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Role-Playing

Article · August 2006

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511617850.010

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ROLE PLAYING

Role playing is a very useful teaching technique that can bring abstract situations to life for
students, push them to focus on significant details they otherwise might ignore, help them to see
other points of view, help them see the differences between concept and reality, provide on-the-spot
variety in the classroom, give enormously useful data to an instructor, and stimulate learning by
bringing conceptual discussions alive. Because of these benefits and the facts that role plays are
flexible and can be set up extemporaneously as the opportunity arises or can be planned for and
managed well in advance, they are a teaching tool you should be familiar with and be able to use
well. This chapter will outline some of the benefits of role playing and address some important role-
playing issues, such as when to use it, how long to use it, how to choose students to participate, how
to set role plays up, how to assign roles, and how to debrief effectively.

Benefits of Role Playing

Role plays can dramatically and immediately galvanize a sleepy class into one charged with
attention and the electricity of concentrated learning. The pressure of having to present one’s ideas
in a simulated but live conversation often causes students to think more deeply, more quickly, and
more emotionally than they do when they present their ideas in the abstract as part of an analysis

Role plays are an excellent avenue for bringing abstract discussions, especially action
planning, alive for students. Without role plays, students can easily gloss over the implementation
issues in their action plans, leaving the plans as mental and experiential concepts instead of realistic
agenda. When students remain concerned only with the concepts, they often talk in poorly examined
abstractions and assumptions (about, for instance, how others will respond to their requests).
Students may assume, for example, that they can move easily from one step to the next in their
action plans, that they will get approval for their suggestions, that abrasive personalities will melt
before their persuasiveness, that strong conflict will evaporate under their guidance, that a key
supporter will materialize at the right moment, and even that they can hire a replacement in a day’s
time. This is lazy thinking, and it bores the listeners, leaving them and the rest of the class, as well as
the speaker, insensitive to the realities of getting something done through other people.

This note was prepared by James G. Clawson. Copyright © 1997 by the University of Virginia Darden School
Foundation, Charlottesville, VA. All rights reserved. To order copies, send an e-mail to sales@dardenpublishing.com.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any
form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the permission of the
Darden School Foundation. ◊
 -2- UVA-PHA-0054

Unless students can make the crucial distinction between concept and reality, they are likely
to leave business school exhibiting many of the justified criticisms of students of management: over-
analysis, under-attention to implementation detail, obliviousness to the practical realities of
organizational influence and power networks, and inability to think in real time on one’s feet. The
role play is a superb vehicle for bringing the distinction between concept and reality to the fore.

Role plays help students confront this mental laziness and think through the barriers that lie
between them and real implementation of their ideas. Herein lies much of the value of role playing.
There is a big difference between saying, “I would have a meeting with John Doe and get his
agreement to my plan and then go see the boss” and being confronted by a live person representing
John Doe and having to convince that person that one’s plan is the right thing to do. Role plays
provide you the opportunity to “push” students to see if they have thought through implementation
details and are prepared with contingency plans to deal with unexpected outcomes. Used repeatedly,
role plays require students to add careful mental review of their plans to their class preparation—
managerial mind experiments, if you will—in which they think themselves through each step of a
plan to see if it will work.

Another benefit of role playing is that it can help students see the merits of another’s
position, either because the role players have expressed themselves well and have been convincing
or because students have been asked to role play a point of view opposite from their own. Referring
to the latter, the role play strengthens the students’ abilities to empathize with, experience, and
understand others’ perceived reality. This experience sheds additional light on their own views and
clarifies the weaknesses and strengths of their positions.

The role play is a way of playing devil’s advocate in an instructional setting and doing so in a
way that leaves students more likely to learn insights than by simply pointing them out. This
technique is used in debate and law school for highlighting the armor and its chinks in an opponent’s
position. Role playing provides a means of performing that exploration in the relatively safe confines
of the classroom.

