How the beer game is relevant to Bed and Breakfast.
The beer game is used by Senge (1992) when writing about learning organisations, to highlight how self destructive our own business decisions unwittingly can be and how important really new ways of thinking are in order to move ahead and achieve a learning organisation.
There are three players in the game; the retailer, the wholesaler and the brewery. The retailer starts by ordering his usual 4 cases per week of Lover’s Beer, when there is an increase in demand to 8 cases per week from his customers. He orders more to keep up with demand but finds there is a delay in receiving his order so he keeps ordering even more. The wholesaler tries to satisfy the retailer’s demand and in turn keeps increasing his order to the brewery. The brewery shifts more resources to the production of Lover’s Beer, taking on extra staff etc. At the end of the game all three parties have a large unwanted stock of Lover’s and each blames the other party or parties for getting them in that mess.
The point of the game is that all three players were acting rationally, maximising their positions but their collective decisions led to their downfall; this then leads each party to look for someone to blame rather than recognise that the system caused its own crisis not external forces or individual mistakes. Each of the players could have stopped the problem but none of them realised how each of their decisions caused the instability.
Senge goes on to explain that the ingredients necessary to build a learning organisation are five; systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building a shared vision and team learning. All wonderful stuff and true but how does this help you in practice? To get behind the five ingredients to build your successful business, think what assumptions you are making in a particular situation, what these assumptions are likely to lead to, what you are missing and what a different set of assumptions would lead to.
Brainstorm with your partner asking them to identify your blind spots (if you are brave enough!). By nailing down the assumptions, new ideas and fresh communication can flow with the possibility of solving a problem or moving in a new and different direction.
References
Senge, P.M. (1992). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Random House: Sydney.