The Sureuro Gaming Exercise: designing a game for sustainable refurbishment by housing companies

J. Design Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2006 201

Copyright © 2006 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

The Sureuro Gaming Exercise: designing a game for sustainable refurbishment by housing companies

Ellen van Bueren* and Haiko van der Voort Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, P.O. Box 5015 2600, GA Delft, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author

Nienke Maas TNO Built Environment and Geosciences, P.O. Box 49 2600, AA Delft, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: The Sureuro Gaming Exercise (SGE) is a management game designed to show managers of housing companies how sustainable urban renewal involves organisational change in addition to different operational decisions. This paper presents how the SGE has been set up to help managers of housing companies make sustainable design choices at operational, tactical and strategic level. In the development of the game a paradoxical choice has been made: to communicate the complex set of lessons about designing sustainable refurbishment plans, a well-structured game has been developed, while the design of sustainable refurbishment plans requires an open approach to planning and decision-making.

Keywords: game design; sustainable urban renewal; housing companies; decision-making.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: van Bueren, E., van der Voort, H. and Maas, N. (2006) ‘The Sureuro Gaming Exercise: designing a game for sustainable refurbishment by housing companies’, J. Design Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp.201–223.

Biographical notes: Ellen van Bueren is a Researcher at Policy, Organisation and Management at Delft University of Technology. Her research, consultancy and teaching concentrate on decision-making and policy-making, in particular in the domain of the built environment and in the field of sustainable development.

Haiko van der Voort is an Assistant Professor in the School of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He has published on decision-making processes and gaming in a multi-actor context. His publications include articles on system innovation, benchmarking and gaming on sustainable urban renewal projects.

202 E. van Bueren, H. van der Voort and N. Maas

Nienke Maas is a Researcher at TNO Delft. She conducts research on innovation in the built environment, including product-, process- and system innovation.

1 Introduction

Games can fulfill an important role in knowledge transfer. They offer participants a safe environment in which they can learn and experiment and experience lessons as if they were trained-on-the-job. This paper analyses how a game has been developed to communicate a complex set of lessons on sustainable refurbishment of residential estates to managers of housing companies. The lessons are complex for two reasons. First, because they deal with an ambiguous concept, sustainable refurbishment, a concept that is of such an all-embracing character that it can be everything and nothing and it is up to housing companies to make something meaningful out of it. Second, because the environment in which European housing companies operate has become much more dynamic in the past years. Housing companies are in search for a new role in this environment; a role in which they try to balance their public tasks with market demands and financial accountability requirements.

This paper will show how the SGE has been designed to teach housing companies to design sustainable refurbishment plans within the changing environment in which they operate. Section 2 will start with an exploration of the background of the sustainable refurbishment challenge for housing companies in Europe and the lessons learned in the Sureuro project for the organisation and management of sustainable refurbishment, Sureuro being an acronym for Sustainable Refurbishment in Europe. Section 3 will focus on the question why a game has been selected as method to communicate the lessons and gives an account of the games played. The critical choices made in developing the game will be discussed in Section 4. In Section 5, the game will be presented and explained. Section 6 will present the tools that have been developed in support of the game design choices. Section 7 will discuss how the game design choices have contributed to the transfer of the lessons to be learned in the game and how this contribution can be improved. The paper will end with a conclusion in Section 8 about how the game design communicated complex lessons on the design of sustainable refurbishment.

2 The sustainable refurbishment challenge for housing companies

The design of refurbishment plans is one of the core activities of housing companies. As owner of the land and the buildings and as landlord and service provider for the tenants they are expected to manage, maintain and improve the buildings and rental units in such a way that it meets the quality requirements prescribed in regulations and requested by the tenants. Refurbishment refers to improvements of the units or buildings that are beyond normal management and maintenance cycles. Refurbishment can be small scale or large scale, with small or large effects on the buildings and the tenants, depending on the size of the operation. For example, a refurbishment operation might range from the replacement of window frames and the adding of an elevator to the demolition and rebuilding of entire blocks of flats.

The Sureuro Gaming Exercise 203

Two developments in the past decade have contributed to the complication of the design of refurbishment plans. The first is that the environment in which housing companies operate has changed drastically and has become more ambiguous and complex. Under influence of the new public management paradigm the social housing sector throughout Europe has been privatised and decentralised while the housing markets have become more dynamic and demand driven. At the same time, housing companies are expected to continue to perform public tasks while operating under market-like pressures and constraints.

The second development is the increased ambiguity of these public tasks. With the growing complexity of society, the question what these public tasks should be cannot be answered clearly. This is because different, often conflicting, perceptions of these public tasks co-exist. This makes these tasks ambiguous, which is reflected in the concept of sustainable development. By demanding a refurbishment project to be sustainable, different and competing values are addressed, ranging from economic prosperity of the estate and the tenants living in it to the energy performance of the buildings and the car dependency of the tenants.

Throughout Europe, housing companies are struggling with sustainable refurbishment. It is estimated that about 56 million apartments built after 1945 in Europe are in dire need of refurbishment (Eriksson and Dekker, 2000). Many of these estates were built in the decades after the Second World War, as a response to the housing shortage. The medium and high rise estates were constructed in an industrial way and introduced a modern way of living, reflecting the trend of separating functions in urban design that was fashionable in those days. Soon after construction, however, these estates were subject to cycles of technical, social and financial decline, affecting the estates, the tenants, and the viability of the estates (Wassenberg et al., 2004, p.11). Problems had to do with issues such as the poor construction and low quality material use, with the inadequate design of the apartments and the public spaces in the buildings and in the estates, with the poor location of the estates, with the homogenous groups of tenants, with the high maintenance costs of the estates, etc., and some of these problems were reinforced by government policies and socio-economic trends (Wassenberg et al., 2004, p.11).

