Classroom simulations for practical judgment
Phronon is a small family of classroom simulations that put students and professionals inside real decisions — ethical, organizational, social — and then hold up a mirror to how they decided. Not another lecture. A place to do the thing that good teaching is supposed to build.
The name comes from phronesis — Aristotle’s word for practical wisdom: the ability to judge well in concrete, messy, one-off situations where no rule quite fits. Phronesis can’t be transmitted in a slide. It is built by deciding, getting it wrong, and reflecting — again and again.
Every Phronon tool works the same way. It drops a learner into a situation that demands a call — whom to lay off, how to act when the group is split, how to redesign a failing organization — and then makes the reasoning visible. The learning is not in being told the answer. It is in the space between the options, where judgment actually happens.
That is also why our mark is a switch caught mid-slide: not on, not off, but weighing. Across ethics, leadership, organizations, inequality, controversy and group decision-making, the common thread is one practiced capacity — judgment under real constraints.
Seven tools, one philosophy. Each runs independently — use one, or the whole set.
Moral judgment under pressure.
A five-minute, student-facing scenario that forces a moral call, then surfaces how students reason about responsibility and blame. A fast, vivid opener for any ethics discussion.
Open Drawbridge Drama →Productive disagreement, by design.
From a short survey it forms discussion groups so that each group holds genuinely opposing views — engineering the conditions for real debate instead of polite consensus.
Open Controversy Generator →Your leadership style repertoire.
A self-assessment that maps the range of leadership styles a person can actually draw on — opening reflection on defaults, blind spots, and untried registers.
Open LSR Profiler →Deciding who goes.
An ethical decision-making simulation: participants must choose whom to let go, and then confront the criteria they actually used — efficiency, fairness, loyalty, need.
Open Layoff Exercise →Seeing the distribution.
An interactive simulation of wealth and income inequality that turns abstract distributions into something tangible, manipulable, and genuinely debatable.
Open Inequality Explorer →Survive together — or not at all.
A team survival exercise. Groups must reach consensus on how to act in a life-or-death scenario, exposing how groups really decide under uncertainty and time pressure.
Open Whiteout →Redesign the organization.
Restructure a company across 52 simulated weeks, balancing performance, fairness, and finances — sustained practical judgment about organizations under real constraints.
Open Orgdesignsim →Phronon is a cost-recovery project run by one educator. Pricing is meant to cover hosting and development and a fair return on the work — nothing more. Academic rates are kept well below corporate ones.
1 tool of choice
All paid tools
One credit = one class created
Indicative prices. Online sign-up and payment are coming soon — for now, to arrange access for a course or pilot, just email info@phronon.org.
Tell me your course and group size and I’ll help you pick the right simulation.
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