Through the Looking Glass
Known formally as Looking Glass, Inc. (Center for Creative Leadership's classic simulation), this is a half-day in-tray exercise where people run a fictional company under pressure, so their real leadership habits show up where they can be watched and fed back.
Stages run left to right, from handing out roles through a pressured simulated day to the debrief afterwards.
Reach for this when…
- Feedback keeps landing as 'be more strategic' with nothing to point to.
- A leader insists they delegate well and nobody around them agrees.
- You need people to see their own decision-making under pressure, not just hear about it.
How to run it
- Assign each participant an executive role in the fictional company.
- Hand out the in-tray: memos, reports, problems, on a tight half-day clock.
- Set trained observers on each participant's behaviour, not just output.
- Run the simulation without interference; let real habits surface.
- Debrief one-to-one against the observer's notes.
- Connect what happened back to real workplace patterns.
A worked example
Situation. James Ashworth's plant managers at Ashworth Textiles in Manchester, United Kingdom, all rated themselves as collaborative decision-makers, and none of them believed the 360 feedback that said otherwise.
Applied. Four of them ran the simulation as executives of a fictional garment company, with observers logging who consulted before deciding and who just issued orders.
Result. One manager, certain he was consultative, had made every call alone inside the first hour. Seeing the observer's timeline made the point the 360 report never landed.
The catch
The debrief carries the value, not the exercise itself, so a weak facilitator wastes a good simulation. Some people treat it as a game and switch off, which needs handling before the exercise starts, not after. And a half-day under artificial pressure isn't the same as six months of real organisational politics.
If the observer only logs what went wrong, the debrief will feel like an ambush, not a mirror.
Origin: Center for Creative Leadership