The owners of the estates, usually (formerly) public housing companies, addressed the problems of their estates with measures that aimed to improve the design and the functioning of the design. Two reasons can be identified for this response. The first is that many of the problems have their origins in the design and construction of the estates and the buildings. The second is that many of the housing companies, operating as traditional social landlords, only have the capacity to solve the problems with solutions in the physical sphere of improved design and maintenance. However, the success of such refurbishment projects is not guaranteed, and refurbishment cycles of less then ten years are not unusual whereas 30 years is considered to be the norm. Without addressing the climate feeding the decline, problems soon became visible again.

Housing companies, as owners and managers of a substantial part of the existing multi-storey housing stock in Europe, are key players in refurbishment projects. Why are housing companies not able to effectively address problem with parts of their housing stock? Various factors can be identified, having to do with a changing role of housing companies in a changed society.

Traditionally, housing companies were not-for-profit organisations operating as social landlords in a rather strict legal framework, organisations designed to operate in a


relatively stable environment in which they build and maintain dwellings and collect rent. In recent years, both the environment and the conditions under which housing companies operate have changed considerably. Housing was one of the many sectors subject to trends of decentralisation and privatisation in the 1990s. Also in the housing sector this led to the paradoxical result of more legal freedom and greater financial self-reliance combined with increased supervision over their (financial) performance and accountability. In the same period, European housing markets have changed drastically under influence of economic growth and changed individual housing preferences, resulting in decreased market share of social rented housing. The negative image of many of the high rise neighbourhoods and the increased availability of alternative housing result in vacancies and a tenant population that cannot afford to move out (Gruis, 2002, p.246).

Despite the decentralisation and privatisation processes, today’s housing companies are still considered to uphold their role as social landlords, providing adequate housing and safe and pleasant living environments for their tenants. In the late 1980s the concept of ‘sustainable development’ arose, adding issues of environment, citizen participation and cultural heritage to the concern of housing companies. The expectations from refurbishment are high: with refurbishment, housing companies are expected to solve a variety of problems and contribute to a range of values embodied in the concept of sustainable refurbishment, such as ecological, socio-economic, democratic and aesthetic values, values from which competing and sometimes even conflicting demands and constraints for refurbishment projects can be derived.

In short, housing companies are in a transitional phase, facing problems for which their organisation is not (yet) equipped to provide adequate responses. The changing role and conditions under which housing companies operate result in a paradoxical challenge: housing companies should professionalise in a business-like manner to respond to private sector demands, while serving public, non-commercial values (Gruis, 2002, p.246).

The conflicting values mentioned above become explicit in concrete refurbishment projects, in which housing companies pursue sustainability objectives. The design of sustainable refurbishment plans involves making choices between a variety of short and long-term goals that may be conflicting and competing. To sustain, these goals can no longer merely be made at the operational level, in the design team working on the project, but have to be consistent with the policies pursued at the strategic level of the organisation. For example, a refurbished estate in which a lot of attention is devoted to improve the energy performance is not likely to perform very well in the long run when a poor image of the estate results in vacancies and perhaps an early end-of-life. Also, achievement of the energy performance goals may require structural and cultural changes in the organisation, such as creating a positive attitude of the staff towards energy saving, facilitating energy monitoring and feedback of the monitoring results to the tenants, and the development of a marketing strategy, including hiring the expertise needed for delivering such services.

3 Sureuro: the project and the gaming exercise

In the project Sustainable Refurbishment in Europe (Sureuro), housing companies and research institutes from seven European countries have developed and exchanged tools and methods that help housing companies to sustainably refurbish their assets.

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240523610_Portfolio_Management_in_the_Social_Rented_Sector_Valuation_Risk_Analysis_and_Strategy_Development?el=1_x_8&enrichId=rgreq-486de074-7304-46b6-b363-4c6fda25cec6&enrichSource=Y292ZXJQYWdlOzIzMTM2MjM3OTtBUzo5NzAzODgwNDk3OTcyMEAxNDAwMTQ3MjYyNzUx


It was initiated in 1998 and has been supported by the Fifth Framework Program of the European Commission. In the project partners from seven countries participated: Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, England and France. Table 1 shows the pilot refurbishment projects that have been used to improve and test the tools. The tools have also been transferred to partners from the Czech Republic and Italy.

Table 1 Overview of pilot projects in which the Sureuro partners have tested and improved the tools

Country Housing company

Pilot project (city)

Features pilot project

Refurbishment ambitions

Best practice housing company

Sweden Kalmarhem Inspektoren Kalmar

160 units 5 buildings 1955

Improved environmental performance

Ecological refurbishment

Finland VVO Sauvatie Vantaa

162 units 6 buildings early 1970s

Maintenance program supported/carried out by tenants

Prevention of refurbishment by monitoring and maintenance

Denmark AKB Taastrupgaard Taastrup


Physical and socio-economic upgrade estate

Co-production of refurbishment with tenants

Germany LUWOGE Brunck Viertel Ludwigshafen

400 units 42 buildings 1936/1955

(Ecological) regeneration of the estate

Development of innovative technologies

Netherlands Wonen Centraal

Planetenbuurt Alphen a.d. Rijn

600 units 6 buildings 1960s/1970s

Upgrading and repositioning of the estate

Strategic asset/ portfolio management

UK SMBC The Lyng Estate Sandwell


Comprehensive regeneration

Community involvement

France Logirep Pont Blanc Sevran


Improved estate and environmental awareness

Neighbourhood management

One of the focal points of the Sureuro project was to exchange and improve tools for the organisation and management of sustainable refurbishment projects. The tools and methods used in SGE are the result of research carried out within this programme. The tools and methods for sustainable refurbishment range from practical design tools to be used by architects and engineers to complex multi-criteria analysis methods to be used by specialists in certain fields. The toolbox also includes tools for the organisation and management of sustainable refurbishment, including a portfolio management method that helps housing companies to develop, assess and implement a marketing strategy and a method for property and facility management.

