| The 30 men and women were working frantically. The Arizona nuclear power facility they helped design and maintain had been taken over by terrorists. It was their job to get a three-person SWAT team inside the plant, get past the "foolproof" alarm system, neutralize the plant before any damage could be done and take out the terrorists. "People were going wild," says Don Jones of Ottawa, who was there. "Operations was trying to make decisions and seating. Guys were saying, 'we go to know, do we turn right or left? Do we cut the blue wire or the red wire?' Decoders are decoding. Technical experts were trying to figure what setup of the situation was. Telecommunications people were trying to figure out, 'how do I [get] this information [out]?'" For the men and women involved in this make-believe catastrophe, the scenario was real enough. And to the company signing their paycheques, Arizona Public Service (APS), the mission had a very distinct purpose - to help their staff re-think the way they work. The simulation is just one example of the hot office trend of the 1990s - business process re-engineering )BPR). Re-engineering has grown as a way to reshape workforces in an anxiety-riddled era of downsizing, mergers and rationalizing. The term itself was coined almost five years ago by business guru and author Michael Hammer. Like TQM, statistical process control and other business buzz words of the past, re-engineering has many definitions. Some, of course, have used it as a euphemism for staff reduction. But to Hammer, the central principle of re-engineering if that an organization must start reshaping its structure with a clean slate, without preconceived notions. A re-engineering project could mean adding people to the payroll just as it could mean staff cuts. The idea has clearly caught on. As companies struggle to convert to the new economy - or simply to get competitive - they've been turning to the latest breed of consultant: the BPR expert. Case in point: When Phoenix-based APS, owners of the nuclear power plant, wanted to re-engineer and integrate communications systems across the company, the management knew it couldn't be done without the hearts and minds of the employees. Since the company owned one of the largest nuclear power plants in North America, what better way to turn attitudes upside down than to stage the nuclear worker's ultimate nightmare - a terrorist takeover? They called in Don Jones, and Ottawa-based consultant whose reputation preceded him to the southwestern U.S. Jones, 37, works at home in a split-level house in a middle-class east Ottawa neighborhood with a bookshelf, teak desk and personal computer. He is president and sole employee of Business Simulation International (BSI) and the simple surroundings couldn't be in further contrast to the type of scenarios that rattle through his imagination. Prominently displayed in Jones' promotional material are words of wisdom from Lao Tsu, the Chinese philosopher from the sixth century B.C.: I hear and I forget
I see and I remember
I do and I understand.
In a more modern context, a 1983 report in the Training and Development Journal concluded that people retain 25 per cent of what they hear, 45 per cent of what they see and hear and 70 per cent of what they see, hear and do. Jones, who gave up a marketing job 6 ½ years ago at Olympic Sports Canada to start a training development firm, doesn't need academic studies to point this out. He'd seen it firsthand when he initially went into business for himself doing traditional standup training. "I didn't like the retention levels of the people walking out of my class," he says. "People were saying six months later, 'what did we really learn back then?'" By contrast, he says that when he talks to people a year after they have gone through simulations they "still remember little things that they did well and little things that they got burned on. The focus stays with people. The research backs that up." When he got the APS contact, Jones took several trips to Phoenix to learn the inner workings of the nuclear plant and spent six months designing that terrorist takeover. He wanted to understand the nuances of APS's corporate culture - how the departments talked to each other and innovated. To ensure the simulation was crediable he soke to senior official of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's emergency response team in Ottawa. The official told him something that seemed to jibe with his understanding of corporate life: 99 per cent of SWAT-type mission failures could be attributed to a lack of complete and timely information. With that in mind, Jones ultimately designed a simulation for up to 3,000 APS employees. The employees were put into groups of 30 in seminar rooms covered with amps and charts of their workplace. Each unit has a traditional top-down hierarchy and was isolated from other parts of the firm. In the first few minutes of simulation, when people inevitably try to revert to the types of behavior they have found natural, it's the job of the simulator to break the behavior loop - to attach urgency to a new set of priorities. "It's kind of a slap in the face. Even if you thought you did things well, you can do them better," says Karen Kapusta, a strategic change consultant with Focus Change International, the California firm that was jint contractor on the APS simulation. Kapusta says she spotted something very telling about traditional corporations amid all the turmoil. There was a team leader filling out a report on cost-control of the simulated operation. Meanwhile, and underling was fruitlessly trying to alert him that the team was doing the wrong thing. After a few players got "killed" when they cut the wrong wire because operations screwed up, the traditional hierarchical team called it a day. But before they left, they were told of a tougher mission to come the following day. They would have to redesign their unit to a group half the size. To Jones, the result was remarkable. Not only did dome employees stay up half the night redesigning the company, they came back looking the part of a SWAT team. "They all shoed up the next morning with elaborate outfits - black turtlenecks, black pants, guys with ropes hanging from their belts," he recalls. "They were having fun by now. They'd forgotten it was a learning experience." In the end the APS employees were speaking the same language. The simulation had taught them how to effectively function as a team. You might dismiss it all as touchy-feely consultant-speak, but a Conference Board of Canada study found in the early 1990s that half of 226 companies polled said they used simulations in training. "Process simulation is a very integral part of re0engineering. It is not all of it, but it the very core of it," says Ronnie Gavsie, a partner at KPMG, who leads the giant accounting and consulting firm's re-engineering team in Ottawa. Others seem equally taken with simulation: Jones has lined up distributors in Canada and the United States to sell prepackaged versions of his games. Once he has finished a custom simulation, a standardized version goes on the shelf for companies that don't want to pay full freight. Jones charges $80,000 to $100,000 for a customer simulation that will require four to 12 months to design. The packaged off-the-shelf versions cost between $2,000 and $15,000. Brenda Valois, investment projects manger at the Ottawa Carleton Economic Development Corp., thinks Jones' tiny company is one of this area's rising business stars. It's normally her job to play matchmaker between expanding companies and investors. In BSI's case it may be a little early for expansion capital, but Valois sees Jones as a future candidate for expansion capital because of BSI's export and product mandate potential. So she has been busy on her network with referral: "We were impressed by him. In Don's case, almost every introduction we made resulted in a major contract." And that's about as real as it get in Jones' business. | 
