SimSoc

In the continuing saga of convincing my bosses to send me to classes outside the normal BSA professional curricula and getting others to pay for it, I spent today in the first official session of the Sheboygan County Leadership Institute hosted by the Chamber of Commerce. I am the only participant who works in a non-profit, but am suprisingly not the youngest person there. This was an all day session held at one of the local resorts (the Osthoff) and was a unique experience.

The program was called SimSoc for simulated society hosted by Dr. Peppers (no joke) from Clemson University. There were 30 or so pages of instructions explaining the game so I will really summarize. In essence you have four groups of people in seperate regions with a limited ability to communicate between them. As it turns out there is a limited number of resources (jobs, subsistence vouchers--required to survive, travel permits) that are available for the groups to use to support the society. For those societal forces that are not represented in the groups there is a set of "natural laws" that define what is allowed. At the end of each turn the overall society has a set of indicators that are measured based on actions of the groups. If you are confused, good, we all were when we started.

What we did not initially realize was that the groups started out with a disproportionate share of resources. One group had nothing to the point of no chairs or table in their room to my group which had more than ample income and resources to support our membership--assuming cooperation. Given this, our group ended up with a very "American" viewpoint quite unintentionally and ended up with a reputation similar to our nations minus the propensity to drop bombs on those we don't like. We were first concerned with taking care of our own, then with being as productive as possible so that we had spare resources to share with others which we did in a thrifty/efficient fashion. The unique part of this for me was to sit on the corporate side of the table and get many requests for assistance but knowing that my liquid resources are minimal as the rest are tied up in business and manufacturing without readily transferrable value yet with a necessary impact on society.

The most entertaining twist of the day was lunch. Our group had a table fully set with formal settings and individual plated meals with salad, soup and dessert. We automatically assumed that everyone had the same. Not so. The poor group was literally given bread, water, and soup with no spoons, knives or even napkins so they went to the other regions begging. My team initially thought that they were joking, but did give up a lot of food to that group. The other two groups got sandwiches and hot dogs respectively. Apparently the lunch is served based on how the individual groups are doing for themselves. We Americans were the best off in all catergories and made a very American assumption that everyone else was as well.

Without boring you with a lot of details that won't make sense without playing the game, I will say that it was a lot of fun. My group was great to work with. Ironically, it was the two youngest guys (myself and another guy) who caught on the quickest and ended up running our region--effectively I might add. It got heated at the end as the society as a whole started to crumble (our region was fine...). The biggest fault our class had was in not working as a team across regions. By the time we started to it was all but too late to arrest the societal decline.

The whole process was enlightening since it did a very good job of modeling societal pressures and challenges in a hands-on way that actually had an effect (minimal, yes) on you personally. It would be a great project for secondary school students to help them understand how a society functions. Shoot, our government should play and get a different perspective on things. I may try to add it to the next Venturing leadership course I have the chance to teach as a great learning tool that is fun.

Next month the class is doing a day of team-building which should be interesting. One side note, we played the name game (circle with each person repeating the names of the people who spoke before them) with 25 people and I ended up as the 25th person who had to say everyone's names--I managed to remember all but the last guy (next to me). My moniker: Jaberwocky Jake.

Back soon.