Two important ‘tools’ for the organisation and management of refurbishment that were developed in the project were concerned with the ongoing operation of the housing company instead of the management of the incidental refurbishment project. One was a comprehensive method for portfolio management or strategic asset management that aimed to improve the sustainability performance of the housing stock by formulating sustainability targets for parts of the stock that were compatible with and supported


by the market profile of those parts. The other involved a method for property and facility management that aimed to improve the sustainability performance of the housing stock by improved monitoring and assessment of the condition of the housing stock and by improving the sustainability performance of tools for monitoring and maintenance.

Use of these tools requires organisational adaptation. It may involve the setting up of new departments, e.g., for exploring the market, for communicating with tenants, it may require new channels of communication between departments, new technologies for monitoring, training of staff to operate these new technologies, it may induce a need for other forms of management information, it may induce feedback loops and other couplings between decisions on strategic, tactical and operational level, etc.

In the Sureuro project, the central message of the research on the management and organisation of sustainable refurbishment projects was therefore that the design of sustainable refurbishment plans involves changes throughout the organisation of the housing company to be able to meet the call for a sustainable housing stock and to meet the demands as set by the market in which they operate.

Instead of ready-to-use tools, the tools promote a different approach to the tasks of a housing company and the way in which these tasks can be performed. This approach and the tools that support this approach, such as the tools for portfolio management and property and facility management, are difficult to communicate in a traditional way, in the form of lessons that can be communicated in a one-way format to an audience. Rather the approach promotes a learning process by housing companies that involves a changed perception of the roles and tasks of a housing company, a changed attitude towards the tenant and an ability to translate the ambiguous concept of sustainability into concrete measures in the design of refurbishment projects. A learning process of this kind can better be taught through experience.

A gaming exercise offers participants the opportunity to get acquainted with this learning process. Participants in a gaming exercise can experience the need and relevance of lessons and the simulated environment provides the opportunity to transfer the lessons in all their complexity. For the transfer of the lessons about the design of sustainable refurbishment the SGE has been developed. As decision-makers, managers of housing companies are confronted with the multitude of values and wishes resulting from the ambiguous concept of sustainable refurbishment, many of which are competing or conflicting. In SGE, participants learn to cope with the multiple values and wishes in decision-making.

The game also offered the opportunity to introduce participants, managers of housing companies, to the tools that might support them in the learning process about sustainable refurbishment. The toolbox developed in the Sureuro project contains a wide variety of methods and tools. From a mere description of the tools it is difficult to grasp the essence of the tools, i.e., it is difficult to understand what a specific tool can do for a housing company in a specific situation. The selection of tools requires a profound understanding of the tools, of the conditions under which the tools can be used and of the consequences of using the tool, after all, using a new tool, even ‘simple’ ones, always involves some investment and commitment.

SGE has thus been developed for top and middle-managers of housing companies participating in the Sureuro project. In the game, they were familiarised with comprehensive methods for the sustainable organisation and management of the stock of a housing company. They could experience the impact of the use of such methods on an


organisation. The simulated environment, the game was played for a fictitious scenario, provided the participants the opportunity to get hands-on experience with some practical problems faced by a housing company that needs to develop and implement a sustainable strategy for refurbishing its housing stock.

The game has been played with top managers and middle-managers from the housing companies participating in the Sureuro project. After all, they were the envisaged first users of the toolbox. From 2002 to 2004, the game has been played six times with participants from the Sureuro partners (see Table 2).

Table 2 The six sessions of the Sureuro Gaming Exercise

Location Country Participants Date Helsinki Finland (pilot version) Top executives of the seven

housing companies May 2002

Sandwell England SMBC March 2003 Ludwigshaven Germany Luwoge June 2003 Kalmar Sweden Kalmarhem September 2003 Copenhagen Denmark AKB/Logirep December 2003 Alphen a/d Rijn The Netherlands WonenCentraal June 2004

4 Principles for designing the Sureuro Gaming Exercise (SGE)

Games come in different types and kinds. Game development is a conscious activity that needs to be undertaken with great care. Two questions should guide the game development:

• What development principles can be derived from the learning goal of the game?

• What consequences do these principles have for the game?

4.1 Principles for game design

As stated, the SGE has been developed to create an appropriate learning environment in which participants could experience lessons about the organisation and management of sustainable refurbishment. First, the game should offer an environment in which participants are confronted with the competing demands with which the management of a housing company is confronted, demands that come from within the housing company (internal) and from the environment in which the housing company operates (external). Second, it should offer an environment in which participants are confronted with the ambiguous character of sustainability and in which participants learn to systematically take into account the consequences of their decisions for sustainability. The first question guiding the game design then is how can the game be designed in support of this goal?

To answer this question, we first turn to Raser, who distinguishes four reasons to prefer a game approach over learning in reality (Raser, 1969, pp.15–19). The first two are economy and safety, which have to do with the notion that mistakes in reality can be expensive in multiple ways. The other two reasons are visibility and reproducibility. Games would aid visibility by making certain kinds of phenomena more accessible for observation and measurement, and by introducing clarity into what is otherwise complex,


chaotic, or confused. Games would enable the participant to experiment with variables of the simulated system to derive probabilities about the way the system works. In more simple words, this means that after having participated in the game, participants should be able to recognise situations in reality that are comparable to situations that they encountered in the game. In addition, they should be able to react to these situations in a better way, for example by not making the same mistakes as they made in the game, or by reproducing solutions that ‘worked’ in the simulated environment. Therefore ‘visibility’ and ‘reproducibility’ are very important goals for designing the SGE.

There is another body of literature from which principles for the development of the SGE can be derived: that of process management (e.g., Glasbergen, 1995; de Bruijn et al., 2002; Koppenjan and Klijn, 2004). Process management is concerned with the management of interactions and decision-making on issues for which no clear-cut solutions are available and that need to be addressed by collaborative action, i.e., that cannot be solved by a single actor, an organisation or an organisational department. From this perspective, decision-making about sustainable refurbishment is a process of interaction between different stakeholders. Within process management literature, considerable attention is paid to rules for interaction according to which the process of interaction, negotiation and decision-making should take place. Many of these rules have to do with protecting the integrity and the core values of the different stakeholders involved in a process (de Bruijn et al., 2002, pp.105–123). Conforming to this way of thought, the following two process rules for the game can be formulated.

