Long cases buried his undergraduates in the details. Running a company gave them the big picture.

Sooner or later, every strategy course gets to the same lesson. Finance, HR, operations, marketing, and R&D either pull in the same direction or they don't, and a decision made in one of them lands on all the others.

Ricardo Flores, an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria's Gustavson School of Business, teaches strategic management in the Bachelor of Commerce program and co-wrote a book on teaching teamwork, Group and Team Work. Integration is the lesson he builds the course around, and for years cases were how he tried to get it across.

Lost in the exhibits

MBA students can work through a long case. Undergraduates, in his experience, drown in it.

Short cases still have a place in his classroom. The long ones worked against him: how the functions fit together turned into one more topic on the syllabus.

Undergraduates often find longer cases overwhelming. They get lost in the data and tables rather than focusing on strategic thinking—big picture questions like, "What should I do?"Ricardo Flores, Associate Professor

Colleagues from the Academy of Management pointed him toward Capsim. The appeal was simple. Students would run a company, even a fictional one, and see firsthand how the decisions connect.

A whole company, every week

Flores built the course around a business simulation. Across a 12- to 13-week semester, teams start with practice rounds to get comfortable with positioning and competing in a market, then play eight competition rounds against each other.

Each class opens with the why: a reflection on the readings and how they connect to everything that came before. Then a short quiz, and sometimes a newspaper article or mini case. The rest of the session belongs to the round. He pulls out the lessons for the whole class, then sits with each team to tie what happened in their company back to the concepts.

I've always been focused on helping them see the big picture. The simulation helps with that. It's not just about running a company—it's also a tool for team decision-making.Ricardo Flores, Associate Professor

Teams reflect every week on how they decide together, and on the long-term goals they're chasing rather than one round's results. Twice a semester, students rate their own contribution and their teammates' through the platform's peer evaluation, and a full class session goes to the places where the two don't match. He runs the first one mid-semester on purpose, while a team still has weeks to change how it works.

Flores studies what makes student teams work, and he's blunt about assignments that can be divided up.

If you give teams in your class any type of project or task that they can easily split between them without needing to collaborate at all, without the need for integrating, then they will never integrate.Ricardo Flores, Associate Professor

Room to get it wrong

Seeing the big picture only matters if students are willing to act on it. Early on, Flores weighted simulation performance heavily, and it backfired.

In the past, when the simulation grade was too heavily weighted, students were terrified. They became risk-averse.Ricardo Flores, Associate Professor

So he rebuilt the grade. The simulation is half of the course grade, but only a small share of it depends on where a team finishes. The top team earns 10 points, and the last-place team still earns 4. The rest rewards engagement, analysis, and reflection. When a round goes badly, he reminds students that only a few points are at stake, and that the job is to understand what happened.

The round that goes wrong

Flores still runs his strategy course on Capstone. The rounds he talks about most are the bad ones.

They can make mistakes, lose $20 million in the simulation, and nothing real happens. But they learn. That kind of learning, especially when performance tanks and they have to understand why, is something we can't replicate through lectures alone.Ricardo Flores, Associate Professor