Friday Night at the ER
What is it ?
The Friday Night at the ER team-learning game is a simulation tool for gaining powerful insight in an engaging group experience. It's a board game played at one or more tables of four players and led by a facilitator. The game teaches people to:
- consider the effects of their decisions on the larger system
- to collaborate with an openness to redesign
- to develop sound data on which to base decisions.
These basic principles of Systems Thinking (and their corollaries) are demonstrated by Friday Night at the ER:
- The parts of a system are interdependent
- Our actions have multiple-order consequences
- Optimizing a part can lead to poor system performance
- Our mental models influence our actions
- Structure drives behavior
- Systems must be able to learn and adapt
How does it work ?
Teams of 4 manage four different units of a clinic/hospital. The team simulates 24 hours of managing patient flows . The team is evaluated on the QUALITY of care given, their ECONOMIC performance and capacity to manage in a given timeframe.
Each hour, participants manage the arrival of new patients (blue beads) into their service. Each new patient must be paired with hospital staff (white or clear beads) for care to be given. During each hour, the unit manger accepts new arrivals, transfers patients to other units, calls in outside staff and manages the books.
As the game progresses, managers end up focusing too much on their own unit and not enough on the overall performance. In addition, the team tends to make numerous assumptions that limit their creativity – how the game is played may vary from team to team.
At the end of the game, teams learn that collaboration, innovation, thinking out-of-the-box and understanding the system are key to success.