The Sim Cafe~ Interview with Clark Aldrich

Clark Aldrich is the world's most experienced designer of educational simulations.  
 
 His sims are patent and award winning, and his clients range from the United Nations, Center for Army Leadership, Department of State, Gates Foundation, and NSA to Moody's, Visa, and Sony.
 
 Aldrich has been featured on multiple 'top in the profession' lists; quoted by Obama; called a 'guru' by Fortune Magazine, 'maverick' by CNN, and top influencer by Charles Koch; and appeared in sources including ABC, CBS, ESPN, and The New York Times.  His is also the author of six books and has a degree from Brown University in Cognitive Science. While at Gartner he founded their e-Learning coverage and served as director of research, and has been a monthly columnist for multiple industry magazines.
 
 His new Short Sim pedagogy is allowing his clients to adopt a 'sim-first' approach to curricula development, creating a better foundation and blueprint for a sustainable revolution in all education-delivering organizations.  

website: www.shortsims.com/house

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Transcript

Disclaimer: 0:00

The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of anyone at Innovative Sim Solutions or our sponsors.

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Intro: 0:53

Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Sim Solutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host, Deb Tauber as she sits down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So pour yourself a cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in, and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.

Deb: 1:26

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. Today we are truly blessed to have Clark Aldrich. He's one of the world's most experienced designers of educational simulation, and we'll get into how he has this experience. During our discussion today, his sims are patent and award-winning, and his clients range from the United Nations Center for Army Leadership, department of State, gates Foundation, and NSA to Moody Visa and Sony. So Aldrich has been featured on multiple top in the professions list, quoted by Obama called The Guru by Fortune Magazine, and a maverick by CNN. So once again, thank you so much for joining us today, and why don't you share a little bit more, uh, about yourself and then we'll get into your journey in simulation.

Clark: 2:16

Great. Hi, my name is Clark Aldrich. I'm, uh, thrilled and honor to be here. I simply build simulations, I build them all day long and I have for decades now, and I am on a mission to create a world where sims are the normal way of learning, not workbooks and lectures. And, uh, I think I'm making some progress.

Deb: 2:33

Excellent. Excellent. So why don't you share with our guests how you got into simulation? Where did you start?

Clark: 2:40

It's pretty hard for me to figure out the starting point, but I, I, you know, I've always felt schools got it wrong. I always thought, thought the model of teaching was wrong, and I went to some of the best schools in the country, um, everything from a great boys school to a great prep school to an Ivy League university. And the entire time I spent thinking, this is just not how people should be learning, I also went to a great summer camp that was actually run by a, by a ex headmaster of another prestigious New England Prep school who believed, you know, this is a boys camp, but who believed that, uh, that again, the model of learning should be a much more experiential one. And, and I certainly learned from him a bit, both as a camper and counselor about learning by doing as opposed to learning by studying.

Deb: 3:21

And so how did you actually start into simulation? How does that journey, what does that look like for us?

Clark: 3:27

So when I was at Xerox, I worked for the number two person at Xerox as his speech writer. And so that was a nice introductory to corporate living and corporate lifestyles. But then I moved to Gartner Group and I founded their e-learning coverage. And so I spent many years at Gartner building up their e-learning practice and studying the field at, at this time, it was right before the turn of the century, but seeing how large corporations including military, government and, uh, traditional corporations for profit corporations were using e-learning. At that point, I was a bit disappointed with the state of the art, with what was being presented as sort of, you know, good educational content, which, which I thought was, was actually pretty dreadful. So I left Gartner to go into simulations and I worked with a few people initially to form a small company called SIM Learn. And we built up a very, very complicated leadership simulation called Virtual Leader that actually won best training product of the year. It had over 50,000 lines of AI code, my degree from Brownie University is in artificial intelligence and then went from there and practiced both building very complicated simulations and also increasingly very simple simulations or very cognitively or pedagogically complicated, but technically simple simulations, which is certainly where I am, where I am right now.

