Clark Aldrich
Global authority on
experiential learning,
with a specialty in
developing leaders
and cultures
experiential learning,
with a specialty in
developing leaders
and cultures
Work with Clark
Not an academic, not a traditional consultant, but a pioneering analyst and pioneering practioner.
Short Sims
Educational content that is visual, interactive, experiential, effective. On budget and easy to audit. Library of Leadership for New Managers or custom Short Sims available. Clark's sim pedagogy is what eLearning was supposed to be.
Co-pioneering
Doing something important and never before done around experiential learning? Ping Clark. ✉
Speaking and Workshop Engagements
Keynote addresses and workshops on experiential learning and real change. ✉
Socratic Cards
Create a culture of meaning and mentors. Use Clark's newest breakthrough pedagogy to bring out your organization's heroes. Custom decks also available
Hero-driven Culture
An organization's value comes from its heroes. And if you don't feed the heroes, you lose the heroes. Socratic Cards is just the begining Powerful, proven tools and advisory services to build a Hero-driven culture. ✉
What's New: Feed the Heroes or Lose the Heroes.
For 30 years, I have explored, predicted, created prototypes for, created guides for, and otherwise driven major changes in formal learning, from online learning, to simulations and experiential learning, to adding game elements, to micro-schools, to Short Sims. Many seemed counter-cultural at the time and have become mainstream today. Now, there is a new, greater, even irresistible, opportunity to transform how we learn and how we work.
Most organizations are built on a foundation of easily-replaceable employees and managers who follow instructions but rarely change the trajectory of the mission. This top-down model echoes most schools and is reinforced by corporate training.
Heroic Tribes are the alternative to easily-replaceable employees. They are self-organizing, excellence-striving, and mission-driven by high-agency individuals who grow every day by doing impactful work. Leadership teams and some development and sales teams are heroically organized. The heroes are well fed, and they alone create real value.
Now, as corporations are seeking to shed layers of managers and employees are looking for more meaning and mentoring, we can't afford not to bring out the hero in more of us.
Whether through the bottom-up transformation of Socratic Cards or the organizational shifts to broader Hero-driven cultures, my work is dedicated to providing the tools for everyone who wants to grow and become the indispensable heroes they yearn to be.
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Books by Clark Aldrich
Simulations and the Future of Learning: An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning
“I read through the entire book in one sitting. Clark Aldrich has achieved a similar effect to Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Soul of a New Machine. Clark compels us to the conclusion that there is truly no other way to learn than through doing. His analysis of how our children will probably learn little in traditional environments results in the realization that we are on a collision path with the current generation when we attempt to teach them with lectures and trivial interactions and exercises. Believe it or not, the book also made me laugh out loud. In addition, I learned more about Leadership than I have in 35 years of management training programs and book reading. These are serious accomplishments for what I expected to be a technical book."
- Gloria Gery, American Society of Training and Development
Learning by Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences
"Drawing from higher education to the corporate world, from state-of-the-art computer games and flight simulators to live role plays, this book is a great read for educators of all types," writes Marshall S. Smith, director of education programs at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The textbook Learning by Doing explains how to select, research, build, sell, deploy, and measure the right type of "learning by doing" for the right situation. As John Coné, former chief learning officer of Dell Computers, suggests, “Anyone who wants to lead or even succeed in our profession would do well to read this book.”
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Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds: Strategies for Online Instruction
This practical guide, widely adopted in undergraduate and advanced degree programs, shows current and future faculty members and instructional designers how to identify opportunities for building games, simulations, and virtual environments into the curriculum; how to successfully incorporate these interactive environments to enhance student learning; and how to measure the learning outcomes. It also discusses how to build institutional support for using and financing more complex simulations. The book includes frameworks, tips, case studies and other real examples, and resources.
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The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games: How the Most Valuable Content Will be Created in the Age Beyond Gutenberg to Google
"A must read for those involved in education and journalism," according to Bill Kovach, former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games offers an encyclopedic overview and complete lexicon for those who care about the next generation of educational media and "gamification" of all systems. This is the award-winning essential reference for not only those directly involved in simulations and serious games, but also for researchers and writers, computer game designers, and software engineers. Organized as a style guide for interactive experiences, the book includes more than 600 easy-to-browse entries and definitions, divided into key topics with introductory essays highlighting essential concepts.