The first process rule is that of respecting subjectivity. The question whether or not a certain decision is ‘sustainable’ is subject to discussion and is highly subjective. First, certain solutions could be seen as sustainable from an ecologic point of view, but not from a health point of view. For example, the insulation of dwellings resulted in substantial energy savings, but also contributed to unhealthy indoor climates. And also when the focus is on one dimension of sustainability, there may be several experts or scientific methods that fail to provide a definite or authoritative answer as to what is sustainable.

Second, estates have specific characteristics, which have to do with the physical traits of the location and of the buildings, but also with the tenant population occupying the buildings and the broader spatial and socio-economic characteristics of the surroundings. Solutions that work in one estate may not work in other estates and might even deteriorate the sustainability performance of estates with different conditions.

And third, strategic decision-making processes are dynamic (Mintzberg, 2003; de Bruijn and ten Heuvelhof, 2000, pp.32–37): the best solutions of today might not last during the process. This certainly is the case in decision-making about sustainable refurbishment. Changes in perception of sustainability highly affect social and technological solutions. For example, in the beginning of the 1990s, the reuse of drinking water used in the shower or washing machine, so-called grey water, for non-potable purposes, such as watering the garden or washing the car, was considered as a great potential for water saving and led to the development of separated piping structures for dwellings, but has been criticised for causing health risks by the end of the 1990s, when the issue of health gained priority over water-saving on the political agenda.

Because sustainability issues are containing multiple competing values and are dynamic, the game should avoid forcing participants to come up with the ‘best’ solution. Instead, the game design should stimulate participants to respect subjectivity.


The second process rule is related to the first and is concerned with respecting individuality. Because participants have much knowledge and expertise on the subject, i.e., refurbishment, the solutions offered in the game should provide room for individual and professional interpretations. The game should not try to instruct tailor-made solutions for managing sustainable refurbishment to participants, but should aim to stimulate participants to come up with their own solutions. After all, also in reality they have to come up with their own solutions in which they try to make use of the specific opportunities offered by the location and by the decision-making context. What the game should do, is to hand participants a way or method, again, not the method, by which they can produce solutions by themselves. When it comes to sustainability, the SGE should pose the question “How to address sustainability in decision-making” instead of answering the question “What is a sustainable decision?” This final point is also crucial for the acceptance of the game by the participants and therefore their willingness to learn from it.

4.2 Resulting consequences and choices for the game

The principles mentioned in this section have guided our game design and they have had several repercussions for the choices we have made, which we will now present and discuss.

Select an appropriate level of abstraction. For reproducibility reasons the abstraction level should be not too high to make it relatively easy for participants to bridge the gap between the reality of the game and the reality ‘outside’. This has consequences for the simulation, for it should represent reality rather than simplify it. Still, simplification is unavoidable and, for example, the simulated decision-making process should be shortened considerably. Decision-making about refurbishment projects takes years and the simulation time is limited. The game procedures (and the underlying model) should be designed to overcome these differences between reality and the game reality, while staying acceptable (and recognisable) for game participants at the same time. These procedures should not hinder essential decisions to be made.

Restrict complexity of decision-making to the internal processes of a housing company, and address the environment as ‘ceteris paribus’. Making the simulated environment as concrete as possible has consequences for the scope. What should be simulated and what not? Without being selective in this, the game would lack focus. It would be hard to communicate about learning effects afterwards, because there are just too many variables involved that would probably have affected the decisions being discussed. We have chosen to simulate decision-making within a housing company by having participants act as consultants hired by the board of the company. The consultants should advise the board on the desirable strategy of the company including the position of sustainable refurbishment herein and on the implementation of this strategy on the operational level, i.e., by advising on the concrete refurbishment of specific buildings. Information on the environment, for example on municipal policies and local market information is provided by the game host. This information on the environment will be provided in the beginning of the game and during the game on request of the participants. The complexity in the game thus has a focus on the multiplicity of wishes and values, which, to a certain extent, have been predefined in the game.


Invest in visualisation of the lessons learned. A possible drawback of a low level of abstraction is that the lessons learned lack ‘stickiness’. The game tries to stay close to reality, but because the participants are confronted with concrete problems and choices during they game, they may think that the lessons are too specific to be of value to them in other situations. To overcome this problem, a couple of visualisation tools have been developed, like the use of assessment models for sustainability and the use of sheets for the containment of former decisions. We will discuss these tools in Sections 5 and 6.

Assess the process instead of the products of decision-making. How to assess a decision-making process shaped by experts about a subjective and dynamic concept? This depends upon the learning goal, which in this case is not predefined as a substantial product to respect subjectivity and individuality. An assessment of the game should offer participants an opportunity to share experiences and to reflect on their decisions collectively. Such a reflexive debate will be more valuable than using the assessment to draw a final lesson for the game participants formulated by the game developers beforehand; an assessment should be the start of a reflection, not the end of the game session.

In the SGE we have therefore developed an assessment model that aims to facilitate training, rather than to simulate reality for experimentation or prediction (Cecchini and Rizzi, 2001). The assessment criteria in this model are broadly defined and contain a mixture of scores that reflect

• the extent to which basic business requirements have been met, which is expressed in performance scores for cost-effectiveness and return-on-investment, but also by score for the consistency of decision-making throughout the game

• the extent to which sustainability has been addressed in decision-making, which is measured by (tentative) sustainability scores

• the extent to which the process of interactions amongst the team members and the management thereof has created an atmosphere that stimulated substantive deliberation and learning, which is addressed with scores for aspects like team work, enthusiasm and management skills of the chair of each group of consultants.

