Karthasia Trials

A ground-breaking assessment tool which identifies and stretches people’s thinking capabilities to cope with complexity at senior organizational level

Why We Created This Games-Based Assessment

Conventional assessment methods cover a range of capability factors (personality, job-related competencies, work values) but tend to overlook a critical component: thinking capability - the mental bandwidth needed to cope with different levels of work complexity within organizations. Without this knowledge about the candidate, you run a high risk of matching the wrong person to the wrong role.

We have created this games-based assessment to provide you with a highly-reliable method to identify and match candidates’ thinking capabilities to working at different levels of complexity. 


 

How Would Your Organization Benefit from this Assessment?

The ‘Karthasia Trials’ Assessment helps you reduce the risk of placing the wrong person in the wrong role, thereby saving time, money and stress for all concerned. This game will help you get the best performance from your talent pool, ensuring accurate recruitment and promotion decisions, talent management and succession planning where it matters most.

You can identify the high-potentials amongst your team for succession planning and leadership development.

You can assess your executives' capability to handle varying levels of complexity, giving you valuable insights into their future potential.

The assessment is available online and does not require facilitation. Therefore, large-scale assessments across global locations are possible to achieve economies of time, money and effort.


 

Assessment Structure & Content

The 'Karthasia Trials’ Assessment utilizes the unique abilities of computer games to simulate complex situations in which the player becomes so deeply immersed so that their responses are genuine and authentic.

The assessment is designed in phases of increasing levels of complexity. Within a fictitious geographical region named Karthasia, the player is given the role of Project Manager for an international organization.  Throughout the game they are faced with a wealth of information, interacting with characters who, at times, give contradictory insights into the challenges the player needs to resolve.

The player must understand the complex interplay between problems, their causes and possible solutions. They also must grapple with the nuances of cultural differences and conflicting racial, religious and political agendas of the various stakeholders.


 

How Does It Work?

The assessment exposes players to a case study close enough to their managerial roles to be highly relevant but foreign enough so they cannot build on previous experiences or knowledge of the subject matter. The player’s performance, as well as the processes they go through to achieve it, reveals their level of thinking capability.

Outputs

Once the player has completed the assessment, the software provides internal measurements with detailed feedback to the assessor/manager, guiding the assessor in interpreting the results. Additional feedback reports for the player – including capability development guidance – are also available.

Excerpts from the Case Study

'A three country region caught in an ancient dispute over power, control and resources.'


 

Sale starts February 2018

Methodology and Research

The methodology of the assessment is built on the concepts of Levels of Work Complexity and corresponding Levels of Complexity of Information Processing (CIP) rooted in the research on Human Capability and Requisite Organization by Dr Elliott Jaques et al. To read more about CIP and the matching of roles and levels of thinking in organizations read our blog post on the topic.

(To access the assessment you need to have a player account or an administrator account and your corresponding login information at hand.)