Teams take over an organization. Five years. Every decision counts.
The Management Challenge is a simulation in which participants run an organization in teams and keep it going for up to five simulated years. They pick a strategy, spend their budget and deal with crises. Every choice has consequences, sometimes right away and sometimes only a few quarters later. That is how they discover how an organization works as a whole. Not from a book, but by doing it themselves.
Teachers, trainers, and consultants run it with their groups. It has been going since 1997 and works for groups of 4 to 100+ participants.
See the game run live. No strings attached.
Where it comes from
In the 1990s, quality manager Willem Jan van der Veldt, a senior auditor for INK and EFQM, designed a simulation game inside his own organization. He wanted managers to truly understand how quality comes about, rather than being told. That game grew into The Management Challenge, which became a product in its own right in 1997.
Edwin de Vos got involved in 2005 and built the first online version. Until then, the game ran in a spreadsheet on Willem Jan’s laptop. In 2011, Willem Jan handed the game over to Edwin, Cees Hoogendijk and Remco Liefting, so it would carry on after his retirement. Edwin has been the sole owner since 2026.
The game kept evolving all those years, from spreadsheet to browser to today’s online platform. Its measures move with the times too, and AI strategy, sustainability and DEI now sit alongside the classics. What never changed is the core: the INK management model, and learning by doing it yourself.
How it works
Participants work in teams of four to seven. Each team is handed an organization with the task of taking it to a higher level and leaving it healthy for whoever comes next. As facilitator, you choose the starting point: you can have teams build from year one, or give them a running organization in year two or three, which takes less time and is no less instructive.
Each quarter, a team has ten energy points to spread across nearly a hundred measures in the online game environment. Invest in the people, or get the processes in order first? Push for growth now, or wait a while? Every choice costs energy and yields something, sometimes only a few quarters later. And every so often a crisis throws the plan into disarray, just like in real life.
After each quarter, the team gets a full report back on what went well, what stalled, and where the consequences of earlier choices are showing. As the organization matures, teams see more and more of what goes on under the hood.
Why teams remember it
Where a paper case study lets you read about it, the simulation lets you feel the consequence. A team that steers on cost quarter after quarter and forgets its people finds out soon enough what that does. Nobody has to explain it because it’s right there in their report.
That also makes it a safe place to fail. A team can go bankrupt here without it costing anyone a job or a budget. It costs a quarter and a lesson, and that is exactly why it sticks.
And it’s never only about the numbers. The simulation looks at the whole organization, from leadership and strategy through to staff, customers and the wider environment. The “organization eye” shows in a single picture how the organization stands across all nine areas at once, in colour. Teams start to see the connections, and notice that steering on one thing can break something somewhere else.
Underneath those connections sits the INK management model, derived from the European EFQM model and developed further in the Netherlands. Organizations have used it for decades to look at themselves across all those areas at once. Participants don’t need to know the model because they run into it on their own.
How it gets used
Five examples from practice:
A traineeship programme in education uses the simulation for recently graduated management trainees who go on to advise and support the boards of educational institutions. In the game, they sit in the very seat their advice normally lands on. What the organization sees in return: trainees oversee the management playing field better and adjust their advisory work accordingly so it lands better with the people they support.
Students have no experience running an organization yet, and that is precisely the experience a teacher needs to hang theory on. So numerous universities of applied sciences open a module or semester with the simulation, playing first and taking the theory afterwards. For the rest of the block, the teacher can refer to what students experienced themselves. Such a kick-off is compact, often half a day, in which teams step into a running organization (year three), for example, and play through two game years.
It also works the other way around, the simulation runs alongside the whole module, semester, or course. Teams build their organization from year one and play through to year five. Everything students learn in class, they apply straight away in their organization, and what happens in the game feeds back into class.
A consultancy plays the simulation with its new staff. They take the seat of the management, they normally advise and support. The effect came back through the firm's own clients: these employees' advice takes the wider organization into account and fits it better.
At the start of a change programme, or when introducing the INK or EFQM model, the simulation makes sure everyone speaks the same language. Participants experience together how the areas of an organization interlock, and afterwards mean the same thing when they talk about coherence, steering and improving. Serious in outcome, playful in form.
Sound familiar?
If you teach about organizations and organizing, whether that’s business administration, management, public administration, HR or an adjacent subject, you’re probably after something that lets students experience how an organization works. Something in which they decide and see what it does, rather than only reading about it.
If you work as a trainer or consultant, you want your clients to feel organizational development for themselves. To steer, make mistakes without consequences, and learn from what comes out.
And if you guide managers, you’re looking for a way to put them in the leadership seat for a while. Juggling short and long term, and keeping every interest in view at once.
Recognize yourself in this? Then book a demo. In fifty minutes we walk through a slice of the simulation together, online, and you see exactly what your participants will see. Afterwards you’ll know whether it fits, without having had to buy anything.
What it earns you as a facilitator
From participants to teams
An example. A day session with four teams costs you € 400 to buy in. A session like that is readily billed at € 1,500 to € 2,500. Any team left over doesn’t expire, so you simply use it next time. As long as you buy something at least once a year, your credits stay valid.
And facilitators stay for the long haul. Once you’ve got the simulation in hand, you use it for years, several times a year.
Facilitate it yourself
Convinced after the demo and ready to run it yourself? With the starter package, you learn everything you need to get going independently in a single session. You get four teams to play with, a certificate, and personal guidance for your first own session. Facilitate it yourself
Used across higher education, government and business
Since 1997, universities, colleges, government bodies and consultancies have used the simulation. More than a hundred organizations, over ten thousand participants.