This section has shown which principles have guided us in the design of the game and to what concrete choices these principles have led. For the sake of transferring our knowledge on and experience with game design we have presented our game design process as a theoretical and sequential exercise, but in reality this design process consisted of numerous iterative steps between the formulation of the learning goals of the game, the development of the game environment and the development of the various tools to support participants in their learning process during the game that would also help them to remember the lessons learned afterwards. The following section will introduce you to the game as it has been played with housing companies from various European countries.

5 The Sureuro reality for a day

Consider that you are a participant of the SGE. You are welcomed by the game host who explains to you that you will form teams of consultants that will compete with each other for a tender of a housing company, in which you are asked to advise the housing


company on sustainable refurbishment of its housing stock on a strategic and on an operational level. To prepare an offer, the teams have to complete several assignments. The team with the best offer, in substantive and, more importantly, in process terms, is hired by the housing company.

The programme takes a day and starts with a plenary session in which the scenario is explained to you. Your team must do a couple of assignments, eventually resulting in a final plenary presentation that ideally leads to the appointment of your team as the winner.

5.1 Scenario and assignments

You will give the advice to the housing company New Wave, which is located in the municipality of Surropolis. Surropolis has eight disadvantaged town districts in need of refurbishment. The first large scale refurbishment project will take place in the Music District, in which New Wave owns approximately 55% of the housing stock. You already have a detailed description of the history, facilities, inhabitants and housing of this district, as well as an indication how sustainable the district is at the moment. Your team is asked to produce an offer in which the following elements are listed:

SGE Part I Strategy development (two hours)

1 Develop a strategic framework for New Wave (including a mission, a vision, and a strategy and pay explicit attention to sustainability)

2 Define indicators for monitoring the performance of the housing company (including sustainability indicators)

3 Analyse the market and position of the current products (housing) in the market

4 (Re)allocate staff and budget required to manage and organise the housing association with new enthusiasm

5 Develop a draft refurbishment plan for the Music district.

SGE Part II Developing a sustainable refurbishment plan (two hours)

6 Develop a refurbishment plan of a complex in the Music district

SGE Part III Presentation and assessment of your advice (one hour)

7 Present your advice on strategy and refurbishment to New Wave

8 The board of New Wave – played by the game hosts, not the participants – will assess the competing offers.

5.2 Part I: the construction of a strategic framework

In the first session your team will be confronted with a detailed list of questions to guide you through steps 1–5, structured along the portfolio management model as developed in the Sureuro project (see Section 3, see also van Bueren et al., 2004). This model presents strategic decision-making regarding housing portfolio in logical steps, which help a housing company develop a strategic framework and create the conditions needed for implementation of the strategy.


The strategic framework is important, because it will be conditional for operational decisions to be made later on (in part II). Therefore each decision made by your team will be written down on sheets. This makes past decisions visible and it is easier to refer to them in discussions coming up.

To help you, you are provided with various tools. For taking the first step, to develop a strategic framework, you are supported with four different profiles from which you can choose or be inspired to formulate your own profile. To take the third and fourth step you will have to invest. You have to decide how much money you think the information on the market and on your current assets is worth, but remember, your budget is limited and you have an expensive refurbishment project ahead of you. To help you position your housing stock, your game host will introduce you to a portfolio management method that you can use for this. In the fifth step you are asked to reserve money for the refurbishment and/or maintenance of specific building blocks.

5.3 Part II: refurbishment of a housing block

After a break you will re-enter your team office and you will see that the strategic decisions made in the first part created a history for New Wave. You are now asked to make a refurbishment plan for a specific housing block in the Music District, selected by the Board of New Wave. There are three major constraints that you should take into account:

• The strategic choices made in the morning session: It is important to be consistent in your decision-making; if not, New Wave could have problems in being recognised by its environment (i.e., the market, governments, societal groups).

• The budget: you have reserved money for the building block that is selected. You can also use money that you did not spend in the morning session and, if you have made clever decisions during this session, you have got some extra budget as a bonus.

• Time: you have just two hours to make many operational decisions that logically follow from your strategic decisions from part I and that show internal consistency as well. Examples of operational decisions are the extent to which the building is refurbished: e.g., just the refurbishment of apartments or the stripping and re-parcelling of the building into apartments; the replacement of glazing by double glazing or the installment of a different energy system; improving the accessibility of the building by adding an elevator or by making more entries; etc. Within these time limits it is a challenge to make balanced decisions.

Part II is built up around so-called feature sheets (which will be explained in Section 5) with options for renovation with different influences on budget and sustainability. You will get an indication of the impact of decisions on sustainability. If you have opted to spend money on acquiring information on the sustainability performance of your stock in the morning session, you will get feature sheets with much more specific information about the impacts.


5.4 Part III: presentation and assessment

The third part is the presentation of your advice to New Wave on their strategy and on the refurbishment of the buildings in the Music District, including the steps that brought you to your advice. The chairman of each team must present the results of SGE part I and II in a plenary setting. The audience consists of the board of New Wave as well as the competing teams. The board of New Wave assesses the offer, using the following criteria:

• consistency of the plan: logical line, solid and compact

• consequent thinking and acting in relation to ambition and available means

• completeness of the draft refurbishment plan

• teamwork: listening skills, collective analytical and problem-solving abilities

• presentation: ability to summarise logically

• enthusiasm.

Throughout the game, your team will be assisted by a game host, a person who has knowledge of the game and who will introduce you to the tools that you can use to help you make your decisions.

6 Supporting tools

Without any help, participants would have a hard job in translating their strategic decisions made in part I in operational design choices to be made in part II. Complicating factor in bridging the first two parts of the game is the ambiguity of the concept ‘sustainability’. The game developers have had to prevent the participants from getting lost in the second part. This poses a challenge that is twofold:

• How to conceptualise and operationalise ‘sustainability’ for the game while respecting the design principles subjectivity and individuality?

• How to bridge the gap between the strategic dimension of decision-making to the operational design choices?