Deb: 4:42

Clark, why don't you share with our guests your favorite or most impactful simulation story?

Clark: 4:48

I'll have two if I may. And one of them was I had a very, very great complicated sim all planned out for a client and it just ended up taking too long and it was too com it just ended up being too complicated and too clumsy. And I failed that deliverable and it really bothered me. It bothered me cuz it was a great client, it was a great opportunity and I started becoming a lot more nervous about complicated simulations and, and simulations that overly relied on technology. And so that was a bit of a scared straight moment for me of really wanting to think about simulations differently. And then the second simulation, um, I built in this case for the Gates Foundation and when I built a bunch of them was realizing that the best simulations that I built were the simplest, the most educationally impactful simulations, were not the ones with all the AI coding, with not the ones with the 3D live rendered graphics or the dynamic sound, but frankly, it was the very simple experiences that presented content in a way that seemed very simple and very intuitive, even though it's a lot of cases hard on my side to, to make it that simple, it's like the old Frank Perdue line, you know, takes a tough man to make a tender chicken. You know, it takes a lot of complicated thinking to present things in a very simple, intuitive and elegant way. But you know, for me, there's no going back. This is the future for what I'm doing, not for all simulations, but for what I'm working on. It's gonna be the very pedagogically rich, but technologically simple simulations.

Deb: 6:16

No, I completely agree with you. Less is more. And I think that the more focus you can have on not putting so many things into one experience and helping the learner process what they're gaining from the experience is just so key. Now, Clark, can you share some of the simulations that you did with the Gates Foundation or is that top secret?

Clark: 6:39

Oh no, absolutely. Um, probably the best one is on my website. If you go to my webpage, you go to shortsims.com,(which is my website, but then)/house.(which is for house styles.) And look at the last one there on demand curves. Would you like me to pull it up right now and show it to you or?

Deb: 6:57

Sure.

Clark: 6:59

Okay. So if I can show you one of my sims, this page is called, uh, this is My House Style things clients go to, to figure out what they want their sim to look like. But I'm gonna take you to the last one, which is the one called Demand Curve.

Deb: 7:13

You can't see this. So what you're gonna, you'll see is a demand curve and there's a little bus with a dollar on it and we're gonna hit to talk.

Clark: 7:19

S o the demand curve sim presents a drink truck as the analogy as the metaphor. And one of the hardest things, you know, for conceptual learning. In this case, my goal was to teach someone about the demand curve. What is i t? What is a demand curve? This is actually for freshman college students. And s o I came up with a drink truck as the metaphor. And so again, if you go to my website, www.shortsims.com/house, and look at the last one you can play through on your own, which I highly recommend because talking is not much fun. So it's, it's a s im o n o n d emand curve t hat uses a drink truck as the metaphor. So we put you in control of a pricing of a drink truck, how m uch is a drink g onna cost? You can raise the price, you can lower the price down. When you raise the price, we'll show you t he price changing, you can go from there. So the idea is let's present people with a very simple metaphor. A food truck t hat sells drinks, give people the ability to raise and lower drink prices and then have a, uh, a line of people and having that line o f people who are waiting for a drink, the metaphor for demand, a h, so the more so, the more you raise the price, the fewer the people i n l ine, the lower the price, the more people who are i n l ine as demand shifts up and down based on your price. The other thing we're doing is showing you a graph, a n actual demand curve so that you can edit in real t ime, like in the old driving games, when you can drive a nd sort of see out your window in the big screen, but also see a little mini m ap in the lower right of the corner. We're also showing you a demand curve and the demand curve itself, you know, will move based on what you do. And so you have these, both these forms of feedback, both this model of a, of a drink, drinks being sold out of a food truck, but also a demand curve. And then you can play with it. And then during the course of this thing, we allow you to experiment and almost teach yourself about demand curves. I I love Socratic learning as much as possible. And then at the end we have a little tiny, y ou k now, say it's a test, but it's a little thing of saying, here's the challenge, create a situation where the demand equals seven. In this case,

Deb: 9:15

Wow, thank you so much for enlightening me. It's gonna definitely help with my life,<laugh>, I like that on your website, and I'll definitely go and check it out and do it. And it seems like almost like a business, how to help someone with business.

