, and sales personnel all the way down to entry-level junior staff at her company. A

Sharing his experience as a facilitator, Dr. Donovan says - “95% of learners, even without any prior knowledge of � nance, end up understanding how income statements and balance sheets work after the Zodiak training,”.

Learners have to participate in shareholder meetings where varying strategies on improving ef� ciency, marketing products and saving operation costs, etc., are discussed and evaluated. Decisions have to be made and learners see the consequences of their decisions and actions on financial success.

Connecting to real businessesWhat follows the business stimulation is a two- to

three-hour session known as “Connections” which makes the learning come to life. Players use knowledge and insights they gained from the stimulation to look at their own company. They also connect to their own behaviours as well as to the day-to-day decisions and actions that impact the bottom line.

Under the guidance of facilitators, learners apply what they’ve learned to real job situations. Individual evaluations are then carried out in the last hour of the workshop to internalise the learning.

Dr. Donovan emphasises that the central core of Zodiak is not only about training on how to read income statements and balance sheets, but understanding how the decisions they made as an individual of a team impacted the overall performance of the entire company.

This board game establishes a link with the learners’ own businesses. They have various concepts in mind about how to make their operations more profitable and more secure while going forward.

“It is an extremely powerful programme,” remarks Dr. Donovan. “We have never seen people walk out at the end of the day saying that they hadn’t learned anything.”

“Highly engaging and fun!”

Talent Management Summer 201338