ESMT Berlin Business School Taps VR for Digital Leadership Training

Students all over the world can benefit from virtual reality in many different ways. It now seems business students may embrace this new technology as a way to prepare for digital leadership. Berlin’s ESMT business school is certainly focusing a lot of attention on this technology, which is always interesting to keep an eye on.

Business Students and VR Training

It is quite interesting to see how ESMT Berlin business school embraces virtual reality technology right now. More specifically,  they envision this technology as a viable way to improve digital leadership skills moving forward. By digitally creating a room from which players need to escape through coordinated leadership, it is evident this venture will raise a lot of questions. At the same time, it also makes a lot of sense, in an odd way.

ESMT Berlin’s Benjamin Quaiser explains it as follows:

“[Digitisation] is a topic or theme in every class we teach, because these executives all know that their businesses are being, or will be, disrupted by digital technology. But it’s quite hard to talk about it without using technology. By immersing them in a virtual environment where they have to lead, collaborate and solve problems with each other, they experience how challenging it is to lead in a digital, VUCA [volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous] world.”

This new venture is a collaboration with local startup Exit VR. Both parties are working on other virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality games to bring out the best of leadership skills altogether, which is pretty interesting. Rest assured this current venture will also encompass non-leadership projects in the future, but for now, the focus remains on digital leadership. Dealing with daily challenges or promoting teamwork is a lot more difficult than most people give it credit for.

Considering how one cannot properly train for digital leadership whatsoever, a VR experience seems to make a lot of sense first and foremost. It also shows how schools and enterprises are moving well beyond traditional teaching methods for these types of much-needed leadership skills.  It also seems this course of great interest to students, as they like experimenting with new technologies as a whole.

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