Role play is a readily available technique, so it gives you an immediate means of breaking
the monotony of your usual teaching approach. Whether you usually lecture or use cases,
unannounced and unanticipated role plays can immediately inject variety and freshness into a class.
Constructing role plays on the spot in class may be difficult, however, so I recommend that you
prepare one or two in advance of each class in case you need them. It was David who carefully
selected and carried five stones into his confrontation with Goliath even though he only needed one.1
Similarly, you can bring several possible role plays into a class and use them only if necessary.

Role plays are tremendously helpful to the instructor from another angle, for they yield
voluminous data about the students’ level of understanding and skill. After a role play, you may be a
bit deflated as you realize that many of the skills, concepts, and principles taught earlier are not
really being used by your students. Making this discovery while you still have time to teach them is

1
Samuel 17:40 in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible.
 -3- UVA-PHA-0054

good. Remember, students do only what they know and can do. Their behavior can reveal how much
they’ve learned; thus this information can do much to help you assess student understanding and
revise your teaching plans if necessary. Maybe the concepts are in the students’ minds, but they just
didn’t see the relevance of those concepts in this particular role play, or maybe the concepts are not
practiced enough for the students to feel comfortable using them.

Finally, role plays can show students how much they know or don’t know. Some students,
when listening to another’s comments about a point in class, blithely think to themselves, “I could
have said that and said it better! This is no big deal—I know this stuff!” Their conclusions are naive,
of course. Those listening may indeed have held some thoughts similar to those spoken, but the
translation from thought to action (“I know this stuff”) is not as easy as students believe. When
students have to role play their own action plans, they quickly discover that finding the right words
and style to persuade someone else is not easy. They begin to see that their mental plans and
behavior are not perfect overlaps.

Carl Rogers suggests that at least two overlaps or congruencies are critical to effective
relationships. The first, internal congruency, is the degree to which one’s experience (i.e., feelings
and emotions) overlap with one’s thoughts.2 Professional people especially value rationality and
logic, and they often suppress their feelings, or their immediate experiencing, in order to appear
“professional.” In those moments, their thinking does not match their feelings, and they become
internally incongruent for the moment. Psychologist Daniel Goleman recently noted that the inability
to recognize one’s own emotions and to manage them in dealing with other people is a major barrier
to a person’s success in the business world.3

External congruency is the degree to which people’s thoughts are consistent with their
behavior. Rogers terms thinking one thing and saying another as “externally incongruent.”
Sometimes a person’s external behavior, that which we can observe or hear, is more congruent with
the person’s experiencing (feelings and emotions) than with her or his thinking. People who are
flushed, agitated, and shaking but trying to speak in a logical and controlled manner manifest their
tension among feeling, thoughts, and behavior.

Clear, effective communication requires us to behave congruently. If we are incongruent in

our communications, people get mixed signals from us and become confused about who we are and
what we are saying. Their trust of us goes down. These are lessons that your students can understand
intellectually and viscerally through the use of role plays in class.

We all have feelings; that is, we all experience. To some degree, we are aware of those
experiencing. We process our experiences internally and translate them into thoughts or mental
plans. We then translate those mental plans into the things we say and do, as shown in Figure 1.

2
See Harold S. Spear, “Notes on Carl Rogers’s Concept of Congruence and His General Law of Interpersonal
Relationships,” in Tony Athos and Bob Coffey, Behavior in Organizations: A Multidimensional View (Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968).
3
See Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995).
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Why then do we find ourselves all too often saying, “That didn’t come out quite right.” or “That
wasn’t what I meant to say.”? Something was lost in the translation.

When students sit back and tell themselves they’re learning as much by observing as by
participating, they deceive themselves. When individuals are called upon to speak, persuade, or
present—in short, to make those internal translations on the spot—many suddenly find themselves
ill-prepared. To be able to recognize feelings and to translate them accurately and effectively into
thoughts and actions is a skill. Fortunately, it is also a skill that we can practice. Role plays provide
an excellent opportunity for students to develop those translation skills and to practice their abilities
to frame and communicate their thoughts and feelings in effective and productive ways among peers.

