First Responder

90min - 3hrs

Game

Simple to play, yet hard to master, First Responder pits your team against a volatile viral challenge. Your people will get first hand experience of how the unexpected can mess with even the best laid plans. But they still must plan and execute to be successful. Your teams will need to balance the urgent and immediate against the important but longer term: neglect the urgent and you might end in quarantine, fail to master the important and the viruses will win!

Our planet is once again being overrun by viruses, different diseases attacking different parts of our world, requiring us to work as one. We have to treat those who have been infected, and we have to find and distribute a cure. We are short on time and our team is stretched. And it won’t be enough to combat the disease in our own locality if our neighbours around the world are not similarly successful.

Simple play

Challenging

Collective experience

Overview

Hard on the heels of our collective experience of the real covid-19 global pandemic comes a new Pod&Hive experience. But this time you get to beat the pandemic yourselves!

This simulation will test a team’s ability to manage a response to a complex and evolving problem. The problem landscape is uneven – it will affect some teams more than others – and the challenge is volatile and in constant flux. Teams will need to balance short term crisis management with longer term goals, and adapt their strategies and tactics and coordinate their resources across multiple teams to have any chance of beating the viruses.

Participants are placed in small teams, each in charge of a city in a region afflicted by its own disease. Each round the teams make decisions about how to allocate their scarce expert resources: do they fight to keep the disease at bay locally, or do the work to come up with a cure? And what if another region needs their help? Over all these decisions looms the volatility of the disease itself, and the ever-present threat of Quarantine.

Outcomes

First Responder has a flexible debrief that can be customised to meet your learning needs or conference themes. The simulation lends itself to discussions around:

Experiencing the tension between focusing on the Urgent and making progress on the Important;
Managing my own resources to my local needs while dealing with demands and requests from neighbouring teams;
Dealing with and responding to random disruption of my planning;
Learning how to respond and adapt to a volatile challenge in real time;
Influencing across multiple teams to plan and execute resource allocation.