Stakeholder Group ideas for En-ROADS game format : Climate Interactive

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David Takahashi

started a topic over 3 years ago

When running the Game Format it is necessary to break into tables of stakeholder groups. The stakeholder groups have personas which guide how they act. In a video of a game simulation the groups were something like:

A nation facing sea level rise
Oil and Gas
Green Energy

I am hopeful we can begin to enumerate the stakeholder groups and provide some background information on what the groups are trying to protect. For instance in the recorded video stakeholder groups would create a carbon tax, and begin upping the tax, while the Oil and Gas table would lower it. So in this case the Persona of the oil and gas table is to protect its profits including oil, gas, and methane, while throwing coal under the bus.

So for instance, a stakeholder might be IOU. This is an investor-owned utility that is protecting its investment in coal while seeing that coal is growing less and less desirable despite its long term investment in coal-fired power plants. They may see using methane and natural gas as a bridge fuel but they see the writing on the wall that renewables have more profitability. People at that table are having to defend stakeholder interest while seeing there is no business on a dead planet. Having the backgrounds will help tables get in 'role'.

The reason I ask is that we never know how many will actually show up. And we may need to scramble to accommodate the numbers that we have. We have to count on people showing up late and we need to get them into role rapidly. So we may not know how many stakeholder groups we need until the session starts. We might need to say we have 80 people, we want groups to be no more than 8 people, so we need 10 stakeholder groups.

If we have a resource which is stakeholder groups and personas to assume, all will be well.

We can learn if fewer groups but larger, or more groups but smaller actually work in the intervention rounds format.

If we have the roles predefined it will be easier to choose what kind of tensions we wish to introduce into the game (that is competing concerns) based upon the number of participants we are looking at?

So I think this could be a running list of personas we have used and had some success with.

This is part of a 'why re-invent the wheel' perspective in our collaborative experiment of an En-ROADS community.

Rebecca Niles

said over 3 years ago

You should take a look at the Facilitator Guide. It has more commentary on the various groups. I would say a minimum of six people (ideally 12 so that you have 2 for each group) - one for each role - to run it as a game. You might be able to collapse it a bit more, but it won't be as fun and you have to be careful to select groups to maintain tension.

If you have fewer than six (or maybe fewer than 12), I would recommend that you run it as an En-ROADS Climate Workshop (without the role play and you facilitating up front - perhaps also letting participants use the simulator before or after your presentation).

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David Takahashi

said over 3 years ago

Do you wish to collaborate on this? There is every reason to get started on our climate emergency. Waiting buys us little and the need to begin acting is perhaps the main pillar of En-ROADS.

Good to know there are other En-ROADers out here!

Rebecca Niles

said over 3 years ago

I am happy to reply on here periodically, but I have taken on a new position and don't have a huge amount of bandwidth for a project like this. If there are specific, short term things you would like help with, please let me know.

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