Model, Simulation, or Scenario? Choose Your Path Wisely to Make Learning Stick

You as the Quest Designer stand at a crossroads in the realm of learning design. Before you lie three paths, each glowing with the promise of "experiential learning." But beware, adventurer—not all paths that shimmer with interactivity actually lead to lasting transformation. Some are mere illusions, engaging on the surface but leaving no permanent mark on the behaviors of those who traverse them.

The choice you make here—the tool you select for your learning quest—will determine whether your participants emerge changed, or merely entertained. Three artifacts lie before you, each with distinct properties and powers. The question is not which is strongest, but which serves your purpose. For in the hands of a master Quest Designer, the right choice at the right moment can mean the difference between knowledge that fades like morning mist and wisdom that becomes woven into the very fabric of how your learners think and act.

The Map: Understanding Your First Artifact

You discover the Model—a mystical map that reveals hidden patterns. The first artifact is the Model, and its power is REVELATION. When learners grasp this tool, complexity that once overwhelmed them suddenly crystallizes into something they can hold in their minds. The Model does not ask them to do anything yet. Instead, it grants them the precious gift of sight—the ability to perceive structure where there was only chaos, to trace cause and effect through winding pathways, to spot the feedback loops that amplify or dampen their efforts, and to identify those rare leverage points where a small shift can cascade into profound change.

Picture this: You unfurl before your learners a systems map—elegant in its simplicity, devastating in its accuracy. It shows how unclear priorities spawn overwork like a hydra's heads. Overwork drives burnout, which degrades quality, which summons forth more rework and mounting pressure, which circles back to create even more overwork. The cycle is complete, self-sustaining, merciless.

Your learners lean forward. Something shifts behind their eyes. This is not abstract theory. This is the very cave they have been navigating for months, maybe years. That moment of recognition—"This explains why I feel this way. This is the trap I have been caught in"—becomes the anchor point for everything that follows. The Model does not solve their problem, but it does something more valuable: it names the invisible forces that have been shaping their reality.

Models build understanding by making the invisible visible. They transform the overwhelming into the graspable. They turn the question "Why does this keep happening?" into "Oh, now I see the pattern." And once learners see the pattern, they can never quite unsee it. This is the Model's quiet power—it changes perception permanently.

The Training Ground: Your Second Artifact Awaits

You unlock the Simulation—a realm where consequences unfold without permanent damage. The second artifact is the Simulation, and its power is PRACTICE within a compressed reality. If the Model grants sight, the Simulation grants safe experience. This is your training ground, your danger-free arena where learners can experiment, fail, learn, and try again without real-world consequences destroying what they have built in the actual world.

Here is how the magic works: Instead of merely discussing burnout as an abstract concept around a council table, your participants step into a living, breathing simulated organization. They become the decision-makers. Over several cycles—days compressed into minutes, months condensed into hours—they must allocate finite time, set priorities that compete and contradict, invest in people or squeeze them for short-term output, build trust or exploit urgency.

In the first rounds, productivity surges. Your learners feel competent, even masterful. They have conquered the challenge, or so it seems. But then the delayed consequences begin to surface, like monsters emerging from the depths. Attrition rises as your best people flee. Errors multiply as exhausted teams cut corners. Trust erodes as promises made cannot be promises kept. The system begins to buckle under pressures that were invisible just cycles ago.

This is where Simulations cement learning into memory. Your participants do not simply understand tradeoffs intellectually—they feel them in their gut. They experience the sting of watching their simulated team collapse under decisions that seemed reasonable in the moment. They carry the weight of consequences that played out over time, consequences they could not see coming because they had never compressed time this way before.

Simulations make the future tangible. They let learners touch outcomes that normally take months or years to manifest. And when they emerge from the simulation, they carry a kind of muscle memory—an intuition for how systems respond to their choices, a healthy respect for delayed consequences, and a hard-won wisdom about what actually matters.

The Crucible: Your Third and Most Personal Artifact

You encounter the Scenario—a mirror reflecting the hardest choices you will face. The third artifact is the Scenario, and its power is INTIMACY. This is where learning stops being about systems and starts being about self. If Models help you see and Simulations help you practice, Scenarios force you to decide in the messy, imperfect, emotionally-charged moments where behavior actually shifts.

You present your learner with this situation: They are a team leader. Their highest performer—someone they depend on, someone who has never failed them—sits across the table looking hollow. The exhaustion is visible. The disengagement is palpable. And tomorrow, a critical deadline looms, one that could make or break the quarter. What do you do?

There is no algorithm here. No optimal path highlighted in gold. Every choice reveals something:

A. Push harder? You reveal beliefs about results over people, about short-term wins over long-term sustainability.

B. Renegotiate the scope? You expose your willingness to challenge authority, to absorb political risk for your team's wellbeing.