To support participants in their decision-making during the game, some tools have been developed. In this section we will describe three of them:

• a conceptualisation of ‘sustainability’, providing a first step to operationalise this ambiguous concept to refurbishment decisions

• the Sustainability Quality Index, providing the possibility to further operationalise sustainability and assess the decisions on sustainability scales

• the feature matrix, providing a structure for operational decision-making, representing the constraints regarding both sustainability and the values of the first part.


6.1 Conceptualising sustainability: four dimensions

Sustainable development is a concept that is often used, and in many ways. In SGE four dimensions of sustainability are distinguished, based on the common trias of people, planet and profit (van Bueren et al., 2004). A spatial dimension has been added as a fourth dimension, in the form of cultural sustainability, to emphasise the site specific character of refurbishment. Figure 1 visualises the four dimensions of sustainability.

The four sustainability dimensions distinguished are:

• Ecological sustainability. To improve the environmental performance of the housing company, its portfolio and of the tenants, e.g., by making more efficient use of natural resources, by improving the indoor and outdoor environmental quality (e.g., noise, moisture, air quality, comfort) and by reducing emissions and effects (CO2, sewage, household waste, storm water management).

• Cultural sustainability. To improve the spatial quality of the portfolio, e.g., by addressing issues as accessibility of buildings, the design quality of public spaces, the safeguarding of historic buildings, the development of a physical environment in which it is pleasant to stay (e.g., by paying attention to green structures, to traffic infrastructure, to the human size, to the identity of the buildings and the public space – to prevent anonymity, etc.).

• Social sustainability. To improve the social quality of a neighbourhood, e.g., by addressing issues as tenants’ needs, well being and lifestyles, involvement and commitment of the tenants to the neighbourhood, social safety (improve social safety, reduce crime and vandalism), the provision of services and facilities, improving coherence, reducing segregation, etc.

• Economic sustainability. To improve the economic performance of the housing company and its portfolio (e.g., improving the value of the portfolio, the return on investments, balancing the economic and technical lifetime of the portfolio, etc.), the economic performance of neighbourhoods (with spin-offs such as job creation, attracting services, etc.) and developing a healthy tenant economy (rent levels, maintenance fees, etc.).

Figure 1 Four dimensions of sustainability

These dimensions represent four different values within the concept ‘sustainability’. To make the refurbishment project ‘sustainable’, game participants should mind all these


four values equally. An extraordinary good score on just one of the dimensions does not add to ‘sustainability’ of the project as a whole. For example, the figure emphasises that the economic well-being of a housing company can be considered as a form of economic sustainability, enabling the housing company to finance ecological measures or social projects in the housing stock, which, in turn, may further strengthen the position of the portfolio in the market.

6.2 Operationalising sustainability: the Sustainable Quality Index (SQI)

The SQI is a tool that ranks refurbishment measures on the different sustainability dimensions (economic, social, cultural and ecological). The tool is based on the assumption that it is highly unlikely that a measure contributes equally to the four sustainability dimensions. Especially because these dimensions represent different values that often compete with each other for budget and attention, and that may also be in conflict with each other, the contribution to sustainability is often a trade-off between different values.

SQI is a tool that shows the performance of a measure on each of the sustainability dimensions. For example, the use of double glazing scores helps save energy and thus improves the ecological and the economic performance of housing, but may decrease the performance of a building on the cultural dimension because it will change the appearance of the façade. The different options for solving particular refurbishment problems and their sustainability score are presented on feature sheets, of which an example is given in Figure 5.

Based on experience and existing methods for assessment and classification of sustainability measures, five different options have been identified for the possible measures that can be taken to address a problem, see Figure 2. The first is the most recommended option from a sustainability point of view; the fifth is an unacceptable option. For the use of SQI we have to rank possible measures and their options on this scale beforehand. Of course this is delicate, because this ranking has to be accepted by the game participants and should be updated regularly. But participants are free to discuss the ranking and in the presentation of their advice they can convince New Wave of their own point of view.

Figure 2 Sustainability Quality Index for refurbishment measures

For each of the estates within the Music District portfolio an SQI level for the current condition of the estates has been set in a score card, see Figure 2. To improve the visibility of the effects of measures on the four dimensions, and especially to get a better view on the synergies and trade-offs between the different measures and their cumulative effects on the different values, the score card results are presented in a


‘sustainability web’ that shows the performance of the refurbishment plan on the four sustainability dimensions. Figure 3 presents an example of results presented in the sustainability web.

At the start of the drawing up of the refurbishment plan, at the beginning of part II, participants are given the current sustainability web of the estate, which helps the team to formulate ambitions and targets that they want to achieve with the refurbishment operation. By selecting options for refurbishment from the feature sheets, the teams develop their refurbishment plan, of which the expected results will also be presented in a sustainability web and in a bar chart using the same colours as the feature sheets (Figure 4). Together, the web and the bar chart give participants a clear and visible feedback on their choices and on the consistency of their choices, because the sustainability level desired and achieved has to match with the strategic ambitions and goals determined in part I of the game.

Figure 3 The sustainability web for the Music district

Figure 4 Bar chart with result on sustainability

At the end of the game the level or score on the SQI will be presented in a bar chart showing the difference in previous level, the defined ambition level and the level realised.

These visualisations simplify the complexities of sustainable decision-making in such a way, that it is possible to discuss them during the game, compare during the assessment and remember afterwards.


6.3 Operationalising strategic decisions: the feature matrix

The Feature Matrix contains renovation options for several features (like well being, water, energy, social safety, etc.). These features correspond with 11 of 12 specific policies given in SGE part 1. One is added: collaboration. Every feature has its own sheet. The layout of all the sheets is basically the same. Each sheet has subjects and for each subject three or more options are available. The order in which the options are arranged, makes the first option the least innovating. The middle option is an option ‘from our time’ and the last option is most progressive or innovative.