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Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education
"One of the few books where I have ever agreed with every word.”
- Larry Rosenstock, creator of San Diego’s High Tech High
The most powerful new ideas in education are coming from the families that have given up on schools. From his experience with homeschoolers and unschoolers, education guru Clark Aldrich distills a revolutionary manifesto of 55 core ''rules'' that reboots our vision of childhood education and the role of schools. This straightforward book, quoted by President Obama, is being devoured and shared by those who care most about education in the 21st Century, including parents, teachers, school administrators, and national policy makers.
Short Sims
"Aldrich has done it again. He has created a solution that makes the room go quiet.”
- Karl Kapp
Education is in crisis, from universities to corporations.
Despite grand visions, the fundamental building blocks of content (and therefore all of instruction) remain text heavy and passive. And the rare application of advanced consumer technology has resulted in experiments that are narrow in scope, hard to deploy, and impossible to update.
This book provides a better way: a proven new pedagogy that allows anyone to quickly create engaging and responsive content that still aligns with current budgets, schedules, and deployments.
Non-proprietary, the approach combines new tools that have just emerged with decades of research and implementations with leading organizations including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Harvard Business School Publishing, ETS, Visa, Gartner, State Department, Acton Academy, and the U.S. Army. If education's dark ages has been defined by the dominance of linear content, Short Sims shed light on an educational landscape where active content is cheap, commonplace, and expected of authors.
▶ Clark Aldrich
"Why can't schools teach leadership?" This single question has motivated Clark Aldrich for three decades, down a path that, along the way, resulted in him being a leading voice and pioneering practitioner in experiential learning and leadership and culture development, and whose work has shaped major trends in education, training, and simulation-based learning worldwide.
His newest pedagogy, Socratic Cards (2026), represents one conclusion of this career-long mission. By blending Socratic dialogues, game mechanics, peer feedback, reflection, mentorship, and real-world challenges, Socratic Cards transforms leadership development from passive instruction into a heroic journey of growth—all in an elegant format that does not rely on a traditional educational infrastructure.
His previous breakthrough pedagogy, Short Sims, became an industry standard, with customers ranging from the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to the U.S. Department of State, Gates Foundation, ETS, Moody’s, KPMG, and the Center for Army Leadership. His sixth book, Short Sims: A Game Changer (2020), documented his scalable method for teaching people in their natural language of “learning to do,” not the academic language of “learning to know,” as demonstrated in his popular off-the-shelf Leadership for New Managers Short Sims suite.
Earlier, Aldrich helped pioneer learner-centric education through Unschooling Rules (2011), a book now associated with the rise of modern microschools and alternative education models. The book made Charles Koch’s list of recommended reading and was cited by Barack Obama.
Aldrich is widely regarded as one of the founding figures of modern simulation- and game-based learning. His award winning books Simulations and the Future of Learning (2003), Learning by Doing (2004) and The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games (2009) helped define the field and launch the broader gamification movement in education and training. Over his career, he has designed more than 100 educational simulations and serious games and earned a U.S. patent for leadership simulation design through his work on Virtual Leader, which also received “Best Product of the Year” honors from ASTD (now ATD).
Before that, Aldrich founded Gartner’s e-learning research and advisory services in the late 1990s, helping define the modern corporate learning industry and advising many of the world’s largest organizations during the first wave of digital learning transformation.
Aldrich also works directly with accomplished leaders at the top of their fields in the real world, including many years with the senior leadership of Xerox (where he worked closely with Ursula Burns, who stepped down as CEO in 2016); with dozens of CIOs while at his Fifth Avenue office at Research Board; on the NSA board where he held Top Secret clearance; and most recently with Heroic-organization genius Jeff Sandefer.
Across his career, Aldrich’s innovations and thought leadership have earned multiple industry “Best of the Year” awards and extensive media coverage, including The New York Times, Fortune, CNN, Wired, NPR, CBS, ABC, USA Today, and BusinessWeek. He has been called a “guru” by Fortune magazine and a “maverick” by CNN. His books and frameworks have been taught from undergraduate classrooms to doctoral programs, and he has guest lectured at institutions including Harvard, the Army War College, the Naval War College, and the FBI Academy at Quantico. He has been featured on the cover of leading industry magazines, and been included on multiple "top of the profession" lists. Aldrich holds a degree in Cognitive Science from Brown University.