Clark: 9:30

It's a business direction, but it's not, I mean, there's, you know, there's, you know, it, it's for econ 1 0 1. So inherently anything you talk about other than perhaps wealth of nations, let, can go into macro or microeconomics certainly, but it puts you in a, in an action situation. Your point though is relevant, which is most of the time in most of the Sims it's all about doing something. You know, it's what are you gonna do? In this case you are raising and lowering prices, maybe you're waiting for the sun to come out or, or whatever. But you know, most of the sims that we teach are all all about doing something. And I think it, it goes to, in my opinion, one of the problems with school, if you will, one of the, the reasons we sort of, we sort of have a, a giant problem in education, which some, some may agree, some may not agree, but we do is that we're mostly focused on analytical skills. You know, here's the situation, analyze it, and we're not nearly focused enough on doing skills, you know, what is it like to be a leader? What is it like for George Washington to have been a leader in his situation? What is it like to project manage? What does it, what does it feel like to be innovative? What does it feel like to, to have stewardship over something? What does it feel like to worry about security? What does it feel like to, uh, to, to bring people in and motivate them and get them excited about doing something? All this stuff. Schools like<laugh> just like shrug their shoulders and say good luck to you. Um, you know, even though these are really important life skills and really important, you know, skills for control over our life, whether we go into non-profits or, or academics or, or corporations. So there's, I think as we, you know, someone once said the biggest problem with writing about sports is you can't use a sports metaphor. Um, you know, and I think, you know, we, we do, all of us who are involved in simulation design have to think about doing and what are our analogies and what are our, our, our microcosms for doing? And maybe it's feeding fish in a fish tank, or maybe it's growing a garden, or maybe it's leading a team or something. But, you know, we have to think about the lens of doing not just the lens of knowing or analyzing or defining, which I think has been the old academic, uh, you know, standby for, for far too long.

Deb: 11:33

Thank you. Thank you. Where do you see the future of simulation going?

Clark: 11:39

What I've, what I've been witnessing firsthand. I have many clients with whom I've been working for well over five or six or seven years. Um, and most of the time those clients came to me saying, we want to throw a few sims into our workbooks, or we wanna throw a, a few sims into our lectures, um, to, you know, to make a point maybe as a little assessment at the end, and every single year of these same clients have have said, let's do more sims and Less workbook and more Sims and Less workbook. And right now they're in what I'm calling a sim first mode, where they're saying the first, you know, we want most of our content to be delivered via Sims, and if we have to do a little bit of workbook at the end to clean up in case there's some, you know, things you wanna define, you know, fair enough. But this whole sim first philosophy is spectacularly interesting to me. So, you know, if you are going into a, into a class, for example, the first thing you do is you play a sim and you'll, you'll get things wrong, and that's okay, and maybe you'll learn from the wrong and maybe you won't, but it's this notion of let's get people doing stuff immediately right off the, the bat. And so I think this sim first approach to educational content, we've seen the tipping point in divisions of companies and divisions of military units and divisions of, in this case, some government agencies. And there's no turning back. And I'm gonna predict right here that we're gonna see a sim first philosophy spreading, I'm gonna say like wildfire through more and more organizations including academic. And they're gonna say, you know, schools are gonna become, and corporate classes are gonna become a series of doing things of, you know, of building things. We'll start off simple, you know, we're not trying to, to frustrate people. You know, there's an old quote, you know, an FA 18, A fighter jet is a terrible place to learn how to fly, you know, so we'll, we'll start off simply, and we'll get more and more complicated. And so if you're going to medical school as opposed to, the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna go through some basic simulations and not basic as in here's how to do introductory stuff, but maybe some, some basic philosophy stuff. You know, here's, you're in charge of a hospital, what is your philosophy apparent of patient care? Or you walking down the woods and you fall and you twist your ankle, what's the first thing that you do? Or whatever. And so we can, we can present stuff abstractly. We don't have to get down in the, in the weeds immediately, but we can allow people to make a few big strategic decisions and see what happens. You know, you hurt your ankle, do you walk out on it or do you, you know, call for help? We don't have to get into the weeds, but we can present these, these basic things. And from these learning experiences, we get richer and richer experiences. There's a philosophy of content, which is, you know, the way to learn to do anything is to first do something, do a simpler version of it.

