To challenge and enhance the learning of participants by taking them out of their comfort zones and placing them in the unfamiliar world of planning a “start-up restaurant” from scratch.
The Restaurant Manager scenario is an ‘adventure experience’ where teams of participants are tasked with putting together an executable plan to set up a restaurant, market it and make it ready for one full evening of service. Within the story of the experience, this one evening is the grand opening and the restaurant must be fully organised, at least on paper, to include a full dinner menu with multiple courses and be fully stocked to be able to deliver everything that prospective customers expect from a restaurant.
The participants will need to research, develop strategic plans, create visual collages and mood boards to present their finalised project ideas to their peers and facilitators at the end of the experience.
Business Schools and companies looking to improve their employee’s soft skills and team skills.
This experience is primarily aimed at individuals and teams in managerial positions or levels. It can also be used for team development and group learning exercises outside of managerial positions.
Academic institutions and corporate entities are therefore similarly well suited for this experience.
To experiment, apply, fail, learn and be successful in using the knowledge, tools and interpersonal techniques that they will gain from the experience’s specified outcome.
Improving participants current soft skills, as well as specific cooperation and communication skills, to be more effective in their roles and with each other.
The goal of the Restaurant Manager scenario is to promote and improve teamwork, the ability to work under pressure and data gathering and analysis skills for your participants.
Whether as a standalone or part of a larger programme, the experience should be a complete surprise for the participants. The addition of curiosity and surprise surrounding the scenario will allow them to become more engaged with it when revealed.
As such your participants will only really discover what the scenario is about when they enter the opening briefing of the experience.
During this ‘player discovery phase,’ the participants will be briefed on what the purpose of the experience is and the desired outcome. Within the briefing, the participants will also be taken through what the overall learning objectives are and what the collective learning objectives are for them as a group, as well as determine what they want to gain from this collaborative challenge for their learning objectives.
All of these objectives will be revisited at the end of the experience in a group and peer-to-peer feedback session, designed to allow for reflection and embedding of learning.
All of our scenarios and experiences are flexible and can be fully customised to your needs and your participants learning needs.
Our customization process begins with a company exploration session with you. This includes a series of discussions and interviews with key users and stakeholders. The purpose of these is to determine the answers to the questions around company business objectives, learning objectives for the participants, resource availability and branding.
From there we use the information gathered to further define and refine the goals of the experience for you. Prioritizing what is truly essential for your participants and connecting the experience to their goals.
Having established these parameters we can work more effectively with you to tailor the scenario to your needs.
The scenario can be delivered with a minimum of a month’s preparation.
This minimum period is required to sufficiently prepare the scenario for any customisations or any specific prerequisites or additions you may have, as well as organising any logistics for delivering the scenario.
As stated, the scenario can be delivered as a standalone experience or it can be integrated into and modified for an already existing workshop or programme. The month prior will allow for a minimum alignment between the scenario’s inherent learning objectives and any additional learning objectives required by the workshop or programme that the experience is combining with.
An example of such a learning objective alignment is if you’re currently running a long-term programme that utilises psychometric questionnaires for participants. The results of these can be incorporated to alter for example the augmentations of the narrative difficulty and tailor them more towards challenging your participants in specific ways.
The branding aspects of the scenario can be related to your own company or the company branding strategies of your participants. This customisation can be invaluable if you wish your participants to think about their brands and how the knowledge and skills they gain from the experience can be used beyond what their daily roles require.
The overall theme of the experience is that of participants being restaurant managers, however, if you wish to use a different theme that better suits your L&D purposes then we can explore these possibilities together.
The scenario has several learning objectives hard-baked into its design. Nevertheless, it is flexible and versatile enough to have any removed or added to it to allow for a better fit with what your participants may require in their L&D journey.
During the ‘player onboarding phase’, your participants will be presented with the various tasks and objectives that are inherent to becoming successful restaurateur entrepreneurs within the food industry. Here they will be able to explore all the facets that they must consider and are required to set up and run a restaurant for one full evening of service.
Your participants will have the relative freedom to pursue the main objective as they see fit, within the inherent limitations that the scenario presents them. Visual aids, tutorials and signposting will initially support them, upon which they must fend for themselves.
Some of the freedom of choice they have is to name and brand their restaurants as they wish, as well as make choices around cuisine and floor layout for example.
Participants are made aware that at the end of the experience, all of them will need to present their plans, as a group, to their peers and the facilitator. The win-state is having worked together to organize a successful strategy for their restaurant. The fail-state is not achieving this, or not achieving it within the allotted time, which for the base experience is around four hours.
The aim of the gameplay, game mechanics and game elements within the experience is to create a situational framework in which your participants will organically start to work together and improve on skill sets that the experience is designed to develop.
