Overview of the ‘Beer Game’ outlined in Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline.
This paper summarizes, explains, and analyzes the significance and the meaning of a board game created at MIT called the ‘Beer Game’. The paper focuses on Chapter Three of Senge’s book, “The Fifth Discipline”, and how he, Senge, uses the Beer Game to address the basic question he asks in the title of the third chapter of his book.
“The Beer Game has been played many times and observed by Senge, and what he shows by this example is that doing the obvious thing does not produce the obvious result. The game also shows how a crisis can develop from what seemed to be logical actions taken by the participants, who also tend to end up blaming each other, thus playing out the learning failures in the average organization.”