Deb: 14:18

I completely agree with you. In fact, I've been working with someone by the name of William Martin and I'm gonna be interviewing him, and he said a lot of the things like you, you're saying, and, and we were talking about see something, say something, right? That whole new thing where you, if you see something that you sh that's unsafe, you should say something. He's saying, see something, do something. Don't just say something, but actually make an action too, right?

Clark: 14:44

The human brain works by doing, there's a experiment in, in psychology, I'm sure you know of it, where they have two kittens and, and, and these are kittens that have just been born and they have one kitten. You know, they have a go, a gondola connecting the two. And so one kitten can walk around and one kitten is, is moved around, but is, you know, is moved around on a gondola. And it is only the kitten that associates action with visual stimulation that learns how to successfully navigate the world. This kitten with who's seeing the exact same thing, but who's just seeing it presented to the kitten, not through experience, ends up with a very messed up, uh, optical system. So one is awful experiments, but nonetheless it was done. And so we don't learn passively, we don't learn by being presented with content. We learn only, almost only by doing. And so the other problem is that because we've been focusing on passive learning methodologies in schools and corporations and governments, that has subtly affected the curriculum, what we've decided to teach. And so I think one of the great tragedies of schools is that we've ended up teaching increasingly analytical skills rather than doing skills. You know, we don't teach project management or leadership or innovation. We teach, define these words, ta create a taxonomy for this sentence, or, you know, we're, we're focusing very much on these passive analytical skills. And so the best schools in the country are producing people who are great at analysis, but terre wood at doing. And, uh, you know, and I think we, we actually see that problem flowing out in corporations that hire these great students, including myself. Again, I come at this as a great student and I went in from, again, essentially being a great student again, ending up at Brown University to being dropped into the top of a major Fortune 25 corporation and realizing how little I knew, you know, I could get great, great grades in at school, but I knew nothing. And so I was just totally blindsided by how much I did not know having gone through 20 years of AAA schools. So it's a problem.

Deb: 16:43

No, I agree. Clark, what about the pandemic? Can you share for our listeners what you were doing during Covid and, and what lessons you learned?

Clark: 16:53

It is such a sad commentary on my life, that very little change with me, with Covid<laugh>. I, you know, I, I work at home, you know, with my wife, so get up, you, you know, have coffee. You hop on on a couple of calls, you build some simulations, you, you stop working. So I'm, it is horrible for me that I, it did, it actually impacted me very, very little except generically business went up, which I guess is great, but I spent my entire life traveling around the world. I spent my entire life, you know, going to conferences and traveling to exotic lands and, and visiting cool countries during times of, in some cases revolution and, and explosions and stuff. And I'm really just absolutely thrilled right now to be spending as many hours as I can. I mean, a good day for me right now is, is building simulations and building cool simulations that cover, you know, I, I'll have one client who's a nonprofit doing a very humanitarian effort, which is wonderful. I'll have another one, which, which is a banking client doing a, you know, a great course on some accounting principle, another one on academic, one on, again, teaching leadership or teaching project management. I love being able to talk to people all over the world and then building sims for an incredible variety of industries, tackling problems from always imaginable. And my strength has always been my variety of clients because they, you know, every client I have has impacted how I develop sims. And because I have a wide variety of clients, it's given me a richness of techniques that I've available to me that I think has been very helpful in every sim I ever make.

