Playing to Stay Ahead of the Game.

The 100 staff members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Reston, Virginia, haven't been the same since they played a business board game. They now understand the big picture of AIAA's operations and how everything they do affects the bottom line.

Created by Paradigm Learning, Tampa, Zodiak: The Game of Business Finance and Strategy, is now available in a version designed specifically for professional service organizations. The board game allows players to deal with such business challenges as multiple product lines, staff capacity issues, new product development investments, customer complaints, and management of outside services and contractors. An online version of the game is available.

AIAA leaders read about the game in a corporate annual report and conducted research on the Internet to investigate Paradigm Learning (www.paradigmlearning.com) as well as other companies that had used this type of training. "After seeing the demonstrated success that the game brought to several Fortune 500 companies, we knew it was right for AIAA," says Patrick Gouhin, director of planning, operations, and business development.

"With 300 project teams consisting of about eight staff on each team, each employee plays a role on some 24 teams. Not every project team is active at every moment but there is a lot of juggling and switching of roles as well as timing coordination that is crucial to our business," he explains. "Because of our self-directed work environment, it is critical that each team member have a thorough understanding of how his or her actions contribute to the bottom line. Everyone is on the front line, and, if everyone can act as an 'owner' in making daily decisions, productivity and efficiency increase throughout the association."

Playing Zodiak enabled AIAA staff to "understand how they can best contribute to the bottom-line success of the organization," says Gouhin, who adds that such awareness is critical for associations, which generally have a relatively small staff compared to larger corporations.

"Associations must practice strong fiduciary responsibility. While we don't have stockholders, we don't have excess dollars to waste either. Every dollar invested must be scrutinized to ensure that the return--either financial or political--exceeds investment in other alternatives."