Inside Easy Meals: Why Goizueta Built Its Own Crisis Leadership Simulation

What makes simulations such powerful learning tools is the ability to put students in an environment that mimics the exact scenarios they're training to work in. They can track stock prices, negotiate finance decisions, and work through the same high-pressure calls that executives, managers, and other business leaders face on the job. Where simulations really shine is is in making it all feel real,  working through the tensions, stresses, interpersonal challenges, and even successes alongside the very people they’ll face them  with every day.

That's why Lieutenant General (Ret.) Ken Keen made simulations a fundamental part of his leadership curriculum as former associate dean for leadership development at Emory University's Goizueta Business School. Managing a leadership development program for MBAs, which includes teaching crisis leadership and developing high performing teams, he relied on some of the leading simulations in the field: Everest and Wildfire Mitigation.

“He had been teaching with the other sims for a while and wanted to bring another angle to the current catalog. At the time there weren't that many complex multi-player sims in the space. This was a great opportunity to take his experience teaching with them and create something next level,” said Stephanie Adams, senior associate director of academic affairs and instructional design at Goizueta. She recalls the shift when her colleague realized his students needed something deeper than what could be taught with existing tools.

After 38 years of global military experience in the U.S. Army, including as commander of Joint Task Force-Haiti during the 2010 earthquake response, Keen knew the gaps in teaching crisis leadership better than most because he'd lived it.

Everest teaches a team to survive a mountain. Wildfire Mitigation teaches a team to negotiate competing interests. But neither is as grounded in reality as Easy Meals would become, where a leadership team runs a company while it falls apart in public, in real time, with the press and investors watching every call.

"I think it was the desire to be part of creating it. He'd been teaching with them so long and [knew] how impactful the simulations were. He wanted to be part of creating an innovation that had that same impact."

Design and Development of the Easy Meals Simulation

The Easy Meals simulation places five or six participants inside the C-suite of a fast-growing meal-kit delivery company preparing for an IPO. Participants take on roles like CEO, CFO, and COO, and work through a series of escalating crises together.

The business concept came to the Goizueta team – including Adams, Keen, and Nicola Barrett, chief corporate learning officer – while bouncing around ideas with Forio, their development partners, in 2021. Meal-kit delivery was near the top of everyone's mind that year: after months of pandemic cooking fatigue, search interest in meal-kit services peaked at an all-time high (Google Trends). It was a setting every learner would recognize instantly, which meant the team could spend its design effort on the leadership problem instead of setting up the industry.

In the simulation, each participant has a distinct role and different information to work with. That asymmetry is a deliberate part of the design. "It's simulating what would happen if you yourself worked on a team of five other people and everybody's receiving different information, and you have to communicate that information in enough detail to your team that it makes sense," Adams says. Leave out the wrong detail, and it can affect the whole team's performance.

The team navigates real corporate pressures playing out at the board level, each demanding a response under incomplete information.

The Easy Meals simulation is designed to be very interactive. “They're not just clicking buttons in the sim, they do need to perform certain actions to contribute to the experience,” said Adams.

That's also what she sees as the real differentiator from more heavily gamified alternatives. "This is more grounded in reality. This could be a very realistic situation that learners would face at some point in their careers." 

One example: participants step inside an executive board meeting, which was actually filmed in 360-degrees for the simulation. Learners can even record their own video messages to stakeholders, for the press, or investors. Then, instructors or facilitators can review those recordings with the group during the debrief.

Instructors can also toggle the simulation's setting between currencies and geographies, so it isn't locked to a US-centric backdrop. Adams says that flexibility mattered given who's actually in the room: Goizueta's student body includes learners from all over the world, and the team wanted the simulation to feel relevant no matter where a class was based.

Funding and Launching Goizueta's Simulation Success Story

Development of the Easy Meals simulation was funded by a multi-million-dollar gift from the Goizueta Foundation, earmarked for innovation and awarded through a competitive proposal process open to Goizueta faculty and staff. The proposal put forth by Keen’s team was one of only a few projects selected. 

Building this very specific crisis leadership simulation meant an extended, hands-on partnership with Forio, which Adams recalled being an excellent, collaborative experience.

"They're kind of like a top-tier company to work with, in my opinion, and I've worked with many in my 13 years at Emory," she said. The teams held more than 60 meetings over the course of development, which took about two years from seed idea at Emory to launch. 

“[Forio] was very dedicated, very smart, very creative,” said Adams. “Sometimes when we’d hit a wall, they would just come to the table with, ‘what about this and what about this?’. They were critical in the creation.”

Easy Meals Becomes an Industry Standard With a Move to Harvard's Catalog

Crisis leadership isn't confined to one subject area, so the Goizueta team built Easy Meals to work for more than one kind of learner. The simulation runs across credit-bearing courses in Goizueta's degree programs, and it's also part of the school's executive education offerings, serving both the academic journeys of MBA students and the professional development of working executives.

Adams estimates that the Easy Meals simulation has reached more than 1,000 learners to date, a figure that will keep growing with the simulation's recent addition to the Harvard Business Impact catalog. Ahead of the HBI listing, the simulation underwent a platform update to prepare for its new audience.

The simulation has also picked up recognition beyond Goizueta’s campus. It won a Silver Medal at the 2024 International Serious Play Awards in the Serious Games and Simulations Designed for Use in Higher Education category, and has recently been used with a group of leaders at Harvard Kennedy School's Crisis Leadership Center, led by Keen.

In Easy Meals, Executive Leaders Learn They Don't Have to Carry the Work Alone

Asked what she hopes participants take away, Adams comes back to a simple idea. "It's always to expect the unexpected," she says. "And to know that you don't have to bear it all as one person." Even in the CEO's seat, there's a team.

That lesson isn't incidental to the design, it's the point of it. No single participant ever has the full picture; the simulation is built so that surviving each crisis depends on people in different roles surfacing what they know in a timely manner to the people who need it. A CEO who tries to make the call alone, without pulling in what the CFO or COO can see, is working with less than the whole team knows. The debrief makes that visible: participants watch back their own recorded messages to stakeholders and see, often for the first time, where the team's information didn't move fast enough or far enough.

That's the same instinct that started this project in the first place. Everest and Wildfire Mitigation still hold their place in the curriculum, but Easy Meals exists because Keen wanted students to learn at a different depth. Here, the stakes are organizational and reputational, not physical or procedural, and the consequences are immediate. What began as one professor's search for more rigor is now the tool leading crisis leadership education.