Tango Conceptual Update

Published: 2013

This paper is intended for those, who wish to understand more about the conceptual
foundations of the Celemi Tango™ simulation. It addresses some of the hard questions that
both new facilitators and customers may ask:

• Why do people and customers in Tango “behave” as they do?
• Does the simulation fit with reality?
• What is the empirical evidence for the way competitive advantage is simulated?
• Does it make business sense to treat people well?

Tango is the world’s first business simulation of a phenomenon, which most people had only vague ideas about twenty years ago. Since then, the business simulation has trained more than 70 000 managers around the world, making it one of the most spread board-based business simulations in the world.

Tango simulates the business logic of what we today call the Knowledge Intensive Firm (KIF). Knowledge Intensive Services have since been one of the fastest growing industry segments in Western industrialized economies, and its share of GDP and employment has grown from less than 10% in 1980, to more than 40% today in the trendsetting Nordic countries and the UK.