EYEWALL
A crisis leadership simulation
“The failure is almost never the storm.”
Six players form the crisis cabinet of Port Alya, a coastal city of 1.4 million people, as Hurricane Helios approaches. Over six days, from the first forecast to the public hearings, the cabinet makes 48 binding decisions.
Taught in Management and Organizational Behavior, ready to teach on Pedagogix Course Designer.
See what EYEWALL feels like
Six players form the crisis cabinet of Port Alya, a coastal city of 1.4 million people, as Hurricane Helios approaches. Over six days, from the first forecast to the public hearings, the cabinet makes 48 binding decisions. On the harder settings each chief holds facts that the others cannot see. The score stays hidden until the end, and it arrives with its causes attached.
The experienceYou take one of six seats: the Mayor, or the chief of Emergency Management, Infrastructure and Utilities, Health and Human Services, Communications and Trust, or Forecasting and AI Systems. The game runs for six days: Watch, Warning, Evacuation, Landfall, Recovery, and Aftermath. Each day every seat files one decision for its own department, and the cabinet takes two decisions together, where each chief recommends an option with a written reason, and the Mayor makes the call.
The twelve cabinet decisions begin as calls on posture, such as when to order an evacuation. From landfall onward they become dilemmas with no clean answer, taken from the record of Katrina, Maria, Sandy, Harvey, and Rita. Only the Mayor sees the emergency budget, and overspending becomes debt. Two storm events arrive during play, and on the hardest setting Helios grows from Category 2 to Category 4 in eighteen hours.
Nobody sees a score during play. The debrief, called the Reckoning, opens with a named resident who testifies to what the cabinet's decisions meant for a district such as Riverbend, an inland flood basin with many mobile homes. Next the score appears with its causes. The last part reverses the team's decisive decision and scores the city that would have existed.
- A team can reach a defensible decision when the forecast is uncertain and the clock is short.
- Information that one person holds helps the city only when that person puts it on the table.
- Most crisis decisions settle who bears the cost, and vulnerable districts bear it by default.
- A good response matches the storm that arrives. Too much costs the team, and so does too little.
- EYEWALL is the only title in the series that a whole team plays together, so it suits the opening session of a program.
- Three settings change how hard the game is and keep its length the same. Every team faces 48 decisions. The setting changes the budget, the amount of private information, and the force of the storm.
- Teamwork is scored from what the cabinet did: how much private information reached the table, who voted without speaking, and whether the Mayor gave reasons for an override.
- The debrief is built from the team's own game. A resident testifies, the score names its causes, and the decisive decision is replayed the other way. The instructor receives a debrief deck and an analysis of the cohort.
- Company and role
- The crisis cabinet of Port Alya, a coastal city of 1.4 million people in eight districts: the Mayor and five chiefs, for Emergency Management, Infrastructure and Utilities, Health and Human Services, Communications and Trust, and Forecasting and AI Systems
- Discipline
- Leadership and crisis management
- Also fits courses in
- Public administration, decision making, ethics, organizational behavior
- Format
- A team of six plays in real time. Each player uses a separate device and sees the view for that seat. A smaller team doubles up seats, and the Mayor stays a single person
- Time
- Six days of the storm: Watch, Warning, Evacuation, Landfall, Recovery, and Aftermath. Each day runs on a clock that the instructor sets, or the instructor turns the days by hand. The default clocks add up to two hours of play
- Advisers and AI
- AI writes the personal after-action review, press reactions to the team's decisions, and the shift in the first day's forecast cone. The instructor switches each feature on. No AI output reaches the score. AI is also a subject of the game: one chief must judge competing storm models and, on the hardest setting, a weather feed that may have been tampered with
- How you are scored
- Four dimensions, built from seventeen sub-scores: lives (35 percent), resource stewardship (25), public trust (20), and teamwork (20). The instructor picks a Category 2, a Category 3, or a Category 4 to 5 storm. The score adds 5 points on the middle setting and 13 on the hardest, so no team is penalized for a harder storm
- Teaching materials
- Briefing video, a practice round, a tour of the screen, a glossary, a confidential one-page brief for each seat, a student quick-start guide and player guide, an instructor guide and facilitation guide, a debrief deck, cohort analytics, and a research mode with a consent screen and survey instruments
- Audience
- MBA programs, executive education, and public leadership programs
EYEWALL beside Everest V3
Everest V3, from Harvard Business Impact. Roberto and Edmondson, is the simulation most programs already know here. Where ours differs: Six days, 48 binding decisions, a score hidden until the end, and a debrief that replays the decisive decision the other way.
| Everest V3 | EYEWALL | |
|---|---|---|
| Who plays | A team of five | A crisis cabinet of six, one seat each |
| Time | 90 to 120 minutes | Six days of the storm, about two hours on the default clocks |
Formats and times come from each publisher's own product page, September 2026.
EYEWALL comes ready to run in class
Briefing video
Practice round and a tour of the screen
Glossary
A confidential one-page brief for each seat
Student quick-start guide and player guide
Instructor guide and facilitation guide
Debrief deck and cohort analytics
Research mode with a consent screen and survey instruments
Bring EYEWALL to your classroom
You can check out online in a few minutes. For a campus or a big group, just ask us for a quote.