A common theme in the benefits of using role

play is that the technique can bring abstract
discussions alive, make them live, and in so doing,
open up students’ willingness to learn. In a role play,
the student is confronted with real people—either the
instructor or a member of the peer group. In the latter
case especially, the student cannot ignore difficulties
in proceeding by ascribing the difficulty to the
stubbornness of an ivory tower academic with a
pedagogical agenda. Role plays thus produce close-
to-real data for the students to work with and respond
to.
Figure 1. Carl Roger’s concepts of congruency in
Role plays demand that the players and those human behavior.
who identify with them (usually most of the class)
engage the situation viscerally as well as intellectually—a compelling feature of role plays that can
cause a class to come alive.

When to Use Role Plays?

As with other teaching techniques, knowing how to use a role play and knowing when to use it
are two different things. Should you use them at the beginning of a class, in the middle, or at the end?

You can use a role play to start a class by asking students to play out a key conversation
suggested by the case reading or assignment. This way, a role play simultaneously highlights the key
issues in the case and grabs the students’ attention.

More often, however, I find role play more useful in the last third of a class. For me, most
case classes have three major chunks: 1) problem identification and clarification; 2) analysis,
addressing such questions as “What are the causes of the problems we have just outlined?” and
“What are the underlying dynamics of these causes?; and 3) action planning. In this last portion of
class, students build on their views of the problems and their analyses of the causes to suggest things
 -5- UVA-PHA-0054

that one might do to solve them. These action-planning discussions only begin with a student’s plan,
for the real test of a manager is in the “how.” How do you implement your action plan? How do you
bring so-and-so to your point of view? What barriers do you expect to encounter? What do you
expect the boss to say?

In these discussions, the role play can often do more than anything you or anyone can say (or
preach, teach, or advocate) to open up a student to new possibilities. I am careful not to end a class
on a role play, however, because I think allowing time either for alternative role plays or for
debriefing a role play is important. A major benefit of ensuring that you have this debriefing time is
that the role players’ classmates can give the role players feedback. Peer feedback is often more
direct and more powerful than anything you can say.

How Long Should a Role Play Last?

Role plays can take up lots of time; if they last too long, they can bore the rest of the class.
Long role plays may teach the role players the limits of their peers’ tolerance for listening to them,
but this insight comes at a heavy cost in class time. Thus, while keeping an eye on the content of the
role play, you also need to gauge the interest of the observers. When you can see that other students
are losing contact with the role play, you might step in and stop it and then begin your debriefing.

Sometimes role-playing students become stubborn and refuse to stop even when it is
apparent that their counterpart is not responding and the rest of the class is bored. Like a chess game
nearing checkmate, a role play can have a clear outcome long before it actually occurs. In this case,
you can stop the role play and ask, “Where is this headed?” Usually the class will see the same
outcome you do. If they say, “Nowhere!” then you can ask “Why?” and the ensuing discussion
becomes a personal feedback session to the participants, one which they usually find hard to ignore.

Generally, I find that two to five minutes is adequate for a role play that grew out of a
student’s action plan. You may need longer for more involved role plays, such as simulated
performance reviews. In five minutes, you can get a very clear view of the objective of the student’s
initiating this discussion and have the class debrief the interchange. Sometimes I’ve stopped a role
play after the first comment, that is, after 15 seconds; I often do this when the person initiating the
conversation has said something that will color the whole rest of the conversation, (e.g., “Bob, you
have a problem!” is an example of the kind of comment that can point a conversation in one
particular direction.), but sometimes I wait until the end of the role play and ask students what they
saw in the opening comments.

Choosing the Role Players

Choosing the right students to participate is an important part of a successful role play. Whom
you choose can make or break the learning experience, but how do you select the right people?
 -6- UVA-PHA-0054

The obvious choice criterion is experience with the topic of discussion. You can pick a
student experienced in the topic area either because you want to show the rest of the class how a
person experienced in that field would approach the topic or because you want the experienced
student to flounder a bit and become more open to learning in the area.

