Decisions and behaviour become visible in the room.
What happens in the room?
Enter a shared situation
Small teams take responsibility for an organisation or challenge. They have a purpose, a direction and choices to make with limited resources.
Choose and meet the consequences
Across successive rounds, new information and unexpected events change the conditions. Teams decide what to back, what to protect and what to stop.
Examine what happened
Facilitated reflection makes assumptions, trade-offs and decision patterns discussable, including how choices held up against purpose, strategy and ethos.
We observe behaviour in action. We pay attention to whose voice is heard, how evidence is used, where authority sits and whether commitments survive pressure.
Leadership teams
Before you plan the future, practise choosing together.
Preparing for a strategic planning day? The Arena helps your team recognise assumptions, debate real trade-offs and practise thinking beyond their own function before they make choices for the whole organisation.
You leave with a shared experience, observations about how your team works under pressure and priorities to carry into planning and everyday work.
Practise the choices you must be able to make together.
Explore how the board and executive challenge assumptions, use incomplete information, hold their respective responsibilities and respond when a consequential decision cannot wait.
The experience can focus on the governance and execution tensions that matter to your organisation, including risk appetite, authority and what your ethos requires under pressure.
Give your clients or members something worth coming together for.
For professional services firms, associations, chambers and other hosts who want to offer a practical strategic experience. People work through consequential choices together and leave with learning they can use in their own organisations.
You bring the people
You hold the relationship with your audience and help bring the right participants into the room.
We deliver the experience
Straforma provides the scenario, materials, facilitation and guided reflection. We agree the purpose, format and practical arrangements with you.
Start with a 90-minute taster or a three-hour Arena. We recommend the configuration after discussing your audience, objectives and available time.
Leadership, Board and Executive, and Co-host Arenas are configurations of the same signature experience. Formats include a 90-minute taster, three hours and a full day, with the scope of preparation and follow-through agreed for your group.
Before
Agree the audience, outcomes and configuration. Decide what needs to be observed and what participants need to bring.
During
Experienced practitioners facilitate the simulation, observe behaviour and help participants learn from the choices they make.
After
Make sense of the evidence and agree what deserves attention next. The proposal specifies the observation report, follow-up and any ongoing practice support included.
We separate what participants report, what we observe, what we infer and what remains unknown. A simulation gives useful evidence to explore; it does not establish everything about a person or an organisation.
Different rooms. Different pressures. Consistently useful.
The Arena has been tested with leadership cohorts, senior corporate participants, business owners and leaders working in complex operational environments.
Different people. Different contexts. Different versions of the practice.
We pay attention to what participants report, what becomes visible in the room and what we need to improve next.
Leaders of Geelong Program · 2024
Full-day Arena inside a leadership development program.
9 participant responses
Voted the stand-out session of the program by Leaders of Geelong participants, as reported to Straforma by a participant.
9.8 / 10
Session content
9.8 / 10
Relevance to future leadership
9.2 / 10
Helped participants perform more effectively in their current role
“The unplanned impacts in the simulation were really useful and demonstrated the real world and ever-changing environment we operate in.”
Leaders of Geelong participant · 2024
“The importance of regularly revisiting strategy, never ‘set and forget’.”
Leaders of Geelong participant · 2024
Geelong Chamber Corporate Partners Arena · 2025
Cross-organisational Arena · senior corporate participants who had not worked together before.
“It was such a great experience. It’s not often that you get to see complete strangers collaborating and strategising so well.”
Lachlan Hodgson · CEO and Board Director
“It was so unexpectedly fun! Keen to pitch this to our leadership team.”
Participant · senior corporate · 2025
Geelong Small Business Festival · 2026
A shorter Arena expression built around real decisions participants were carrying into the room.
A shorter format, measured on a different scale.
4.7 / 5
Would recommend to others
4.5 / 5
Useful and engaging
4.4 / 5
Left with a clear next action
Organisational Leadership Arena · 2026
Full-day Arena for the leadership group of a high-profile public sector organisation within Victoria’s Department of Justice and Community Safety.
14 participant feedback forms
8.9 / 10
Average usefulness
93%
Rated usefulness 8 to 10
“Team work discussions — understanding strategic planning is not something to be scared of — but to be embraced.”
Participant · 2026
“I have loved the session and it was extremely valuable to me.”
Participant · 2026
Different sessions measured different things on different scales, so the numbers are not directly comparable.
Sessions with leadership teams, cohorts and community organisations, 2024–2026.
Across the evidence
What keeps showing up
What participants keep telling us, across every format.
Reality makes the learning stick.
Participants repeatedly point to changing conditions, unexpected impacts, consequences and the need to adapt as some of the most useful parts of the experience.
Practice changes the conversation.
Feedback repeatedly references teamwork, communication, collaboration, shared understanding and the need to explain why a choice is the right one.
Strategy becomes something people can do.
The language shifts from abstract strategy to decisions, trade-offs, action and what participants intend to use back in their own work.
“I thought quick decision-making would challenge me. Because the activity felt low risk, I was comfortable making quick decisions.”
Leaders of Geelong participant · 2024
That is the point of the room: practise something difficult before the consequence is real.
Across different Arena formats, participants consistently describe the experience as engaging, useful, relevant and applicable to real work.
