Most IT service management (ITSM) programs fail not because the employed framework is wrong, but because the people running services every day haven’t internalized its purpose. They’ve sat through training, passed the certifications, and can recite the practices, yet when a major incident hits late on a Friday afternoon, the coordination falls apart in exactly the ways the framework was meant to prevent. It misses the benefits of simulation.
This isn’t a criticism of training. Classroom teaching, e-learning, and certification routes all have their place, and most ITSM professionals have been through several of them. The limitation is in what those formats can do. They transfer knowledge well, but they can’t produce the kind of judgment that only comes from having made a decision, watched it play out, and felt the consequences. The gap between knowing a practice and applying it under pressure is where simulation-based learning offers a specific advantage.
Inside a simulation session
A business simulation puts a team in charge of a fictional organization, for example, an airline or an e-commerce retailer, complete with customers, revenue targets, service infrastructure, staff, and the same operational pressures any real organization faces. Over the course of a simulation session, from a few hours to a day or two, the team runs that business through a series of decision cycles representing months of operation, investing in capabilities, responding to incidents, approving or rejecting changes, and negotiating service levels with internal and external stakeholders. The simulation models the consequences of every decision. It feeds them back into the next cycle. Hence, underinvestment in problem management early in the simulated year results in a spike in repeat incidents later. A poorly governed change introduces an outage three cycles further on.
Whether the format is gamified depends on the objectives, the delivery channel (virtual or in-person), and how the teams are set up: one team working against the system, or several teams competing against each other. Where gamification is built in, the act of competing drives careful analysis and sharper strategic choices. Performance is measured in customer satisfaction, service availability, financial results, and the credibility the team builds with the simulated executives they report to. Gamified or not, the exercise asks participants to recognize the same patterns they encounter at work, in conditions where the cost of getting it wrong is educational rather than operational.
Why ITSM specifically benefits
ITSM is fundamentally a discipline of interdependencies, where incident management touches problem management, change enablement, release management, and service level management, and the central challenge of running services well is that those connections aren’t visible to most people doing the work most of the time. The whole purpose of having a framework is to make those connections visible and manageable. Still, a framework on a page is only as useful as the judgment of the people meant to apply it. That judgment is the thing that classroom training has the hardest time producing.
This is the kind of subject matter where explanations quickly reach their limits. An incident manager can be told accurately that aggressive workarounds without root-cause fixes create technical debt that returns later. They may agree with the proposition in the abstract. However, they’ll still apply the workaround when the next major incident occurs, because the immediate pressure to close the ticket outweighs the abstract knowledge of future consequence. The future consequence isn’t real to them yet. Simulation is the format that makes it real, by collapsing the time between cause and effect into something the participant can actually witness.
In a simulation session, the incident manager closes the ticket with a workaround and then watches the same issue recur four times over the simulated months that follow, each recurrence consuming time their team doesn’t have, the customer satisfaction score dropping, and the director of operations asking why repeat incidents are climbing. The next time the same situation arises, in the simulation or back at work, the participant approaches the decision differently. They’ve seen what the alternative costs. The same logic extends across the practice areas. Service level management becomes concrete when teams negotiate service level agreements (SLAs) that they must deliver against. Change enablement stops being a process people work around and becomes a tool people use, once they’ve lived through the difference between disciplined change and chaotic change at scale.
The evidence base
David Kolb’s experiential learning theory, published in 1984 and developed over four decades of subsequent research, underpins much of the academic case for learning by doing. Kolb’s argument is that adults learn through a cycle of four stages: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. Knowledge transfer alone, whether through a lecture, an e-learning module, or a manual, covers only one part of that cycle. Without experience and reflection, knowledge remains abstract and doesn’t reliably translate into changed behavior.
A growing body of empirical research supports this position across multiple disciplines, including medical education, engineering and leadership development. The specifics vary by context, but the finding is consistent: when learners apply concepts in conditions that approximate reality, retention improves and, more importantly, so does the ability to act on what’s been learned.
ITSM.tools has written before about experiential learning as one of several models suited to ITSM training. The argument here doesn’t claim it should replace other models. It claims that for the specific challenge of building applied judgment in a discipline of interdependencies, simulation is the format that does the work others can’t.
