The Art and Science of Business Simulations: A Catalyst for Effective Leadership
Business simulations are a powerful, yet often overlooked tool in the world of leadership development. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the framework behind business simulations and uncover their potential for shaping dynamic leaders.
Business simulations: Powering excellence through practice
Imagine a training method that combines the complexity of real-world business with the safety net of a virtual environment; such is the power of business simulations. Simulations provide an immersive experience, enabling leaders to experiment with potential strategies and decisions, gain insight through doing, and witness the ripple effect of their choices—all without the risk of consequence on the organization’s bottom line.
What is a Business Simulation?
Business simulations are complex algorithms applied to replicate real business scenarios for leaders and teams. They incorporate key factors such as market dynamics, consumer behavior, and operational intricacies to create the perfect environment for experimentation and innovation. These sophisticated models offer a sandbox where executives are able to test their mettle, apply theories in practical settings, and receive instant feedback on their performance.
How to build a successful simulation
Executing a business simulation that is both engaging and educational, means meticulously chart the course within the context of your business. This process begins with defining learning objectives and aligning the simulation’s outcomes with the company's strategic goals. Participants are chosen based on their roles and the appropriately related competencies the simulation is designed to develop. Finally, the learning environment must be supportive, ensuring that the experience is comfortable but challenging.
Leveraging Business Simulations for leadership development
Empirical evidence shows that business simulations are a powerful medium for not just learning, but also for unearthing leadership potential and transforming skills.
Key elements of effective Simulation
An effective business simulation encompasses these vital elements:
- Relevance: The simulation must mirror real business challenges, ensuring that lessons are transferable to the workplace.
- Engagement: It should captivate participants, fostering a collective desire to win and learn simultaneously and together.
- Feedback: Immediate and clear feedback throughout promotes a continuous learning cycle and encourages iterative improvement.
Impact on leadership skills enhancement
Business simulations have been particularly effective in honing:
- Critical Thinking: Participants are forced to analyze and extrapolate from complex data sets, and subsequently learn to make better informed decisions.
- Adaptability: The dynamic nature of business simulations prompts leaders to pivot and strategize in response to changing circumstances.
- Ethical Decision-Making: The safe space created by a simulation environment allows leaders to explore the ethical implications of their choices without the usual high stakes and or external consequences.
Successful implementation strategies
Successful business simulation experiences happen when organizations lay the groundwork and set the right expectations up front, fostering an environment of safety and trust for all participating. Providing follow-up coaching and mentoring post-simulation is also crucial, enabling leaders to integrate their newfound skills into their day-to-day practices.
Compelling reasons to integrate Business Simulations into executive training
Simulations are also a great tool to test and prepare high potential leaders and raise their game through practice.
Elevating strategic thinking
Simulations force participants to think strategically, looking beyond immediate tactics to long-term goals and vision. They offer a rarefied platform to dissect and understand the interconnectedness of business elements and how each part contributes to the whole.
Sharpening decision making
The high-fidelity environment of business simulations forces leaders to make strategic decisions under pressure. In this way, simulation scenarios mirror the urgency and complexity of real-life business, helping leaders mature their decision-making musculature in real time.
Nurturing team collaboration
Collaboration is the heartbeat of many corporate ventures, and simulations present a unique opportunity to foster this skill. By participating in a shared experience, teams develop synergies, learn to communicate effectively, and crystallize roles within the group.
Mastering risk management
Risk is ubiquitous in business. Simulations provide a structured approach to risk that equips leaders with the ability to assess, mitigate, and take calculated leaps—essential competencies for effective business management.
Increasing financial acumen
Business simulations are especially effective methods of deploying financial training. In this variety of simulation, leaders encounter and manage P&L statements, balance sheets, and cash flow. These encounters, contextualized in the reality of their own business, provide learning opportunities deepen participants understanding of organizational financial dynamics.
Fostering innovation and creativity
Simulations are a practice ground for innovation. Simulations spur creative thinking that is essential for staying ahead in a competitive marketplace, encouraging leaders to experiment with business models and various hypotheses.
Providing Real-World Experience
The most significant advantage of business simulations as a learning tool, is the real-world experience leaders develop in these risk controlled settings. An immersive learning experience, business simulations effectively bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and pragmatic application.Business simulations are more than just a training exercise; they are a philosophy that propagates experiential learning. By integrating simulations into executive training, organizations lay the foundation for robust leadership, strategic acumen, and overall business resilience. Simulations challenge participants to embrace the unknowns, traverse complexities, and emerge as sharp, decisive leaders.
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From top-down to judgment all around: The AI imperative for organizations
Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.
In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.
Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.
Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.
Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.
But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.
Why judgment matters more than ever
Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.
If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.
What organizations must do
To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:
- Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.
- Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.
- Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.
- Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.
What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.
BTS acquires Nexo to strengthen its position in Brazil and Latin America
P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.
Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.
Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.
BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.
“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”
“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.
Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.
The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.
BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.
For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com
Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19
High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.