Product Review: Zodiak® - The Game of Finance and Strategy

Zodiak®, The Game of Finance and Strategy is a worthy addition to the toolkit of Change Agents, Training Managers and Leaders who are looking to fast track your organisation’s business acumen for all levels of staff.

I came to this conclusion several weeks ago, after participating in a demonstration game at the invitation of my colleague, Dr Grant Donovan of Perception Mapping. Perception Mapping holds the license to supply the game in Australia.

What is Zodiak®?

Zodiak is a board game. Like a typical board game, you learn the rules, apply them as you go, and play to win. Picture a game of Monopoly with a board, chance cards, and various playing pieces and several players and you’ve got a similar scene to a Zodiak game. The context of success and failure is somewhat different, though. In a game like Monopoly, players are compelled to an inevitable conclusion in that the player who accumulates the most property must be the winner, and, by deduction, the remaining players are the losers. In Zodiak, however, the players of any one game are all investors in a single business and must therefore collaborate in their investment decisions over several quarters to experience a collective win and produce profits for the business.

While the purpose of Monopoly is for one player to accumulate the most property, the objective of Zodiak is to experience, understand and apply the rules of business acumen. In other words, learn how a business makes its money.

Zodiak levels the playing field

A key differentiator of the Zodiak game is its capacity to level the playing field when it comes to learning about business acumen. Understanding of finance and strategy is typically quite divisive in business, generally the preserve of certain professions, leadership roles or a particular intellectual capacity in the traditional academic sense. Zodiak breaks through these typical barriers. Anyone can play from the shop floor to the senior executive team – and they can play the game together. This is due to what the designers of the game refer to as “discovery learning”. It’s basically learning as you play the game, instead of through lectures, seminars or academic texts.

The discovery learning technique means that it doesn’t matter about your level of business acumen before the game. By the end of the experience, everyone is speaking a common language. This common language opens the door to meaningful conversations across all levels of staff about how the learnings of the game can be applied in your own business.

How long does it take to play?

The demonstration game that Grant facilitated was around 3 hours. We ran four games simultaneously, each with 4 players. I understand that to play the full game, which extends to a conversation about your own business, would be played over the course of a day. I found the time passed very quickly because I was an active player in the game and totally immersed in the experience. Not a lecturer in sight. At the end of the 3 hours, I was keen to continue to the end of the game and to apply it to my own business.

I confess I learned a lot in the 3 hours of interactive game-playing. A worthwhile addition to the six or seven accounting and financial courses I have completed over the years at University and other educational institutions. CEO of the game’s manufacturer, Raymond Green puts it succinctly when he says:

“Training your employees and managers on the concept of business acumen… (goes) beyond financial literacy to a true understanding of what it takes for a business to make money, is the key to producing real results for an organisation.”

Benefits for Business

For me, the core benefit of the Zodiak discovery learning experience is in its capacity to quickly facilitate meaningful discussion about business finance and strategy across all levels of staff. By management and staff becoming more aware of business acumen, they develop a greater capacity to align their decisions and actions to the bottom line of the business.

For leaders, the game offers an avenue to improve your personal business acumen, and bring staff up to speed with corporate decisions around finance and strategy, especially during difficult economic times.

For employees, the game offers a vehicle for participating in strategy conversations and understanding fundamentally how their job fits into the overall strategy and what they can do to improve their contribution to the bottom line. Understanding strategy also reduces employee suspicion of management’s motives during times of change.

For Learning and Development Managers, the game offers a good ROI for your training dollar with a fast track process to business acumen across all levels of staff. The game has the potential to quickly impact the bottom line during business as usual; as well as advance the level of knowledge, participation and understanding that people so desperately crave during periods of change.

Zodiak® helps your business community address key questions like:

• Is cost cutting the only option to business improvement?
• How the current economic climate impacts your business
• Why budget cuts and pay freezes may be necessary even if you have done well in your job
• Why pay rises or capital investments aren’t always possible if a business makes a profit
• How a decision made by you in your job or business unit affects other business units

The Business Case for Managers Considering Zodiak®

Grant closed the session with a challenge for managers who doubt the process of educating staff about business acumen. He outlined the consequences of several typical business issues on the shop floor that a basic understanding of business acumen could have addressed:

• How the loss of one customer in a grocery store through a checkout operator’s poor attitude is not just equivalent to the lost sale of a bottle of milk. The loss could be worth 10s of $1000s in the potential lifetime value of that customer to that store; and
• How the salesperson that has a habit of heavily discounting in order to win business erodes profit margins to the extent that he will need to work even hard to win over more customers to make up the difference.

If you would like to explore Zodiak® further, contact the Australian distributor, Dr Grant Donovan of Perception Mapping on 1300 855 592 or www.perceptionmapping.com .

For a White Paper on Zodiak®, click this link.