ICONS User Manual: Implementation Issues

Decision-Making Procedures

Country-Team Roles
Team Organization
Decision-Making Procedures
Scenario
Position Papers
Communication
Foreign Language
Umpiring
Grade
Facilitation

General team meetings have proven most useful. They are usually held once or twice a week during the preparation period and three to five times a week during the simulation period. It is recommended that an agenda be followed in these meetings in order to prevent the meetings from turning into "bull sessions." It is also recommended that someone perform the role of chairperson of these meetings. It is most beneficial for the facilitator to take this role during a team’s preliminary meetings. A team member should take over this role once the team has progressed to a point of solid organization and has a substantive knowledge base from which to work. This generally happens a few weeks before the start of the simulation. It is suggested that the instructor attend at least some of the meetings that he or she does not chair.

After the team is organized, at least four functions can usefully be served by these general team meetings. First, an overall position paper must be assembled at the outset which: a) identifies a plausible set of broad foreign policy goals for the country in the simulation time period; b) relates the situation in the scenario to these goals, identifying the central issues; and c) charts guidelines for obtaining these objectives. More detailed suggestions for preparation of the team position paper are discussed below. Second, once the exercise has begun, the general meetings serve to assure that the various specialists will be exposed to each other’s ideas and provide a forum for coordination and integration. The educational values of this aspect of the general meetings are particularly important. Third, the general meetings also provide an opportunity for the whole team to review the actions that various team members have taken since the last meeting. Finally, these general meetings will also enable the team as a whole to revise and design new policy guidelines -- to update the position paper -- as the situation unfolds throughout the exercise, especially in response to updates of the scenario (which will be issued by simulation control from time to time). In summary, then, the general meetings serve as a forum for reiterative cycles of planning-coordination-review-revision.

Ad Hoc Meetings: Both during the pre-simulation planning and throughout the exercise, ad hoc meetings of subsets of the team have also proven essential for good policy integration and coordination. These may involve relevant subgroups within the team, depending on the particular question(s) that arise. The participants may fall within one specialized area or they may cut across specialties: for example, a meeting between an economic policy specialist and a Chinese policy specialist on the Japanese team.

The need for an ad hoc meeting may arise at any time, for example, when a Middle East specialist, who is retrieving messages, receives a communique which requires quick action on a matter dealing with debt restructuring. The appropriate people will have to be consulted, perhaps in an ad hoc meeting, perhaps by e-mail or telephone. In this regard, it is helpful to post a list of each member’s e-mail address and phone number and distribute it among team members.

Monitoring Message Traffic: It is vital that the team makes sure that it keeps up with communications on a regular basis. This means that at least one person from the team must login to the simulation community each day during the simulation period to receive any messages addressed to the team.

Most groups have found it convenient to distribute this workload by scheduling particular students to log in at specific times. (In practice though, as more and more students have easy access to a computer, we find that many team members log in to read and send messages on a daily basis.) The person(s) checking messages may simply direct incoming information to the appropriate team specialists and enter into the system outgoing messages which have been prepared by others prior to the scheduled period. (Again, though, it is increasingly common for each person or sub-group to send the messages that they themselves have prepared.) In some cases, the person checking the message may have to make a direct response to another country on an issue other than the one he or she specializes -- all the more reason for each participant to be thoroughly familiar with the policy guidelines developed by the group as a whole. Another note of caution: experience teaches that a balance between individual initiative and coordination with one’s teammates is essential to a smoothly functioning team. The literature on foreign policy decision making illustrates that this problem is encountered, not only in gaming exercises, but in actual foreign offices.

In a simulation community, the entire team logs in using the same username and password. ICONSnet was designed to facilitate an entire team sharing an account. When a student logs in, he or she may choose to read all new messages, selected new messages, or new messages associated with a particular simulation issue. After reading the message, the student can choose whether to keep the message on the list of new messages for other team members to see or to send it to the archives for later access. (ICONSnet allows participants to search the archives to find messages according to a number of parameters, including message number, date, send, recipient, and issue.)