There are moments in team and leadership development that refuse to stay in the training room. They travel home with people, sit at the kitchen table, and quietly alter the course of relationships. This is the story of one such moment.
A global pharmaceutical company had gathered twelve factory managers on an emergingleaders programme. They were competent, seasoned professionals who had spent the pandemic years producing vaccines under relentless pressure, often inisolation, rarely in conversation with peers. The organisation wanted more than another webinar on “communication skills”. It wanted people to seethemselves—and each other—more clearly.
So the cohort met not in a hotel conference room but in a virtual mine. Using Jenson8’s Apollo simulation, they were dropped into a shared crisis: miners trapped underground,systems failing, time visibly running out. Headsets had been couriered to homes,cameras were on, and the odd intimacy of being alone together began.
The loudest voicein the room
As the scenario began,the familiar friction of uncertainty appeared. People spoke over each other.Some reached for control, others withdrew. The audio channel filled with overlapping attempts to make sense of maps, roles, and alarms.
One voice cut throughall the others. Let us call him Peter. Senior, experienced, already known toseveral colleagues as a trainer and authority figure, he did what he had always done: he became the loudest person in the room. He issued instructions, directed traffic, and filled any moment of silence with more words. Leadership, for Peter, had become indistinguishable from continuous talking.
At the same time,another pattern was playing out almost invisibly. Daniel, quieter, more tentative, had moved quickly to a transit panel and on to an escape pod. While others debated, he quietly assembled the components needed to move the mission forward. His contribution was decisive. His impact, however, was largely unnoticed.
The round ended in a kind of exhausted confusion. No one felt particularly successful. Yet the realwork had only just begun.
“I couldn’t tellyou because you didn’t stop talking”
In the debrief, Peter did what senior people often do in groups: he took the floor. He wanted an explanation. Why had Daniel “left his station”? Where had he gone? Why had he not stayed where Peter expected him to be? The questions were less about curiosity than about control.
The group went quiet .Cameras showed a dozen faces suddenly still. Daniel shifted in his chair,visibly uncomfortable. It took gentle prompting from the facilitator to coax out his account of what had actually happened: the transit panel, the escapepod, the components quietly being assembled while others talked.
Peter’s reaction was to push further. Why had Daniel not told the group? Why had he not said he was leaving his station? The assumption beneath the questions was clear: if Peterdid not know about it, it had not really happened.
It landed with a kind of stunned silence. What had been background noise—the constant dominance of one voice—suddenly came into focus. Daniel had found just enough courage,supported by the structure of the debrief, to name what everyone else had been tip toeing around.
Absence as data
Peter’s first responsewas not enlightenment. It was indignation. He announced that in the next roundhe would say nothing at all and with drew into a sulk. It is easy to judge that reaction, but it is also human. To discover that your well‑practised way of helping might actually be hindering others is a deeply uncomfortable experience.
The second round began with roles rotated and Peter largely silent. Something interesting happened.The conversation spread. More people spoke. Decisions were shared. The team performed better. The improvement was not miraculous, but it was noticeable.
In research terms, the simulation had just provided a small but clear experiment: the same system,slightly different configuration of behaviour, measurably different outcome. Peter’s absence had become data.
When self‑image collides with evidence
The second debrief had a different tone. Peter’s voice, when he finally used it, was quieter, his face flushed. This time he did not issue instructions. He asked a question: “Do I not listen to people?”
It is a deceptively simple sentence. Behind it sits a collision between self‑image and evidence. In Peter’s mind, he was the one keeping things moving, the person others relied on. In the simulation, he had been the person others could not get past.
Daniel answered with the kind of unvarnished honesty that rarely appears without psychological safety: “No. You talk over people.”
The crucial moment was not Daniel’s courage alone, but Peter’s response. Instead of defending himself,he apologised. He acknowledged that the team had performed better without his running commentary. And he expressed something that often remains unspoken in leadership programmes: a genuine desire to change, not because someone told him to, but because the evidence had become impossible to ignore.
What Jenson8 is really doing
From the outside, it might look like “just a VR game”. Twelve people in headsets, moving digital avatars around a virtual mine, debriefing on video. Under the surface, several important mechanisms are at work.
In Peter’s case,Apollo exposed a blind spot that traditional feedback had failed to touch for years. In Daniel’s case, it provided a protected space to practise speaking upto authority and to discover that the sky did not fall in when he did.
When the head set comes off
The real test of any development experience is what happens afterwards. For the HR lead, the firstsign was startling enough: Peter, who had declined coaching for a decade,proactively asked for it. That alone suggested a shift from “I am fine as I am”to “I have work to do.”
The second sign came later, in an email. Peter had gone home and asked his wife a version of the same question he had asked Daniel: “Do I not listen?” Her answer was blunt.They talked. He made a commitment to try to change, not just as a manager but as a husband. He ended by suggesting that the workshop might have saved his marriage.
It is tempting to dramatise that line, but perhaps it is more useful to treat it as a reminder. Leadership is not a separate persona we put on between nine and five. The habits we rehearse at work—talking over people, or making space for them—travel with us into every room we enter.
Jenson8’s contributionin this story is not simply the provision of a clever piece of technology. Itis the creation of a space in which people can safely collide with the truthabout themselves—and then decide what to do with it. In a world full of leaders who are still talking, it is sometimes the quiet sentence, spoken in a debrief after a virtual mine rescue, that changes the most.