You Can't Learn Leadership from a Book, Movie, Inspirational Story, or Google

This site is for anyone who creates or manages content, from game designers to corporate, academic, and military educational designers, to publishers, researchers. analysts, and strategists.

The premise (and structure) is:

First, traditional Linear Content including books, movies, and lectures have failed in capturing and sharing the world. Linear media focus (or focuses, depending on your English teacher) on the passive content of "learning to know," rather than the active content of "learning to do" (see Learning to Be, Learning to Do, Learning to Know).

For example, linear content cannot develop in people Big Skills (a.k.a. "soft skills" and "thinking skills") such as leadership or stewardship, nor capture the intellectual property needed for dynamic planning and execution, nor create an accurate representation of time and place.

Second, the creation of any research-based intellectual property, be it academic or corporate, should focus on Simulation Elements, including Actions, System Content, and Desired Results, not just linear content.

Third, those simulation elements can further be processed for education and entertainment to make them "practiceable" (through Game Elements and Pedagogical Elements and being shaped into Tasks and Levels). Given that, just as books have styles such as paragraphs, appendixes, bullet points, and bold fonts, so to do sims have styles that are just as critical, defined, and meaningful, such as sandbox levels, bosses, and balanced scorecards.

Finally, to simplify the task, just as books come in Genres, such as dictionaries and mystery novels, so to do sims come in genres, such as first person shooters and branching stories, and matching up the right sim to the right task is just as important as the right book genre.

This site is broken up into topics (see the outline on the right). The topics have a heading that introduces the concepts and highlights some key terms (see Topic Headings for a complete list). The topic then contains a list of entries. Each entry is a definition, usually one or two paragraphs, and includes references to other entries or even complete topics.

Some people will rather start with Four Sweet Spots of Simulations.

A New Science

Seeing the world through the approximation of a simulation rather than a book ultimately will require new tools and even a new syntax and corresponding style guide, but will mint a new generation of scholars, and a new generation of leaders.