Knock-On

Four numbers describing a team, and eight rounds of decisions that genuinely change them. Some of what a choice does lands immediately. Some arrives two or three rounds later — and when it does, the tool says which round it came from, which is the one piece of information nobody has in real life. Two rooms running the same eight rounds finish somewhere different, and the trajectory chart at the end is theirs rather than the author’s. Five looks ship with it — the activity’s own, plus a glasshouse, a trading floor, a control room and a winter market, drawn in the file itself with no images to load.

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Problem

A cost that arrives immediately gets attributed correctly. A cost that arrives three rounds later gets blamed on whatever else was happening that week. That is why organisations repeat decisions that plainly did not work — by the time the bill turns up it looks like a different bill, belonging to a different cause.

Who it helps

Team leads, operations and change managers, and anyone being taught that a decision has a tail — particularly people who have only ever been measured on the quarter a choice was made in.

In training

Have them predict the numbers before each choice and write the prediction where everyone can see it. Being wrong about an immediate effect is uninteresting; being wrong about a delayed one is the whole session. Run it twice with different groups making different choices and put the two trajectory charts side by side — same eight rounds, different endings, is a more convincing argument than anything you could say about it.

Skills shown

State simulation with scheduled delayed effects, attribution labelling, SVG trajectory chart generated from live state, systems-thinking activity design, in-browser editing with persistent export.