Every organisation says it wants people to work across the business. Then the quarter starts, the targets land on individual teams and everyone is measured on their own number. Working across the business quietly becomes whatever is left over once the real work is done.
Leaders know the theory. They can recite the value on the wall. What they rarely get is a moment where they watch themselves choose the local win over the shared one, in front of their peers, with the scoreboard in plain view.
Wall Street creates exactly that moment. It hands a room one ruthless objective, make as much money as possible, then builds the rules so that no team can get there alone. Within minutes the trading floor is loud, fast and revealing. People stop performing and start behaving, and that is when a debrief can actually change something.
Wall Street is a fast, tactile trading floor built around one tension: every team is judged on its own result, and no team can get that result without the others.
It is loud, competitive and genuinely fun, and it scales from a single leadership team to a conference hall of hundreds.
See all our simulations →A mini documentary of how the behavioural simulation works in a face-to-face setting. Click to play.
Did you work on the stock market trading floor on Wall Street in the 1980s? Did you see the movie? Then you have a fair idea of what to expect.
Teams trade across ten time periods of five minutes each. Prices move every period. Whichever team makes the most money wins. And yet no team can succeed alone, so the room has to work out, under a hard clock and in full view of everyone else, how much to compete and how much to collaborate.
A simulation creates learning by shining a light on the real decisions and behaviours of everyone in the room. Rather than telling participants the messages, we let them experience them first. The insight comes during the activity and in the debrief that follows: experiential learning at its most dynamic.
It also transforms the energy of the room, filling it with laughter and bustling activity. It is consistently the highlight of any conference or offsite, and the shared reference point teams come back to for months afterwards.
A typical run of Wall Street takes about two and a quarter hours straight through, or two and a half with a break, and flexes to fit your agenda:
People of Influence is the consultancy through which Michelle Rushton and Shaun Kenny deliver leadership programs, team offsites and impactful conferences.
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Leadership Engine is our proprietary platform for measuring and improving leadership effectiveness with diagnostics, dashboards and behavioural nudges.
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