The Time Trap
The Time Trap is a single-player leadership simulation that places participants in the role of a newly appointed meeting convenor at Bombay Consulting Group, a mid-sized consulting firm struggling with chronic meeting lateness. Across 10 rounds representing one quarter, participants manage attendee selection, invitation tone, start policies, and latecomer handling while balancing trade-offs between punctuality, inclusivity, meeting effectiveness, and fatigue. Every decision feeds back into the organisation's cultural norms — most visibly through Traditional Waiting Time and Cultural Drift — creating a system that either stabilises or compounds lateness over time.
The simulation makes the invisible visible: what feels like a minor delay in any single meeting accumulates across rounds into measurable financial costs, Person-Minutes Lost, and entrenched behavioural norms. Participants discover that chronic lateness is not a people problem — it is a leadership system problem, and one that responds to disciplined, consistent intervention.
- Quantify compounding costs of lateness
- Use leadership levers to shape behaviour
- Analyse feedback loops in meeting dynamics
- Balance punctuality, inclusivity, and fatigue
- Apply systems thinking to culture design
- 10-round simulation spanning one quarter, with each round following a full meeting lifecycle — pre-meeting setup, arrivals, in-meeting dynamics, overage decisions, and post-meeting cultural updates
- State-action-state feedback loops that update Traditional Waiting Time and Cultural Drift endogenously based on participant decisions, creating realistic norm formation and inertia
- Four decision levers each round — announced start time, email tone, latecomer policy, and start policy — alongside attendee selection from a 20-employee pool with evolving attributes
- Comprehensive post-meeting dashboard showing Person-Minutes Lost, financial costs, Meeting Score, Cultural Drift trajectory, Fatigue Index, and Engagement Curve
- Configurable instructor levers including number of rounds (5–15), meeting duration, cost per minute, initial Traditional Waiting Time, and maximum overage
- Recognise how small, repeated delays compound into significant financial, productivity, and cultural losses across an organisation
- Understand how state-action-state feedback loops and behavioural norms like Traditional Waiting Time institutionalise lateness over time
- Develop the ability to evaluate and calibrate leadership levers — attendee selection, tone, start policies, and latecomer handling — against competing organisational priorities
- Balance the trade-offs between punctuality, inclusivity, meeting effectiveness, and participant fatigue in real-time decision-making
- Leave with a concrete, systems-informed plan for diagnosing and correcting chronic lateness in their own organisational contexts
