March 2026 – Put your tech down and get down – to business
If you’re like us at PriSim Business War Games, you’re obsessed with the latest tech. Business simulations, AI, robot vacuums – maybe even smart contact lenses.
But sprinkled in with the high-tech dashboards and real-time data analytics in our business simulation classes, we also deliver some of our most powerful learning moments using the simplest of tools: blank paper, pens, markers, boardgames, and focused human-to-human discussions and lectures.
While our core, multi-day simulation-based classes pit cross-functional teams competing as virtual companies over several immersive and intense years, we intersperse low-tech tools and techniques including lectures, paper Memo Engine™ disruptors, and pen-and-paper activities that sharpen key business skills—customer focus, financial intuition, and adaptive thinking—without spreadsheets or screens.
An example is PriSim’s Moments of Truth exercise, detailed in our earlier article “Pen and Paper Exercise – Moments of Truth.” Teams use a single sheet of paper to map 5–10 critical customer touchpoints, listing top customer expectations at each. The debrief quickly exposes misalignments between current strategy and real customer needs – and often drives immediate adjustments in the team’s simulated company as well. It’s a fast, high-impact reminder of Peter Drucker’s assertion in The Practice of Management that the core purpose of business is to create and serve customers.
Financial clarity emerges through notes hand-scrawled on end-of-year printed results including simulated-industry results, income statements, and balance sheets. And hand-calculated ratio comparisons, benchmarking, and real world annual-report analyses focus financial thinking. Finance stops being just an abstract set of rules and processes and comes alive as a shared, strategic conversation.
One-page memo disruptors add real-world jolts—supplier crises, regulatory changes, ethical dilemmas. Teams discuss pros and cons, sketch options, debate, then commit before feeding choices into the simulation engine. Bad decisions hurt results visibly; well-considered ones create clear advantage.
Handwriting engages more cognitive processes than typing, improving retention, reducing multitasking, and deepening understanding—advantages backed by research and still relevant for business managers and leaders today.
Pen-and-paper exercises aren’t nostalgic—they’re deliberate instructional design choices that unlock deeper learning in a digital age. And they’re a reminder that even today, low tech can still be good tech.