Finance has always taught judgment through apprenticeship. Juniors did the reconciliations, the schedules and the first-draft analysis, and in doing so absorbed how senior colleagues weighed a problem. But as automation absorbs more of that routine work, the question is how the next generation learns to make decisions – and whether finance functions have an answer yet.
In the US, Harvard researchers tracking CV data from 285,000 businesses found that companies employed 7%–12% fewer juniors after adopting generative AI, a result of slower hiring rather than redundancy, while senior headcount kept rising.
‘AI has broadened the capability gap between juniors and seniors’
Zu Hui Yap, a Singapore-based strategy and transformation expert, says the routine work that once taught judgement is ‘now done by AI, and the capability gap between a junior and senior has broadened’. Asked how that gap can be closed, he is candid: ‘I don’t think we have a solution that we can generally agree on yet.’
Play as teaching tool
One answer being offered to finance functions – by external facilitators, in-house learning and development teams and, increasingly, boutique consultancies – is play-based or experiential facilitation. This involves running building-block exercises, physical team challenges, business simulations and role-based workshops to allow participants to work on a real problem together.
‘It isn’t about building toys, it’s about building clarity’
The best-known of these methods, Lego Serious Play, was developed by the toy company for adults, as a tool for corporate and organisational workshops. Katherine Sum, a Lego Serious Play facilitator in Hong Kong, runs a stricter sequence than the label suggests. Participants build a model in response to a prompt, and the facilitator then takes the group through what she calls the ‘so-what’. It ‘isn’t about building toys’, she says. ‘It’s about building clarity.’
But adoption is uneven. Yap spent years facilitating at Accenture, mostly for abstract visioning rather than defined problems. Claire Ng, co-founder of consultancy Elix Advisory, says ‘pockets’ of the sector have embraced it. Its advocates, though, make a case that maps directly onto the judgment gap.
Eunice Ng, talent and organisation leader at Singlife in Singapore, says the removal of routine tasks is shifting professional value to ‘strategic business partnering, enterprise-wide critical thinking and decision-making under ambiguity’. Simulations built around complex business scenarios force leaders to exercise those ‘non-linear, human capabilities in real time’.
Claire Ng sees a narrower use: play earns its place where finance is being pushed to work faster. ‘It’s always very daunting, and it’s hard to visualise how your role will evolve,’ she says. Putting a risk officer, a product owner and a developer together on a real business problem lets each rehearse an unfamiliar role before their performance is measured. It is a tool for moments of change, not a standing fixture. ‘You cannot interject it all the time or you risk it becoming frivolous.’
One size doesn’t fit all
Even where play is appropriate, seniority changes what works. Eunice Ng finds senior executives thrive on abstract strategic play, while mid-level leaders need exercises anchored in ‘operational realities such as trade-offs, resource constraints and commercial negotiation’. Without that grounding, it ‘risks feeling like theatre rather than skill development’.
For Sum, whether participants share a goal makes a big difference. An intact team maps its own bottlenecks and pain points, while a cohort of relationship managers has no single operational target, so the prompts shift to each person’s own barriers – what stops a client relationship moving from transactional to advisory, for instance.
‘Play fails if it feels compulsory, patronising or embarrassing’
Hong Kong-based Timothy Bean, a former HR leader at a major global toy company, says even an organisation built on play has plenty of people who find creative exercises challenging. He also points out that finance is not a single audience: tax specialists, auditors, FP&A analysts and CFOs work under different pressures. Play works when people feel they have chosen it, he says, and fails when it feels ‘compulsory, patronising or embarrassing’, adding: ‘A senior finance professional will switch off quickly if the activity feels like a children’s game with a business label on it.’
Seeing what hierarchy hides
The claim that resonates most with practitioners in the region is that hands-on methods surface talent that formal processes miss. Yap, who left the military expecting corporate life to be flatter, says: ‘Some of them are more hierarchical than the military, where the boss says something and there’s no psychological safety to say, no, I don’t agree.’ Where disagreement is unsafe, capability is hard to see.
Traditional assessment leans on dominant voices and polished presentation, Eunice Ng says, whereas watching people solve problems under pressure reveals quieter, highly pragmatic contributors.
Bean’s view is more conditional. ‘Being a creative problem-solver doesn’t make someone a better leader than someone who isn’t,’ he says. Whether quiet voices are heard depends on the facilitator: who sits with whom, and who presents back. And there is little hard research on play with experienced finance professionals, ‘so I’d be wary of anyone claiming it’s proven either way’.
‘Without return on investment, it becomes a feel-good exercise’
Right-timing and proof
Getting the moment wrong is another way to fail. Steve Lin, executive director and head of people partner at Singlife, has seen sessions proposed during post-merger integration, while staff were still asking whether their roles would survive. ‘Play-based facilitation should help the integration, rather than become the integration itself,’ he says.
Buyers also want evidence. Claire Ng says the objection is rarely cost itself: clients want a return of roughly three times what they spend, and without that ‘it becomes a feel-good exercise’. Most hesitate because they have never seen it work, so she runs pilots free of charge on a live client problem. ‘There’s no miracle pill.’
Play has a place in finance when it is aimed at a real problem. Whether it can carry the whole weight of teaching judgment to juniors is a question none of these practitioners would answer yes to.
