XB: A Classroom-As-Organization that Engages Participants
with the Skills, Attitudes, and Knowledge of Management

A class that doesn't start with "Let's pretend that …" combines aspects of simulation, case, game, lecture, and encounter group, but it's not quite any of them. Call it XB: the eXperience Base.

Other ways of teaching Management and Organizational Behavior approaches have benefits and drawbacks. Lectures present theory to those who can stay awake. Games keep you awake but oversimplify reality. Cases present realistic dilemmas, but you imagine decisions that you couldn't really execute. Simulations draw you in, but you have to play a pretend role and then suspend the simulation for theoretical discussion. Folding paper airplanes proves easier than learning. Nor does emotional involvement in a simulation replicate real organizational experience. How do you feel about encounter groups? You learn a lot about yourself through deep emotional experience. Maybe too deep! Besides, the "unstructured" group environment won't teach you much about complex organizations.

XB skims the cream and dumps the whey of these approaches. The teacher – "Senior Manager" - creates an organization with a mission: for participants to teach each other, learn organizational behavior, and practice management. The XB Manual (each participant receives one) contains instructions for every task. These programmed tasks are divided, creating departments (and the opportunity to talk about departmentalization). The Senior Manager delegates responsibility for execution to the participants and then sits back to let the participants run the organization.

It Doesn't Work.

It doesn't work for the same reasons that real-world organizations don’t work. People don't do what other participants ask them to do; they don't read, for example. Participants experience a modicum of the chaotic reality whose chill presence disturbs the sleep of every entrepreneur. They feel the weight of their responsibility for leading other participants to achieve their assigned objectives, and they recognize a fear that has shaped organizations since the dawn of history but whose overhead cost organizations can no longer afford in the age of information, fear of peers. They appeal to the Senior Manager (The Leviathan!) to assume control. The Senior Manager steadfastly delegates. It doesn't work.

XB Works.

But when XB doesn't work, it does work. With learning as our mission, we observe whatever happens as a case from the literature and then do what management theory tells us to do. Learning from reading, coaching, and making mistakes, each department learns to run its own aspect of the organization and sees how its function ties in to the whole.

Participants learn how to observe with discipline, to think before acting, to take responsibility, and to use personal commitment to get others to accomplish objectives. XB becomes an organization of real people doing real work.