Decisions under pressure, in a room you control.
Bespoke, facilitated simulations for vice-chancellors, executive teams and governing bodies — built around the choices your institution is actually about to make.
A simulation built for your team, not from a template.
The simulations published on this site are deliberate tasters — short, single-player scenarios anyone can run in a browser.
The work I do with senior leaders is something else. It is a bespoke, facilitated exercise — a multi-strand scenario designed around your institution, your committee structures, your real risks and your live decisions.
Participants do not click through a script. They sit around the table, receive briefings, react to events, talk to characters, and make calls that move the scenario in different directions. The simulation pushes back.
The point is not to produce the right answer. It is to surface how this team actually decides under pressure — where the friction is, what gets avoided, where governance holds, and where it bends.
Four stages, one cycle.
Every engagement is bespoke, but the underlying shape is consistent. Discovery sets the brief; design builds the world; the live session is where the work happens; the debrief is where the learning sticks.
A few of the shapes these take.
Every simulation is unique. These are archetypes — recurring situations leaders ask to rehearse. Real engagements often combine two or more.
The structural deficit
A multi-year financial squeeze with no single villain. The team must reconcile portfolio, estate, staffing and student experience trade-offs while the press, the unions and the board each pull a different way.
The compliance shock
A regulatory letter, a Home Office investigation, an OfS condition. The decision space is narrow, the timeline is short, and what the team does in the first 72 hours sets the trajectory.
The merger conversation
A neighbouring institution wants to talk. Or politicians do. Governance, identity, staff and student protection, sequencing — all in play before the financial model has even settled.
The media storm
A story breaks. The facts are partially known, partially wrong, and moving. Internal and external comms, governance, legal and operational responses must hold together — or visibly come apart.
The dispute
Pay, workload, redundancy, marking and assessment. The team negotiates with a union side that has its own internal politics, while running the institution and protecting students through the cycle.
The AI decision
Procurement, governance, academic integrity, equity, vendor lock-in. A live decision about what to adopt, what to refuse, and what to say publicly — with the sector watching.
Want a feel for it? Try one.
These browser-based scenarios are deliberately simplified versions of the full executive engagement — single-player, scripted enough to run in twenty minutes. They are useful as a preview of the texture, not the depth.
The Vice-Chancellor I
Lead a Russell Group university through a financial and reputational crisis.
The Vice-Chancellor II
Steer Ashworth Metropolitan through a Graduate Route squeeze and a visa investigation.
The Merger: Righton & Southex
Steer Righton through a six-turn merger with Southex. Partnership of equals, or acquisition with good PR?
Scotia West
Steer a Scottish post-92 institution through merger pressures.
Branch Chair
Navigate disputes, negotiations and member politics from the union side.
The PVC
Decide how to procure, govern and respond when an AI study companion comes to UEB.
Someone Else's Department
A failing university moves through six desks — UKVI, the VC, the OfS, a minister, the Treasury — and the trigger never sits with the consequence.
Tell me about the decision ahead.
A short conversation is enough to know whether a simulation is the right instrument — and, if so, what shape it should take.
charles@charlesknight.co.uk