Figure 5 An example of a feature sheet: feature ‘Well Being’


On these sheets, each of the options that can be selected has an impact on sustainability. This impact can be either positive or negative. These impacts are scored in accordance with the Sustainable Quality Identification, from avoided options to accepted and recommended options. The scores range from –3 to +3. These scores are based on expert judgement, but are not meant to give an exact inside into the sustainability impact, just to give an idea of the impact of the different options.

For each choice participants have a clue to which sustainability issue is most affected. The issues correspond with the colours shown in the fifth column of the feature sheet (Figure 5). However, the exact impact of the decision remains unknown, unless participants have chosen the related policy in part I. If this is the case, the team will see the impact scores in the 6–9th column (Figure 5). All the other sheets are handed to the teams without these columns.

The feature sheets provide a structure for the decisions to be made, focussing on sustainability impacts and budget allocation, both conditioned by the strategic decisions made in the first part of the game.

7 Discussion of the game design choices

In the SGE managers of housing companies learned to cope with the multiple and competing values and wishes resulting from the ambiguous concept of sustainable refurbishment. They were confronted with what the sustainability concept can mean for the refurbishment of their stock and were made aware of the challenges posed by the concept. Sustainable refurbishment is not something that can be dealt with at merely an operational level; it involves decisions and processes throughout the housing company. In the game, participants experienced how sustainability goals are compatible with requirements set by the changing context and framework in which European housing companies operate and they were made familiar with tools that can help them define and implement ambitions and goals for the housing company.

In this paper we have presented the game from a developer’s perspective: how should the game be developed to transfer lessons on sustainable refurbishment to participants? We have made four choices that were crucial for the resulting game.

First, we have decided to keep the reality of the game, although simplified, close to the reality of the participants. This has resulted in a moderate level of abstraction: we have tried to make the game reality as concrete as possible by letting the participants draw up a strategy for a housing company and by letting them translate the strategy in a concrete refurbishment plan for an estate. Second, we have decided to restrict complexity to the internal complexity of the housing company, which is already quite high for participants that were used to think of housing companies as relatively simple organisations. Third, we have paid much attention to the development of tools that support the visualisation of the learning process for participants, ranging from simple ‘wall paper’ on which participants can write key decisions to more sophisticated tools as the sustainability web and score card that helped participants define and monitor ambitions and targets. Fourth, we have decided to assess the process performance of the participants and not the substantive performance. Sustainable refurbishment is challenging because of the ambiguous and subjective character, and only in processes of interaction with others, i.e., departments and organisations inside and outside the housing company, sustainability can be given concrete meaning. In the game, participants should


learn about such a process, and not about the concrete decisions that can be the result of such a process. The assessment criteria emphasise this process orientation.

The tools developed for the game were not just important to support visualisation; they also helped cope with two more specific questions that troubled us in designing the Sureuro game: How to conceptualise and operationalise ‘sustainability’ for the game while respecting the ambiguous character of the concept? And how to bridge the gap between strategic choices and the operational design choices?

Both questions are concerned with the tension between the openness and closure of a game. Open games provide very little structure to games in terms of processes to be followed and products to deliver. For the Sureuro game, such an approach would have had the advantage that the game would very well reflect the ambiguous character of sustainability, but disadvantage would be that participants would feel lost in the game, like they also feel lost when trying to address sustainability in real refurbishment operations. A pitfall of a closed game would be that participants would learn answers instead of learning to formulate questions, but an advantage of approach would be that participants could learn more about concrete sustainability measures and about methods and tools for enhancing sustainability in organisational decision-making.

In the Sureuro game, a more closed game design was preferred while paying explicit attention to the open character of decision-making in reality. This was done by structuring the game in certain steps, in which participants had to take strategic and operational decisions, and by giving participants tools that could help them make these decisions. However, the tools emphasised that there were no ‘best’ decisions to make in the various steps. For example, the sustainability web showed synergies and trade-offs between different sustainability values, and the assessment tool emphasised that not the actual decisions and scores were important, but the consistency between decisions and the quality of the interactions leading to the decisions. Also the competition between the four consultancy teams emphasised the importance of the process by which the teams had come to make their offer.

With the support of various tools that structured but also triggered discussions, the Sureuro game managed to avoid the pitfall of a ‘closed approach’. We will now discuss in more detail the experiences with the game as designed. We will pay attention to the positive experiences, while keeping an eye on opportunities to improve the game.

7.1 Structuring of the game facilitated assessment

As we have described we have chosen a low level of abstraction. All issues addressed in the game scenario are highly appropriate for housing companies and therefore immediately recognisable for the game participants. To guide the teams through the decisions to be made, the game has been structured. Participants have to answer specific questions in the first part and have to fill in feature sheets in the second part. Despite this structure, teams came up with very different strategies and refurbishment plans, which reflected the diversity of experiences and expertise of participants and their different institutional contexts and cultures. An advantage of this structure is the comparability of the different team results and therefore the possibilities to learn from each other during the assessment phase. Especially the debates following the presentations were much focussed on why teams came up with choices that seemed to be undesirable or ‘not smart’ for others, who preferred other choices for the same situation. Sometimes, it turned out that teams had missed important information because they had


not invested in it, for example, when they did not bother to obtain market information, but differences in opinion were also caused because different teams adhered to different values.

7.2 ‘Dynamic feedback’ prevented strategic behaviour in game design

A drawback of the structuring might be the participants’ tendency to reduce decision-making to an optimisation exercise. Because the constraints for decision-making were clearly set in the game, in the form of budget, sustainability scores for different refurbishment measures, and consistency with previous decisions made during the game, participants tended to deduct their decisions from the information about these constraints, instead of making decisions on the basis of substantive deliberation. This effect was probably further caused by the time pressure within the game. This could be prevented by giving no feedback on the sustainability scores of participants’ decisions, but the effect of this might have been very undesirable and obstructive for the game; participants could decide that ‘anything goes’. Whether this was caused by strategic game behaviour of participants or out of lack of knowledge of sustainable refurbishment does not matter, the result could be that there would be no substantive debate.