Your participants must, therefore, be creative in their approach and show this in the challenges presented to them, through this they will be forced to work on their communication and collaboration skills.
And by the simple fact that they need to deliver within a strict time frame, this will give them the experience of working under pressure while making decisions with limited knowledge and resources.
The experience is designed to be flexible and allow for alterations and additions in its delivery.
When determining sizes for the experience, the optimum conditions for it are with at least three groups of around 5-7 people in each group. However, it is deliverable if you have only one group or if you have five or more groups. The main requirement is always that each group has around 5-7 people in it.
The experience will have several limitations and augmentations that can be added to it to adjust the level of difficulty of the challenges that the participants face. The groups can, therefore, collaborate or compete, this is down to their own choices and how they wish to accomplish the objectives of the experience and the learning objectives that you wish them to achieve.
The scenario is not location-sensitive, however, it is beneficial for the participants to have the ability to go out and question people for in-game research purposes that are not part of the overall group.
The reasoning behind the optimal number of three groups for the experience, with each group containing around 5-7 people, is so that the participants will benefit the most from the experience through the peer and guided feedback sessions at the end when they have finished presenting their concepts. However, the experience can still work to an extent if there is only one group or more than three.
A method to further tailor the experience to your participants learning goals can be done by stating the question of what two key learning’s they want to take away from the experience. Having these two points in the back of their minds can be especially useful as a starting point for the debriefing and feedback session at the end.
In its base form, the Restaurant Manager scenario is fairly low-tech. To be able to deliver it anywhere, you simply need the scenario outline and the delivery documentation.
To increase the engagement and immersion, the ability to play video is important and accessibility to computers, the internet and possibly printers would be beneficial as well.
If the participants are to physically create aesthetical representations of their restaurants then being able to print images on paper is useful, as well as having flipcharts, pinboards, pens, glue and scissors can make it a more involved and tactile experience.
When the participants do their market research with individuals in a town or city, you can either have them record answers on a pen and paper or have them use their phones as audio recorders. If you wish to add a layer, you can provide handheld camera’s with microphones if you wish them to film the answers from their market research.
Beyond these few aspects, there are no extreme technological needs to run this scenario effectively and successfully.
The Restaurant Manager scenario can be used as a straightforward, one-time use, teambuilding experience that focuses only on the base soft skills inherent to communication and collaboration. Or with a level of investment of time and partnering, it can be developed into a tailored experience for you and your participants that fully combines with your institutions L&D roadmap.
The development time will depend on your desired level of customization and augmentation, but the delivery of the experience will always take two-three full days. These include a set-up and preparation day, the delivery day and a post-experience follow-up.
The follow-up will consist of surveys around session feedback, to ascertain the participants mindsets, general feelings, as well as gain valuable feedback on ways to improve the experience for future groups.
Every experience that is delivered by æStranger has a metrics system and framework associated with it. Our favoured system for this experience is the HEART framework from Google labs. The framework is flexible and robust enough for us to determine the signals and measure the outcomes and success points of the goals that our scenario sets out. These goals are the engagement of the participants and how successfully their skill sets were improved upon.
We can use the information gathered through this framework to better shape post-experience follow-up feedback to help further deepen and embed the learning of the participants. As well as it aids us in improving and iterating the experience.
As a statement of guarantee, for each customised experience the creation of a specific HEART framework is always done in conjunction with you, the client, to ensure that all aspects of the scenario adhere to your wants and needs.
The layout of the experience is subject to your requirements but here are a couple of example packages that illustrate what can be expected in delivering the experience as detailed in this document:
This package incorporates Level 1 with the additions of:
Game-based learning experiences such as the Restaurant Manager scenario are more holistic collaborative learning experiences than the traditional basic team-building experiences. Due to its strong narrative basis and all-inclusive thematic activities, this experience more fully engages participants, giving them meaningful learning choices and leaving them with a valuable and long-term learning experience.
Simply consider the human-centred return on investment that a truly meaningful collaborative group environment will give your participants. They will have learned more about themselves and each other in an engaging activity, as well as improving essential skill sets to keep refining their abilities to communicate and collaborate effectively.
The benefits of using game-based learning experiences such as this scenario are to create a safe environment, with realistic challenges that engage participants to learn, practice and apply skills, as well as plan and execute strategies relevant to not only the narrative but also their daily work. And collaboratively doing all of this, allowing for inter-communication enabling a meaningful outcome and to embed learning across the entire team as a group experience.
To book this session for your company or institution, or to discuss a partnership to tailor the experience for you, please either use the form below or send an email to: albert@aestranger.com
About
æStranger officially started in 2018, but has been around in some form for a few years. It is a platform to promote a mission to engage people through adventure and storytelling, to better learn and understand from each other.
For more information please go to our About page.
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