Bissim
A business simulation designed to feel like business
Bissim is our flagship business simulation. First developed in 1975 and continuously evolved since, it has always had a simple ambition: to make a simulated business feel as real as possible to the people running it.
That takes more than a sophisticated computer model. It comes from the depth of the commercial world, the ambiguity participants encounter, the freedom they're given and, above all, what happens around the table.
Participants work together to understand their market, decide what they're trying to achieve and make the strategic, financial, operational and people decisions needed to run their business. There is imperfect information, competing priorities, the wrong amount of time and no single right answer.
But as the simulation runs, the dynamic changes. Participants slowly stop trying to work out how to play a game and start thinking about how to make their business successful. That's when Bissim really starts to come alive.
How do you win Bissim?
It's a question participants often ask at the beginning. And the answer: “Treat your business as though it were real” initially frustrates.
There’s no hidden formula, or winning sequence of decisions to discover. Teams need to understand their market, develop a strategy, manage competing priorities, work with customers and suppliers, respond to competitors and decide where to spend their time.
And then, once the team has let go of the desire to 'win Bissim' the answer starts to make sense.
Different ways to create advantage
One of the things we've seen from running Bissim over many years is that the most successful teams don't all behave in the same way. Some are very clear about what they're trying to achieve. They execute aggressively and are able to shape the market to their advantage. Others are exceptional at relationships, collaboration and deal-making. They understand what their customers, suppliers and people need, build trust and create opportunities that aren't visible to their competitors (the other teams).
Bissim allows either approach to matter and more besides. The simulation doesn't prescribe where competitive advantage should come from. Teams have to find it.
If you could do it in a real business...
While Bissim has a range of defined decisions it avoids giving participants boundaries. A team might want to collaborate with a competitor on R&D, propose joint marketing with a retailer, renegotiate an arrangement with a supplier or report a competitor’s regulatory non-compliance to the authorities.
If you could do it in the real world, you probably can in Bissim too.
We don't have to break the experience by saying: “No, you can't do that. It's only a game.”
That freedom is an important part of the immersion. Participants can explore possibilities rather than search for the boundaries of the simulation.
Bissim lets people waste their time
Real businesses don't protect people from misplaced priorities.
Neither does Bissim.
A team might spend ten minutes of a 90-minute decision round negotiating with their market research agent to save W$10,000. They negotiate hard. They get the discount. They're really pleased with themselves… And they've just spent more than 10% of their available management time saving what is little more than a rounding error.
The important conversation comes in the review afterwards: how else could they have used those ten minutes? Time and attention are resources too. Allowing participants to make decisions like this - and then experience and reflect on their consequences - creates learning that would be difficult to produce by simply telling them about opportunity cost.
The conversations are the simulation
Bissim isn't computer-based for participants. Teams typically work around a table with detailed information on their business. They discuss what's happening, challenge assumptions, disagree about priorities, negotiate with stakeholders and eventually decide what they're going to do.
How they reach those decisions matters.
Because the work takes place in the room rather than between individuals and a computer, Bissim makes the team's decision-making process visible. Who sifts through the data? What gets attention and what gets overlooked? Is time spent on immediate problems or longer-term issues? Are assumptions challenged? Does everyone contribute? How does the team deal with disagreement?
This creates a rich source of material for review. A facilitator might explore a task that’s relevant to the client’s objectives. They might review the group's processes, or facilitate peer feedback sessions. And where useful, observed behaviour can also be related to frameworks such as DISC or MBTI.
Bissim can therefore provide two different perspectives on performance: the commercial consequences of the decisions a team makes, and the processes and behaviours through which those decisions were reached.
Built around your commercial world
Bissim can be tailored to reflect the commercial world of a client and the particular issues participants need to explore. The aim isn't to reproduce a client's business exactly. It's to create enough familiarity for participants to make meaningful connections, while retaining enough difference to give them freedom to experiment.
Responsive to the people in the room
Bissim is facilitator-led, allowing the experience to respond in the moment to the needs, ideas and direction of the group. This gives participants freedom. If they want to pursue an idea outside the standard decisions, the facilitator can adapt the simulation to accommodate it rather than forcing them back onto a predetermined path.
And this same flexibility also helps make the experience relevant. A facilitator can recognise what is interesting or important to a particular group, creating another layer of tailoring. The underlying simulation can be designed to reflect the client's commercial world, while the experience itself develops around the people taking part and what emerges in the room.
There is significant structure around Bissim, but the experience isn't scripted. No two groups experience quite the same simulation.
When people start to care
For Bissim to work, participants need to stop seeing it simply as a game. The commercial world needs to feel believable, their decisions need to feel like their decisions and the consequences need to make sense. As that happens, people start to care about what happens next.
Teams become attached to the businesses. It's theirs and (for better or worse) they've made it what it is. They become proud of their team, embarrassed by the oversight that bit them, worried they may run out of cash, determined to beat their competitors, relieved the market responded so well to their innovation, or joyful that they achieved the success they'd hoped for.
None of it is real. But the emotions are.
And those emotions really matter. The consequence of a decision is no longer just a number on a screen. It becomes the expression of a shared success, disappointment or surprise. The team remember their thinking and conversations. They remember everything they've put into getting to that point.
The review can then explore why they made the decision, how they reached it, whether the outcome was what they expected and what they might do differently next time. Because the experience meant something to them, the reflection means more too and is more likely to stay with them long after the programme ends.
50 years of evolution
The first version of Bissim was developed in 1975. Since then, the technology has changed enormously, as has the business world it represents. Bissim has evolved continuously through different generations of software, different commercial environments and many thousands of participant decisions.
That history matters not because Bissim has remained the same for 50 years, but because it hasn't. The simulation has been continually adapted as we've learnt more about how people make decisions, what makes a simulated business feel credible and how the experience can create useful learning.
What could Bissim look like for you?
Bissim has been adapted to very different commercial worlds, participants and objectives. You can explore some of the ways it has been used, or talk to us about what it might look like in your organisation.