What it is

The Library of Alexandria is burning and the fire is moving faster than anyone expected. A senior emergency leadership team has been convened to decide what survives. Not everything can be saved. The exercise makes explicit that this is not only a decision about knowledge: every section is staffed by people who gave their lives to preserving it, so the team is also deciding whose life’s work survives.

How it runs

1. Draw. Each member takes one of five operational roles. A role determines what information reaches you from staff on the ground. It does not tell you what to save.
2. Scan. Every round, each member scans the QR code for their role and reads that memo privately on their phone.
3. Share. Members report what they are seeing out loud. Nobody has the full picture, so the team has to assemble it verbally.
4. Commit. The team reaches a collective decision on where to focus remaining resources before time expires. When a domain loses support it is turned face down, and that is permanent.

The five roles

Operations Director · Records Manager · Resource Coordinator · Personnel Director · Communications Lead

What is at stake

The library holds three wings of two knowledge domains each. The Scholar Wing covers Science and Medicine, and History and Law. The Cultural Wing covers Art and Literature, and Languages and Cultural Records. The Archive Wing covers Technology and Engineering, and Environmental and Geographic Data. All six begin intact, all six are under threat, and not all of them will survive.

What it surfaces

There is no designated leader. The team leads collectively or it does not lead at all, which makes leadership emergence visible rather than assigned. Because each role receives different information, no individual can reason their way to a good decision alone. And because a domain turned face down cannot be turned back, the team has to live inside its own tradeoffs for the rest of the session.

The exercise is deliberately built with no win condition: the fire always takes most of the archive, no matter what the team decides. It’s the same design logic behind Starfleet’s Kobayashi Maru: a no-win scenario meant not to be solved, but to reveal how people lead when saving everything was never on the table.

Running it

Runs in person in teams of five, one member per role. Each participant needs a phone to read their round memos. Physical role cards and domain cards are placed on the table, and losing a domain is enacted by turning its card face down.

For the facilitator

The facilitator holds the clock and the tiebreak. If a team cannot reach consensus before time expires, the facilitator makes the call for them, which is itself a result worth debriefing.

Access

The facilitator prompt is hidden from participants. To open it: click the book icon at the top of the app five times within three secondshover to reveal

Authors

Woodard, Charles C. · Charpied, Brandon T. · Kuron, Lisa

Presented

Management & Organizational Behavior Teaching Society (MOBTS) Annual Conference, Ann Arbor, MI, 2026.

References

• Hannah, S. T., Uhl-Bien, M., Avolio, B. J., & Cavarretta, F. L. (2009). A framework for examining leadership in extreme contexts. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(6), 897–919.
• Weick, K. E. (1988). Enacted sensemaking in crisis situations. In K. E. Weick (Ed.), The social psychology of organizing (2nd ed., pp. 305–317). Addison-Wesley.
• Hallgren, M., Rouleau, L., de Rond, M., & Mantere, S. (2018). A matter of life or death: How extreme context research matters for management and organization studies. Academy of Management Annals, 12(1), 111–153.
• Maitlis, S., & Sonenshein, S. (2010). Sensemaking in crisis and change: Inspiration and insights from Weick (1988). Journal of Management Studies, 47(3), 551–580.
• Riggio, R. E., & Newstead, T. (2023). Crisis leadership. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 201–224.