What it is

Groups of three or four take the role of a manager across six workplace scenarios of escalating pressure. In each round, the group chooses the message it would actually send to an employee: not the textbook answer, but the one they’d really send on a Thursday afternoon when the deadline just moved. Every option carries two hidden values: a Results Score that rewards pressure, and a Trust Score that penalizes it. Neither score is ever shown to participants, not during the activity, not at the end. Only the facilitator sees the full picture, in a live reveal once every round is complete.

The exercise is built on a simple, uncomfortable premise: the message that produces results in the moment is rarely the one that preserves trust over time, and the options engineered to feel manipulative are often the most obviously coercive ones, while the real traps are written to sound like consideration.

How it runs

1. Setup. Each participant joins on their own device and votes independently. Whichever option gets the most votes on a team becomes that team’s answer for the round. The facilitator reads a short framing script and says nothing about what the rounds are actually measuring.
2. Six rounds, back to back. Each round presents a new scenario of rising pressure. Groups choose their message and move on. No discussion, no reveal, and no naming of the categories in play, round to round.
3. Rate and reflect. Before any scores are revealed, groups rate how realistic each scenario felt. This has to happen before the reveal, because once a group sees its outcome, the score rewrites how it remembers the hour.
4. The reveal. The facilitator unlocks every team’s full results, Results, Trust, and Delivered Performance, for every round at once, then walks backward from Round 6 to Round 1, asking simply: was anyone surprised by their own choice?
5. Debrief. The framework arrives last, not first, named only after the room has already lived through what it describes.

The six rounds

The closing calculation

Delivered Performance = Results Score × (Trust Score ÷ 100). Trust isn’t a moral scold applied after the fact. It’s the multiplier on everything the team produces next. A group that pressures its way to strong Results while gutting Trust can still end up delivering less than a group that led ethically the whole way through.

The four conditions

Introduced only in the debrief, as a way of naming what the room has already experienced rather than a checklist handed out in advance.

What it surfaces

The options are deliberately engineered so that the most courteous-sounding message in a round is often the most coercive one, and the exercise never announces which is which until the reveal. Two of the sharpest moments: a round where results are doubled and the fully transparent option is also the manipulation, proving that honesty and ethics are not the same variable, and a final, zero-stakes round that tests whether a habit learned under pressure outlives the pressure that created it.

Debrief conversation tends to land on ethical drift (pressure doesn’t make anyone a worse person, it just changes what gets rewarded first) and the delayed cost of removed autonomy: influence that takes away a real choice doesn’t produce an argument in the room, it produces silence later, somewhere down the line.

Running it

The six rounds run back to back with no discussion between them. This is a deliberate change from earlier versions of this exercise, which paused after every round. A mid-round discussion isn’t neutral: whatever gets said changes what the next round measures. All discussion happens after Round 6, in the reveal and the debrief. Between rounds, the facilitator reads a single escalation line and nothing else.

For the facilitator

The facilitator’s job is mostly restraint: never name the four conditions before the debrief, never use words like ethical, manipulative, or coercive during a round, and never signal, by tone, timing, or an eyebrow, which option is the trap. No score is revealed before the full reveal at the end, including Round 1. Facilitators are expected to read every round’s full logic in advance; several of the later rounds are engineered against the exact heuristics a room forms by the middle of the hour.

Access

The facilitator guide is password protected. The password is: ETHICS490hover to reveal

Documents

• 📄 Facilitator Cheat Sheet PDF

Authors

Woodard, Charles C. · Craven, Courtney · Reaves, Tiffany

References

• Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524.
• Yukl, G., & Tracey, J. B. (1992). Consequences of influence tactics used with subordinates, peers, and the boss. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(4), 525–535.
• Bolino, M. C., Kacmar, K. M., Turnley, W. H., & Gilstrap, J. B. (2008). A multi-level review of impression management motives and behaviors. Journal of Management, 34(6), 1080–1109.
• Tepper, B. J. (2000). Consequences of abusive supervision. Academy of Management Journal, 43(2), 178–190.
• Tenbrunsel, A. E., & Messick, D. M. (2004). Ethical fading: The role of self-deception in unethical behavior. Social Justice Research, 17(2), 223–236.

Background Reading

Not cited directly in the tool, but part of what shaped its design.

• French, J. R. P., Jr., & Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright (Ed.), Studies in social power (pp. 150–167). University of Michigan Press.
• Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice-Hall.