Bain & Company’s 2024 research into business transformation found that only 12% of transformations achieve their original ambitions. The other 88% fall short. The reasons typically cited (leadership churn, scope drift, change fatigue) are real, but they sit atop a more fundamental problem: the people expected to operate the new model often don’t fully understand it, and the formats used to prepare them can’t develop that understanding. ITSM programs are not exempt from this pattern.
Where simulation fits in a program
Simulation isn’t a replacement for training, and any vendor claiming otherwise is overstating the case. Classroom teaching, certification routes, and e-learning still do important work in building the vocabulary, the shared reference frame, and the foundational knowledge that practitioners need before they can engage seriously with any practice. Simulation sits on that foundation, converting knowledge into capability and understanding (particularly by showing the interrelationships between processes and technologies in the value chain and their impact on the business), and there are three uses where this conversion is especially valuable in an ITSM context.
The first is leadership and cross-functional alignment
A new ITSM lead taking over a program needs their leadership team to see how their decisions interact with each other. Sitting them in a session together, where they make decisions and watch them play out as a group, produces alignment that strategy off-sites and framework briefings struggle to match. Senior people who arrive holding different mental models of what good looks like often leave holding a shared one, because they’ve spent the day testing those models against the same set of consequences. Agreement in the room is only half of it, though. They also have to leave believing the program is the right thing to do, ready to make the case to their own teams rather than carrying a skeptical line back that rubs off on the people they lead.
The second is operational team development
IT service desk managers, incident leads, problem managers, and change practitioners benefit from experiencing the system from a perspective they don’t normally have access to, which is the perspective of the whole. Simulation compresses the development of judgment that would otherwise take years of incidents and reviews to acquire, and it does so in conditions where mistakes don’t cost anyone their job or their service availability.
The third is program communication
When an organization is rolling out a new ITSM platform or moving to a new operating model, a simulation gives the people affected a chance to experience the change in a compressed form before they encounter it in their day jobs. The session turns what would otherwise be a passive briefing, met with the usual resignation, into active engagement with what’s coming and their part in it. People who’ve worked through the change in a simulated environment tend to bring fewer objections and more constructive questions when the real thing arrives. This works best when it runs alongside the leadership engagement described earlier: the people communicating the change and the people leading it are the same group, and a program that aligns both is most likely to succeed.
ITSM is a discipline whose effectiveness in the workplace depends on practitioners exercising judgment under interdependence, time pressure, and incomplete information. Those are the conditions every framework is meant to be applied in, and they are not conditions a classroom can reproduce. A simulation can. This is the case for adding it to the program, not as a replacement for training, but as a part of the curriculum where what has been taught gets tested against something closer to the work.
For ITSM leaders looking at their training investment, the test is whether the current mix is producing applied capability or only certified knowledge. Certification proves someone has the theory. Simulation is where that theory gets put to work against real consequences. If the current curriculum stops at the certificate, that’s the part it’s missing.
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Simulation FAQs
Certification confirms someone knows the theory. A simulation puts that theory to work: teams run a realistic business, make the technology and process decisions a real transformation demands, and live with the consequences over a compressed period. The result is applied capability rather than knowledge that’s never been tested under pressure.
Not necessarily. Whether a session is gamified depends on the objectives, the delivery channel, and how teams are set up: one team working against the system, or several competing against each other. Where competition is built in, it tends to drive sharper analysis and more careful strategic choices. However, a simulation can run without any of that and still do its job.
SXP simulations are team-based. Participants work in groups, make decisions together, and report to simulated executives, which is part of what makes a session useful for leadership alignment, program communication, and individual skill development.
No. A simulation can be built around a particular platform or operating model when that’s the program’s focus, but the core formats cover ITSM operations, ITSM transformation, and DevOps or digital transformation without being tied to any one product.
Yes. Sessions run both in person and virtually, and the delivery channel is one factor that shapes how a given simulation is set up.
A simulation compresses months or years of transformation into a single facilitated session, typically lasting a few hours to a day or two, depending on the objectives and format.
Henry Strouts
Henry Strouts is a co-founder and Director of SXP Limited, a software business that develops serious games and business simulations that raise situational awareness and breakthrough understanding of new models and ways of working, including best practice frameworks and enterprise software solutions. Henry has been developing and delivering experiential learning for 30+ years, working with teams and executives to drive performance outcomes, whether in support of technology sales or organizational transformation. He has worked with many of the world’s largest vendors and enterprises, and his extensive industry knowledge supports the creation of highly relevant, business-issue-focused simulations designed to resonate with the transformation challenges organizations face today.