To guarantee participants the opportunity to have a substantive debate, feedback on the sustainability scores of possible measures was provided in the Sureuro game, but with the explicit recognition that the desirability of a measure, whatever the sustainability score may be, depended on the goals and ambitions formulated by the participants in the game.

Another way of preventing strategic game behaviour of participants could be to explicitly add a criterion like ‘creativity’ to the assessment criteria. This could invite participants to reflect on the menu of choices presented by the tools used in the game, and create their own choices on a strategic and an operational level. The creativity criterion could also invite participants to present their series of refurbishment decisions some more as a design, with its own values besides budget, sustainability and strategic profile.

7.3 Performance measurement tools contributed to substantive discussions

In discussing the Sustainability Quality Index in Section 6, we observed the importance of the acceptance of the index by the participants. Related to this, we observed that the tool might even stimulate strategic behaviour by participants, which actually happened in some of the games played. However, in most of the game sessions, the method for assessing the group work stimulated passionate substantive debate, driven by the non-acceptance of the method or tool used or the indicators used in the tool by participants. In one game, this concerned a team of executive managers who were not inclined ‘to fill in forms’ and instead, they discussed the conceptualisation of sustainability and the consequences for particular refurbishment decisions. As a consequence they did not win the game, but they did generate valuable insights into sustainable refurbishment and shared these with the other participants in the evaluation of the game.


7.4 Visualisation measures fuelled discussion

It was important for participants to be consistent in their choices, as was expressed during both the introduction of the game and the assessment. Participants had to make a lot of decisions to be consistent with later on. The obligation to visualise their decisions, by writing decisions on sheets and stick the sheets on the wall, worked out very well. While some participants tended to make decisions ‘case by case’, others tried to induce their decisions by their former decisions, referring to the sheets on the wall. These two ways of bridging the gap between strategic and operational decisions functioned as triggers for fruitful discussions within the teams and, during the evaluation, amongst the teams.

7.5 Sustainability concepts appeared recognisable and workable

The feature sheets and the Sustainability Quality Index provided a way to discuss sustainability on a very concrete level in a practical manner, while respecting the ambiguous nature of sustainability. The tools structured the discussions about sustainable refurbishment and gave some feedback to participants on their decisions. Eventually these tools provided an opportunity to make comparable assessments of the teams’ decisions. The conceptualisation of ‘sustainability’ into four different dimensions and the ranking of the options on the SQI were accepted by participants, and when they were not, they gave rise to substantive debates about the meaning of sustainability.

7.6 Assessment: team work was a critical success factor

It was clear to the participants that the assessment model, with ‘team work’ and ‘enthusiasm’ as criteria, was of a subjective nature. The game was not about winning, but about engaging in a learning process in an environment that was both safe and enjoyable. Nevertheless, the participants were very much focused on their assessment scores and they wanted to win the tender of the housing company. Also they wanted to show off, in a positive sense, to their colleagues and competitors in the game.

One critical success factor in the assessment of the advice presented by the teams appeared to be ‘team work’. The more the participants functioned as a team, the more balanced the outcomes of the assessment were. Successful teams had their decision-making process organised by at least three principles: • The main values and constraints were represented by individual team members.

In this way the teams ‘institutionalised’ the main values, guaranteeing a balanced weighting of them. Another positive effect of this was that the values embodied in sustainability were made explicit in the discussions and thus facilitated learning effects.

• The participants were willing to listen to each other’s arguments during the decision-making process. There were many differences in the ways teams organised themselves. An important variable seemed to be hierarchy. Some teams operated as hierarchical ‘mini-organisations’ with a big substantive role for the team leader, usually played by a hierarchical superior in real-life. In other groups authority was divided equally among members. The latter form appeared to be more effective in this game because all members felt free to express their arguments and opinions. In this way a large variety of values was addressed in the decision-making process, resulting in the positive effects as discussed for the first principle.


• One team member acted as a process manager, showing constraint in using power. Open discussions with a variety of values involved tend to be slow and unstructured; that is, if there is no process manager. As in the second principle, this process manager should show constraint in using power to enforce decisions. During the games the temptation to do so was present, especially in teams in which the process manager was a superior to the other members in real-life. The temptation of process managers to make decisions for the team was also enhanced by the time pressure in the game, leading process managers to take their responsibility and enforce decisions for the progress of the team.

The overview shows how the various tools in the game supported the learning function of the game and prevented that participants in the game would behave strategically to such an extent that it would overshadow the central lessons to be communicated in the game.

8 Conclusion

In this paper, we have given an account of how housing companies can be taught about the design of sustainable refurbishment plans. Lessons on this subject are highly diverse and cannot be pinpointed in clear and unambiguous do’s and don’ts. A gaming exercise has proved to be a good and enjoyable method to transfer the lessons on the design of sustainable refurbishment.

However, there is something paradoxical about the game design. Designing a sustainable refurbishment plan requires an open approach of housing companies towards the contents and ambitions of the plan. In this way, maximum use can be made of opportunities for sustainable refurbishment; opportunities that can be the result of a diversity of reasons, such as the physical characteristics of the estate, the political momentum for ambitious goals, demographic developments and changes in the housing market, or the accidental availability of subsidies to invest in specific sustainability measures. Instead of an open game design that would simulate the open character of decision-making for a sustainable refurbishment plan, the game design consisted of a more closed format that reduced complexity for the benefit of learning. That this apparently paradoxical game design worked can be ascribed to the balance that has been found between openness and closure and that were embodied in the tools used by participants in the game. These tools structured the decision-making process, while stimulating substantive debate. Participants experienced the potential benefits of models and tools that helped them to recognise, in simplified form, opportunities for including sustainability goals in refurbishment plans and in the continuous processes of decision-making and (re)design in which housing companies organise and manage their housing stock. In this way, complex lessons about sustainable refurbishment could be transferred in a way that was simple enough to remember and that helped participants to recognise situations to which the lessons could apply.


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The Sureuro Gaming Exercise: designing a game for sustainable refurbishment by housing companies

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