On the other hand, you may wish to choose a person who is not experienced in the topic area to
help them learn what the topic is like. Then you can choose someone experienced in the subject as the
counterpart so that the inexperienced person will be pressed more effectively. For instance, having an
experienced bond trader interview a Wall Street hopeful for employment can teach the hopeful person
a lot about whether or not he or she has what it takes to thrive in that environment. More important
criteria than experience, however, is the ability to suspend fear of looking stupid to classmates and
ability to get into the role. Since role plays grow out of the discussion of the moment, you can probably
call on anyone in the class and have a reasonable hope that they will have something to say. If they are
paying attention, they should have an opinion about what has been going on.

But the personalities of some people may make them ill-suited for role plays, and self-
conscious students can destroy a role-play opportunity. Some people feel very uncomfortable “play
acting,” as they put it. You can try to explain, as I do, that the student is not to act but, rather, simply
to be him or herself in that situation. Even then, some people will begin with something like, “Well,
first I would explain to them the importance of the situation and then I’d motivate them to follow my
lead.” In this case, the student is not role playing but talking about the situation. I always interrupt
here and say, “Wait. I don’t want you to talk about the situation; I want you to speak to these people
as if they were the actual people in the situation. Don’t talk about it; do it!” This is usually enough to
get people out of their reluctance but not always. If a person just cannot speak directly to the role-
play situation, then you might thank them and try someone else.

Picking someone you know is quiet and/or shy is a high-risk tactic. People who, for whatever
reason, don’t participate much in class are unlikely to bring much energy to a role play. However,
this is not always true. I remember many quiet students who surprised me. In role plays they
demonstrated a different kind of commitment to their positions than they usually did in class and
were very effective. Role playing evidently made it easier for them to speak out.

One method for finding good candidates for role plays is to ask who in the room agrees with
one of the points of view in the discussion. Pick someone from this group and then ask who
subscribes to the opposite view and pick one of them for the role-play counterpart. In this way, you
know you have people who are likely to have real points of difference and can produce a good
discussion. Random choices may produce two people who think the same and cannot do much more
than say; “You’re right; let’s go ahead.” This outcome is terribly deflating when your goal is to
highlight differences in approach or difficulties in implementing a particular plan.
 -7- UVA-PHA-0054

Role plays will certainly highlight differences in style among students. When you want the
role play to motivate a student to think about his or her style, as when a student may be seen as
overly assertive or abrasive or when the role play calls for a person to wrestle with a known
personality type (and, therefore, requires some acting), playing one of the roles yourself is often best.
You can then insure that certain viewpoints or certain interpersonal styles are brought to bear.

One caution here is that you can overdo the role plays in which you take part. Your
background, strength of feelings, determination to press the other role player, confidence, position of
authority as the instructor, and expertise can all combine to overwhelm the student. If you are always a
part of role plays and/or if you manage them so that you always prevail, the class will grow
discouraged and retreat emotionally and mentally from role playing. Therefore, you should be sure to
mix student role playing especially early in the course, using students mixed in with your own role
plays. In addition, be sure the role plays in which you occasionally participate show how well the
students are doing and how far they’ve come, even though they may not be as far along as you would
like.

Another approach is to structure role plays so the whole class can participate. There are at
least two ways to do this. First, you can have the class pair up and role play a situation simul-
taneously (as is called for in the “Sloane Company” exercise).4 A variation of this approach is to
have a third person assigned as an observer who takes mental or physical notes for feedback later.
Alternatively, you can assign various segments of the class to certain group roles, such as the board
of directors or shareholders or unionized employees. These groups may interact with a student who
has suggested a meeting or react to a student making an announcement as an officer of the company.
These entire-class role plays can be extremely powerful and can reveal key issues very rapidly.

The Setup

Role plays require some forethought, even if they are only a possibility for the class. If you
ignore this fact, your attempts to create useful role plays may well flop and you may draw the
erroneous conclusion that they don’t work. In order for learning to occur, all students, not just the
role players, have to understand the situation clearly and be prepared to participate.

