5M Leadership

Signal Line Protection — Signals and Risk — Stitch In Time

The Nokia
Signal Simulation

It is 2007. The iPhone has just launched. You are a senior Nokia manager. Over the next three years, your engineers bring you five signals about Symbian's competitive position. What you choose to do with each one will determine whether Nokia survives.

Decisions5
Time8 minutes
SourceVuori and Huy, 2016

Before you begin

This is a reconstruction of a real organizational failure

Between 2007 and 2010, Nokia's middle managers received signals about Symbian's competitive position that were technically accurate, strategically alarming, and organizationally difficult to surface. The peer-reviewed study by Vuori and Huy (2016), based on direct interviews with Nokia executives and engineers, documented how those signals were filtered, softened, and absorbed before they reached senior leadership.

The five signals in this simulation are drawn from documented accounts. The three choices available at each decision point reflect the real behavioral options available to Nokia's managers. The consequences shown are what the historical record produced.

Your task is not to judge Nokia. Your task is to discover what choices you would have made, and whether your choices would have produced a different outcome.

Source: Vuori, T.O. and Huy, Q.N. (2016). "Distributed Attention and Shared Emotions in the Innovation Process." Academy of Management Journal, 59(4). Additional: Wall Street Journal Nokia coverage 2007-2013; Stephen Elop internal memo, February 2011.
Signal
1 of 5
The signal your engineers bring you
Your decision
Select an option to continue