A public sample scenario · LeadLab IQ
A working preview of one LeadLab IQ scenario, set out in full. The situation, the time, what you do, what you receive afterwards, and an excerpt from a sample debrief report.
You are the incoming chief executive of a family-controlled industrial group. Your father, the founder, has agreed to step back at the next AGM, nine weeks from now. He has also agreed, in private, to remain on the board as honorary chair for two further years.
Yesterday, the long-serving CFO requested a closed conversation. He has just been offered a seat on a competitor's board. He will not take it if you ask him to stay. He needs an answer within forty-eight hours.
Your father does not know about the offer. He hired the CFO eighteen years ago and considers him a friend. Two of your three siblings sit on the board. One of them already believes you are moving too fast.
In seventy-five minutes, the simulator will move you through the conversation with the CFO, the conversation with your father, and a board update. You walk in cold.
Twenty minutes. You hear the offer in full, respond in real time, and make a position visible, or you do not. The simulator reads what you said, what you avoided, and the language you defaulted to.
20 minTwenty-five minutes. You decide what your father is told, and when. You decide whether to ask his counsel or to inform him of a decision. The simulator notes the shape of the choice and its downstream cost.
25 minThirty minutes, written. You compose the update the board will receive at its next meeting. The simulator reads it for composure, for what is left unsaid, and for the order in which the facts are placed.
30 min · writtenNo grading, no score. The debrief is generated from your choices during the scenario, delivered to your email within minutes of completion. It reports what you did, what each move suggested about the dimension under load, and what a more prepared version of you might have done instead. Written, confidential, and yours.
Across each of the five readiness dimensions. Composure, decision quality, stakeholder reading, authority calibration, stewardship. What the scenario surfaced about each.
The decisions made explicitly, the decisions made implicitly, and the decisions you avoided. The cost of each, in this scenario and at scale.
One paragraph, not a model answer. The shape of a response that a more prepared leader might have taken, drawn from the practice's casework.
Anonymised. Reproduced with permission.
In the first conversation, you held the room well. You did not flinch when the offer was named. You also, however, made a small decision early that the rest of the seventy-five minutes paid for. You let the CFO frame the choice as a binary (stay or take the seat) and you responded inside his frame.
A more prepared response would have opened a third option in the first three minutes. A phased exit on terms that protected the institution and honoured eighteen years of service. The frame would have been yours, not his. The reason it was his is the same reason your second conversation went the way it did. You treat your authority as something you have to earn from the room before you can hold it.
This is a recognisable pattern in the Steward archetype. It is the dimension on which your Toolkit report flagged the widest gap. The full debrief sets out three exercises that work directly on it.
Excerpt from a LeadLab IQ debrief report, anonymised, 2025. Approximately 9% of the full debrief is shown here. A full debrief runs to between fourteen and twenty written pages, generated from the participant's choices during the scenario.
The full LeadLab IQ Founding Circle opens during the founding period with twelve interactive scenarios. Register your interest to hear first and reserve a founding-rate place.