Traditional business games are of the so-called black-box type (BBBS=Black box business
simulator); that is to say, the internal structure which generates the results of the simulation after
decision-making is not known. As a result, the player normally operates by trial and error and bases
his decisions on the symptoms of the problem (the observed behaviors of the system's variables)
and not on the real causes of the problem (the system's structure). Since 1988 José A.D. Machuca
has insisted that the business games based on System Dynamics models should be Transparent-box
business simulators (TBBSs). That means that, during the game, the user has access to the structure
of the underlying model and is able to relate it to the observed behaviors. The hypothesis is that
such transparency would facilitate causal reflection and favor systemic learning of business
problems.
In 1990, the G.I.D.E.A.O. Research Group took action on this idea and centered one of its
lines of research on this matter, with three main objectives: a) Creation of TBBSs, b) Introduction
of TBBSs in undergraduate and graduate Management courses as well as in executive training, c)
Experimentation in controlled environments in order to test the hypothesis mentioned in the above
paragraph. Now, ten years after the birth of the idea, we would like to share in this paper the results
obtained during that period
