At 09:41 on a Monday a client posts four words in a shared channel. What happens over the next quarter of an hour depends less on what he wrote than on what you decided it meant. The scenario takes about four minutes to play.
You are the producer on the Northline account at Studio Halcyon. In the channel are Dev Raman, the client at Northline, and Priya Okonjo and Tom Beake from your studio. Tom is the junior. Noor also works with you and will write to you privately as the morning goes on.
Noor's messages arrive while you are still playing and talk about the way you made each decision. There is no score at the end, because a number would be the only thing you remembered.
It works on a phone as well.
The scenario takes place inside a work messenger, which you already use every day. It needs no tutorial, and the writing can carry the whole scene.
Each of the four decisions can be made from a different rung of the ladder. The game never tells you that a choice was wrong. At the end it shows the sentence that was on your screen next to the sentence you replaced it with.
The rungs come from the Ladder of Inference (observable data, selected data, meaning, assumption, conclusion, belief and action). Chris Argyris developed it at Harvard, and Peter Senge later brought it to a much wider audience.
The ladder is Argyris's; what I did was make it playable.
The whole scenario is one HTML file with no framework and no build step. Claude wrote most of the code while I argued with it about the details.
The longest part of the work was tuning how long the typing indicator stays up before each message. That pause is what makes the channel feel like a room with people in it.