Pragmatic Leadership: Coaching Leader, a manager coaching game

Pragmatic Leadership: Coaching Leader is a serious game that trains managers in coaching conversations. Wrainbo, Inc. created it for Bacharach Leadership Group, a leadership development firm. In 2019 it won a silver medal in the Company Training category of the International Serious Play Awards.

The game targets coaching techniques a manager can use immediately in day-to-day talks with the people they lead. Coaching, as the game frames it, means engaging and developing people through competencies such as active listening, asking facilitative questions and giving feedback. The player takes the role of a people manager and role-plays real-world scenarios, such as giving feedback to a subordinate. Branching dialogue offers dozens of paths through them.

Sessions and modules are short, between 5 and 12 minutes, so they can be played in the gaps of a working day. After each choice the player gets a score and written feedback right away, which shows where they are strong and where they have gaps. A library section holds short lessons in several formats, including video, infographics, text and quizzes, for different learning styles. Scenarios include difficult situations such as listening for possibilities and exploring alternative career paths and choices. The library works as a knowledge base of coaching skills that the role-play scenarios then put to use.

Wrainbo, Inc. is the developer. Bacharach Leadership Group, the client, runs leadership programs for high-potential leaders. Its approach centers on the Agenda Mover model, which rests on four competencies: contextual, ideational, political and facilitative. Wrainbo, Inc. is named as the developer in the 2019 Serious Play Awards announcement.

Bacharach Leadership Group is still operating at blg-lead.com. The site describes a BLG Experience that combines live lectures and webinars, interactive exercises, real-life coaching, a 360-degree feedback tool, a Leadership Simulation App and a library of priming tools. The simulation app includes a BLG Pragmatic Leadership Simulation with leadership-challenge scenarios and bite-size learning materials. The page does not use the title Coaching Leader.

Wrainbo's own address no longer shows a company site. It forwards to a page listing the domain for sale. No official page offering Coaching Leader under that name turned up, so the games directory lists its status as not confirmed.