Deb: 18:26

Excellent. Now, can you share with our listeners the biggest thing you'd like them to know? Something that when you learned it, it changed the way you practice? So essentially, a personal aha moment,

Clark: 18:39

Probably the biggest aha moment is the best way to research a sim for me is to ask the expert, where do people get this wrong in the real world? So whatever, whether it's understanding the demand curve. So again, when I was talking to an expert about the demand curve, the biggest thing the person said was that, well, most people think of the demand curve as being static. It's something that doesn't move and doesn't change. It's sort of a symbol. And one of the, the things they most wanted my sim to convey was the fact that it's very dynamic. It, you know, conditions change, the demand curve. It, you know, it's a very fluid thing that maps, you know, that sort of mo a moment of time. So it's all about where do people get this wrong? And so if you're doing a sim on say, leadership, and that's a little vague, but you know, let's say it on, on role modeling. So, you know, a sub, a sub-bullet of leadership being role modeling, the question is, you know, where do people get this wrong? Why do people get this wrong? If it's such an important topic, where in the real world do people mess this up? And those themselves become the greatest building blocks from my sim. So a good sim might be eight or nine minutes long, which is, you know, has a very specific context to it. You know, you wake up in the morning and, and what do you do? Or there's an emergency, what do you do? But it's all about giving people the opportunity to make real world mistakes as efficiently as possible. And then the ability to correct the, to explain to them why, why a mistake is a mistake. Uh, building a sim on Socratic, learning on, on Socratic teaching for some, for some teachers on Socratic, on, on teaching Socratically. And one of the things that if a Socratic teacher, if they hear this from a student, they know that they've really messed up. And that is, oh wow, you're so smart. So if a student tells you, oh, wow, you're so smart as a Socratic teacher, you know, you've messed up, you know, in some cases it's what does, what is bad feedback? You know, if you're a, if you're again, a leader at a meeting and you tell everyone, Hey, go, go take that mountain. Go take that hill. And everyone says, sir, yes sir. And, and, and runs out the door saying, hooah that ma, you know, that is, it was that like a great leadership moment or a terrible leadership moment. And so, you know, in, in a lot of cases that's like the worst thing possible because you're not getting, you know, you're not exploring the options, you're getting feedback, feedback or something. And so, you know, in a lot of cases we don't even know what failure and success looks like in the real world, let alone how to read it or avoid the failures to go for the successes. So it's all that stuff I think is just what's so wonderful about sim design.

Deb: 21:02

Excellent. Now, is there anything that you wanna ask me?

Clark: 21:05

What are you most scared about in this? You're, you're focusing on simulations. What, what keeps you up at night? What, what terrifies you about, about this area that you've dedicated a tremendous amount of your yourself to?

Deb: 21:16

I'm terrified for healthcare right now. I just feel like we've been doing the same old, same old, and there's just, you know, we should be focusing on wellness, we should be focusing on, on health of the person. Um, I think that we're just absolutely our society's outta control with mental health, addictions, suicides, down the rise, and just the polarization of the nation. So those kinds of things just keep me up by, try not to think too much about'em, but try to think about every day, what is one thing that I can do today that's gonna make the world a better place? Even if it's just a little tiny thing, right? Just one little thing.