Begin your setup by planning in advance how you will arrange the room for the role play.
Ask yourself if you need chairs, lights dimmed, name tents, a table, or props. Some props can be
created impromptu. (For example, I use my hand with the thumb and little finger extended as a
telephone. To simulate phone communications, I don’t look at the student with whom I’m speaking
during the role play.)

4
This exercise was developed by Len Greenhalgh at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College. It involves a three-part
written case, a general overview of the situation, which everyone gets, and then two parts: one for each of the two people
involved in the performance review.
 -8- UVA-PHA-0054

Handouts can really help a role-play setup. As in the “Colonial Foods”5 case series or the
“Sloane Company” series, you may want to give half the class one handout and the other half
another handout. In general, distributing handouts can be tricky. If you simply give a stack of
handouts to a student near the front of the room to pass around, the noise of shuffling papers and the
confusion as to who gets which or who misses one may well destroy the atmosphere you are trying
to create. An alternative method that Tony Athos once taught me was this: think carefully about how
many of each handout you need and who gets which; sort your handouts before class by row and
number of seats in each row, laying each row’s stack perpendicularly to the last row’s; when you are
ready to hand them out, you can walk up the aisle or to the side of the room and give the right stack
to the right row knowing there will be exactly enough to go around. In an amphitheater setting, if
you start at the back of the room with the longer rows, everyone will get a handout at about the same
time (30 seconds after you hand the short stack to the first row). Using this technique you can
distribute 90 handouts in less than a minute and minimize the disruption.

The in-class setup of a role play will take careful explanation—don’t be too hurried with it.
When I’ve tried going too fast in setting up a role play, it has seldom worked well. What’s worse,
the students’ confidence in me as an instructor has been eroded. Make sure the students understand
the roles and the setting before you begin. Choose the players at the beginning of your setup so that
while you continue to explain the role play to the rest of the class, the role players can be getting into
their roles. A two-minute introduction to review the data for each role can enhance the actual role
play enormously. Don’t be afraid to use silence to give the students time to adjust mentally and
emotionally to their roles and put themselves into the setting. I have been using one role play
situation based on an event prior to the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War for over 10
years. The set-up takes about 10 to 15 minutes and includes drawings on the chalkboard and a fairly
elaborate “story telling.”

Be clear about who or what the roles are. For role plays involving several people, you may
wish to have name tents, signs, or some other means of identifying the players. One example is the
Porsche Simulation.6 In this simulation, there are six different roles each with a different functional
responsibility. While this might also be classified as an experiential exercise, there are many “role
plays” in the exercise, and name tents or large name tags are essential to keeping the players straight.

Your verbal setup can profitably include a review of basic facts that were outlined in the case
or discussed earlier in the class. For example, in setting up a role play involving the entire class in
which one person is the chief executive officer (CEO) and the rest are members of the board of
directors, I assign the CEO role first (so that student can collect her or his thoughts and notes), and
while that person is thinking, I talk through the nature of the board of directors. “How old are you?
What are your educational backgrounds? How liberal are you? What concerns do you have about the
firm? Why did you get into this business in the first place? How do you feel about risk?” This kind
of session is particularly important when you are asking students to portray positions in a case that
5
A performance review case series, which I wrote while at Harvard Business School is similar in structure to the
Sloane Company case mentioned in the previous footnote.
6
This is a case developed at Stanford in which a team of executives from Europe must decide which features of the
car to offer in their regions.
 -9- UVA-PHA-0054

may not align with their own. In this case, for instance, the young, assertive, MBA students would
be prone to respond differently from more elderly board members. If the students respond as
themselves, the difficulties facing the young manager in the case, that is, trying to convince an older
board of directors to change corporate strategy, might not emerge.

