The New Manager Compass
The New Manager Compass is a demonstration piece designed to showcase a particular kind of scenario-based learning: morally textured, no obvious right answers, with reflective rather than evaluative feedback.
Learners respond to five brief scenarios representing realistic situations they might encounter after taking on a team leadership role. The learner chooses one of three contrasting responses to the scenario and receives feedback that points out advantages and risks of the chosen response. The learner’s response is also mapped onto a “compass” of six dimensions on three axes, representing different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, approaches to leadership:
Protect the Team <—> Serve the Organization
Protect Relationships <—> Hold People Accountable
Deliberate <—> Decisive
After the learner responds to all five scenarios, they are labeled with one of five “archetypes” based on the shape of their compass:
- The Anchor — strong on Decisive and Serve the Organization; gets things done, drives results, but may underinvest in relationships and team protection.
- The Steward — strong on Protect the Team and Preserve Relationships; loyal and trusted, but may avoid hard calls or resist organizational pressure.
- The Diplomat — strong on Preserve Relationships and Deliberate; thoughtful and careful, but may move too slowly and smooth over things that need direct attention.
- The Operator — broad and relatively even across all six poles; adaptable and situationally aware, but may lack a clear leadership identity.
- The Advocate — strong on Protect the Team and Hold People Accountable; fiercely fair, but may find themselves in tension with the organization above and relationships below.
The goal of all of this is not to tell learners the “correct” or “best” way to handle a situation, but rather to help learners understand their own leadership style and reflect on the strengths and potential pitfalls of that style, so they can be more thoughtful when making similar decisions in their real work.
The activity took several hours to create, using Claude Sonnet 4.6 to develop the design concept and scenarios and Claude Opus 4.7 to build the app itself. It is built entirely as a self-contained HTML file — embeddable, portable, and easy to launch on a local computer.
(Full screen version is here.)
Potential Use Cases
In deployment for actual learners, the New Manager Compass could be used as:
- A spark or grounding exercise for a team discussion or leadership workshop.
- Pre-work for a coaching session with a supervisor.
- Part of a leadership training course or series.
- Part of a catalog of experiences that earn professional learning credit or badges.
- The beginning of a larger set of connected scenarios, where decisions have “ripple effects” over time.
- As a way to direct learners (you might say, a “compass”) to readings, courses, and other resources based on their management approach.
A Design Surprise
The biggest surprise in the design of this project had to do with how the compass is revealed. Originally, Claude and I both agreed that the compass should ideally be revealed at the end, after the learner had finished all of the scenarios. I was concerned, though, that someone taking just a brief look at this demo might not get through all of the scenarios, and thus might miss the compass feature entirely; to take this into account, I proposed that for the demo version only, the compass should be built bit by bit as the learner responds to each scenario.
When I tested the app with some colleagues, it turned out that actually one of their favorite features was seeing the compass grow and change as they went through the scenarios and tried out different answers. It is clear now that even when deployed for real learners, we should keep the feature as it is.
It’s a testament to the power of being able to build, test, and get feedback quickly on features before settling on a final design.
Next Steps
Based on user feedback, improvements to this app could involve:
- Adjusting the archetype algorithm to better balance the outcomes (in user testing, most people have landed on either Anchor or Diplomat, with narrower paths to landing on the other archetypes).
- Explaining the archetypes better at the end, and including a broader discussion of all of the archetypes.
- Including references to better connect the insights to established theory and research, especially around the archetypes.
- Adding discussion guides to help groups or coaches make effective use of the experience as a starting point for reflection.