20 of the best and brightest graduate students in the Netherlands gathered at the Rijswijk offices at Tuesday 3rd May for a Shell in-house day. They are participating in the Best Graduate Game, organised by Memory Group, to compete for who is the Best Graduate of 2016, with phenomenal prices for the selected winner. During the in-house day, Perspectivity facilitated its Nexus! challenge on energy, water and food. Marianne Derksen and Herman van der Meyden were the gameleaders. The students were observed during the game by Shell’s recruiters, which was part of their assessment for the competition.
The students really enjoyed participating in the Nexus Game. The facilitators were impressed by their comparatively high table scores and many lessons were drawn afterwards about the difficulty of getting genuine dialogue going given the time pressure of the game. The students acknowledged the need to organize time for interaction, even when there are many short-term distractors that are related to running one’s own business. Afterwards, the students commented strongly on Herman’s independent remarks that McKinsey consultants thought “the game is teaching communism”, whereas WWF representatives felt it was too capitalist in the past. It must be a matter of perspective.