C. Ignore the signs and hope for the best? You show a pattern of avoidance, of choosing comfort over courage.

The Scenario is a mirror, and mirrors can be uncomfortable. But this discomfort is precisely what makes Scenarios stick in ways that lectures and discussions never can. Because the learner is not observing someone else's dilemma—they are living it. They must choose, and that choice becomes a memory marker. Later, when they face the real version of this moment in their actual workplace, the Scenario will surface. They will remember not just what they learned, but how it felt to choose.

Scenarios build judgment. They cultivate the capacity to navigate ambiguity, to honor competing values, to act with intention even when the path is unclear. This is the crucible where knowledge transforms into wisdom.

The Combined Quest: Weaving Three Artifacts Into a Journey of Transformation

The true master does not choose one artifact. The master weaves all three into a quest that changes those who complete it. Now imagine you are designing not a single learning intervention, but an epic campaign—a journey that takes your learners from confusion to clarity, from theory to embodied practice, from passive understanding to active courage.

Chapter One: The Revelation: Your learners begin by exploring a Model of sustainable performance. They study how trust, workload, clarity, and recovery interact across time like elements in an alchemical formula. They begin to understand why their good intentions—work harder, do more, prove your value—so often produce outcomes they never wanted. The Model shows them the hidden mechanics of the system they inhabit. They gain sight.

Chapter Two: The Training Grounds: Next, they enter a Simulation where they manage a fictional team across several months of compressed time. This is their safe sandbox, their training arena. They practice balancing delivery against sustainability. They experiment with different strategies. They watch some approaches flourish while others collapse. They witness the long-term consequences of decisions that felt reasonable in the heat of the moment. They build fluency through repetition, through failure, through discovery. They gain skill.

Chapter Three: The Test: Finally, they encounter a Scenario that mirrors a real workplace conversation they have been avoiding—perhaps for weeks, perhaps for years. Maybe it is the difficult feedback they need to give. Maybe it is the boundary they need to set. Maybe it is the truth they need to speak to power. Whatever it is, it feels uncomfortably, vulnerably familiar. And now they must apply everything they have learned in a moment that matters. They gain courage.

This three-part sequence—seeing, practicing, applying—transforms learning from information into behavior. Models build understanding. Simulations build fluency. Scenarios build judgment. When used together, they create learning experiences that do not end when the workshop concludes. Instead, they continue to live inside your learners, showing up in how they think, decide, and act when the real stakes are on the table.

The Twist: Your Learning Experience Levels Up Into Something More

But wait—there is a secret fourth path, one that few Quest Designers know exists. Here is what happens when you design learning experiences with the intentionality of a game master crafting a campaign: the experience itself begins to evolve. What started as a learning program gradually reveals its true nature—it was a game all along, waiting for the right conditions to emerge.

Suddenly, your Models become game mechanics that teams can modify and extend. Your Simulations transform into live challenges that adapt to group decisions in real time. Your Scenarios multiply and branch, creating choose-your-own-adventure pathways where each team's choices lead to genuinely different outcomes.

The learning experience becomes a living, breathing adventure that demands:

Adaptation — Teams face unexpected plot twists and must adjust their strategies on the fly, just as they will in real organizational life.

Innovative Solutions — There is no single path to victory. Teams must create novel approaches, combining insights from the Model, skills from the Simulation, and judgment from the Scenarios in ways you never prescribed.

Group Dynamics — Collaboration is not optional. Success requires diverse perspectives, healthy conflict, shared decision-making, and the kind of trust that only forms under pressure.

A Heroic Journey — Each participant moves through their own transformation arc—from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence, from follower to leader, from consumer of knowledge to creator of wisdom.

The game mechanics are simple but profound: Teams progress through levels of increasing complexity. They earn achievements not through passive completion but through demonstrated mastery. They face boss battles—those high-stakes scenarios where everything they have learned gets tested. They unlock new abilities—advanced models, deeper simulations, more nuanced scenarios—as they prove their readiness.

And here is the beautiful secret: when learning becomes a game in this way, it stops feeling like training and starts feeling like an adventure worth embarking on. Your learners do not show up because they have to. They show up because they want to see what happens next. They become invested in their own transformation.

The quest is real. The stakes are genuine. The transformation is lasting.

So, Quest Designer, which path will you choose for your next campaign? Will you offer a single artifact, hoping it is enough? Or will you design the full quest—Model to reveal, Simulation to practice, Scenario to apply, and the hidden game layer that transforms everything into an adventure your learners will talk about long after they have leveled up?

Roll for initiative. Your learners are waiting.

*Note: I know I'm weird, but I have run Dungeon & Dragons campaigns since 1978 and love the power of myth, magic, and a good story--a quest worthy to embark upon. JME