My experience is that after several role plays with careful setups, students become
accustomed to the technique and are able to get into role playing much more quickly than at first.
The more you use role plays, the more you can expect your skills and your students’ skills at setting
up and learning from them to increase. I’ve found it useful using signals to which the students have
become accustomed in order to get them into the role-playing mode more quickly. I almost always
conduct role plays from a chair in the front of the room. After two or three times of pulling out the
chair, the students know it means we are about to role play. Pulling out the chair often creates a stir
in the class because they know they’re about to have some fun, view some difficult situations, and
pay closer attention because they may be in the middle of it. After two or three classes, the students
respond in almost Pavlovian fashion, sitting up, leaning forward to concentrate, perhaps even
salivating a little! I never speak as the instructor from the chair. When I’m sitting in the chair,
students know we are in role play; when I stand, we are back in real time.

Sometimes it’s useful to take a time-out during the role play. As a convenient signal then, I
bump the edges of my hands together like the take signs on movie sets to signal a “timeout” so we
can talk about what’s going on at the moment. I even explain that we can do this here, whereas in
real time we don’t have that luxury. Students enjoy using those sitting around them to get back on
track before the “time in.” I use a similar gesture to signal “time in” (“Roll ‘em!” on the movie set),
and we’re back in the role play.

In time-outs, I often talk to the side of the class opposite from the one containing my
student’s counterpart as though that side were my alter ego or a group of confidants. I ask their
advice and counsel. “What should I say? How should I respond?” Their answers help reduce the
impression that the instructor isn’t reasonable and not behaving like a “real” business person, which
forces the student role player to deal with what I say, rather than discount it by thinking, “A real
business person wouldn’t do that!” Time-outs also give the role player additional time to think about
and consult others nearby on how to carry on from that point in the role play.

Who Are You Playing?

Students often wrestle with the question, “Who am I?” in role playing. Usually, I have one
answer for this, “You are YOURSELF in this person’s situation. You have all the data we’ve
discussed so far, you have the benefit of this analysis on the board, and you are you, not the person
in the case. We want to know what YOU would do in this situation, not what you think the
protagonist would do.” Students who try to be cute and play someone else or play the opponent’s
advocate actually undermine the role play because they interject a dimension of dramatic falsehood
into the situation. These students maintain and build the gap between concept and reality in the
classroom; acting another person in a role play is a means of avoiding engaging the situation and the
 -10- UVA-PHA-0054

class at an emotional as well as a conceptual level. I press for students to be themselves in the case
situation. No one has to act; and hence, no one has the option of copping out by saying, “I’m not a
good actor.” We don’t want actors; we want people to deal with a situation as they would if they
were there. As they do so, they build experience and insight that will serve them well later.

Debriefing

As with experiential exercises, debriefing your role playing is very important. Here is where
you try to see what the students saw in the situation. I try to help them bring out the “obvious”
because often what is obvious to me turns out not to be so to them. I ask them what they saw
happening, and I learn from their responses much about the quality of their observational skills. I
sometimes ask them what suggestions they would give to the role players and see how they deal with
both giving and receiving feedback. Sometimes I interrupt their discussions to interject my own
observations or to lighten or reinforce a message that may be either too direct or too obtuse.

A common and useful debriefing question is “What other approaches could X have taken?”
Sometimes this question leads to another role play. In any case, it always gets some response
because almost everyone in the room secretly wishes to have been in the limelight showing how they
would have handled the situation.

Finally, I want to know what conclusions they’ve drawn from the experience. “What does
this experience teach you? What principle or principles do you glean from this experience? How will
this change the way you think about your action planning for tomorrow’s case? How will this affect
the way you analyze a situation?” Students often say they want to pay more attention to the other
key people described in the cases and how those individuals might influence their action plans.

Conclusion

Role plays are powerful teaching tools. I use them in almost every class. They always engage
the students—MBAs and executives alike. Role plays narrow the gap between theory and practice,
enliven the class, and add a healthy dose of realism to the discussions. They require careful setup,
careful time management, and an instructor who is willing to take some risks to learn from an
experience. Practiced and used appropriately, role plays can greatly facilitate your students’
learning.
 -11- UVA-PHA-0054

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