The Gazogle case

Experiential games have long been used to break up the tedium and boredom present in courses that consist entirely of lectures and cases. Myers, Heinekeand & Meile and Wolfe & Luethge offer a discussion of the use of games in education. We use the hands-on game ‘Gazogle’ (available in the appendix) to bring relevance to the concepts of high performance, re-engineering, lean production, and total quality management. We feel that it is important that students actually experience some of the implementation issues relevant to these concepts rather than merely read or talk about them. We have used this game in both MBA and executive training programs for both the public and private sector throughout the world. It has been a successful experience for groups as diverse as manufacturing managers, bowling-center employees, government officials, and high-school students. The exercise can be used either as a capstone to summarize learnings to date or as a justification for principles to come. The exercise takes approximately 90 minutes to run, with an additional debriefing time of 60 to 90 minutes, often completed during the next class period.