Clark: 21:57

Here's a thought, and this may or may not work for you, but I believe one of the reasons for polarization right now is schools. I believe schools are the biggest culprit in the mess we're in right now. And the reason I believe that is because if we have, let's say two people are attending the same school, one of them is great symbolic thinker, one of them is great at crunching numbers. One of them, you know, can spend hours and hours, hours writing a computer program or reading a thousand pages and highlighting it and taking out their marker and going online and, and, and researching. That's person number one. Person number two is really mediocre to all of that, but it's a great leader. Is clever, is she's charismatic. She loves doing stuff with her hands. She loves building stuff. She loves solving cl people's problems. Uh, she loves rallying friends together to, to do cool things. Which of those two people, you know, is gonna benefit from the school experience? In most cases, it's gonna be the dogged, analytical person who's gonna get the a's, who's gonna be praised as the, you know, the let's send you off to Yale or send you off to Harvard and this other person who is rather met in that stuff. But it was, again, who loves getting stuff done and working and helping people and rallying troops. This person's gonna probably be a troublemaker. This person's probably gonna be, uh, send this person off to community college or flunk'em out and tell'em to grow up and, and get a grip on life. And I think that's a spectacular problem of schools, the skillsets that we've chosen to reward. It's not consistent with either the market value, the world value in terms of their, the, the ability of people to contribute to the world. And so I think in my mind, if we can solve the simulation problem, because if you're building simulations, then you're starting to introduce the topic. I mean, Sims, especially short sims are Trojan horses in schools, and they allow content to be focusing not just on analyze this or read this and working and collaborating, all this stuff. It introduces a whole new language. And I believe that's gonna help the world, that's gonna solve one of this great toxic problems that we've all been, that we've had to, we're right now we're, we're dealing with the, the fallout of decades and decades of schools that have been McKinsey over time, that have been, you know, Jack Welsh, McKinsey over time in terms of being these incredibly narrow, highly analytical, highly unfair systems that have taught a lot of people that they're not part of society, uh, who are great people. And again, I think that is the cardinal sin of our society at this point. And it's also where I believe sins and shorts and specifically can provide a necessary foundation. They don't solve the problem, but they provide a necessary foundation for fixing the problem. It's one reason why I'm so excited about them.

Deb: 24:47

Thank you. Thank you. Great answer. So I, I just wanna let you know that, read your comment on LinkedIn that this was a bucket list for you to get a mug, so I'm gonna have to make sure that I, uh, get I that I can<laugh> that mug. Alright, anything else that you wanna share with our listeners before we conclude?

Clark: 25:06

Again, this is a, a massive topic. This changes civilization, and I would beg everyone who's listening to this to go to the page, short sims.com/house and play through some of yourself. You can't and, and, and, and see on one hand how simple they can be and how elegant they can be and how pedagogically rich they couldn't be. Because I think we way overcomplicate these things in a lot of cases and, uh, from a technology perspective, but way under think them from pedagogy perspective. And we need to create new experts. I have spent, I think I added up a 30 or 40 or 50,000 hours of, of my life working on Sims and creating sims and, you know, the amount of nuance, the amount of the uses of coaches, the how long should they be, the length of feedback cycles, what is the minimum necessary to make them ed, to make them good, uh, and make them effective. How can we start measuring and assessing this new thing? What are the new topics that simulations can take that we could not do through traditional media? I mean, this is such a spectacularly rich and deep world that we're just, you know, this is like Gutenberg. We're opening up a revolution of media that can frankly change civilization and what it means to be smart and what it means to be educated and what it means. And, and again, how can we solve this massive problem that we've created in terms of the haves and have nots in terms of those who are good at school and those who are not as well as just, you know, medicine. We can, we can start thinking about a sim first curricula for a medical school. We can start thinking about sim first for, uh, continuing medical education. Medicine's always been ahead of the game. A because it deals with people dying. So when people die, people, we, we spend more money when people are dying, which is good, but also because it is ultimately a doing activity. You know, in the same way with the military, uh, I think there's, the sharp end of the sword has been spent on sim design. You know, you, you wouldn't want a doctor who's not gone through a bunch of simulations, but we can use simulations for everything we can, you know, in terms of how do people work together, how do people problem solve together, how do you know all this stuff can be sim based. And so I think a sim first world when it comes to education will, will be transformational. And I think we're all on the front edge of that.

Deb: 27:20

Fantastic. All right, well, thank you so much for your time. And with that, we will conclude this, this sim Cafe episode and happy simulating!

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Outro: 27:52

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