Managing an important change process within an organization or community. Introducing innovations in an educational institution. Helping a group of diverse and distributed professionals to collaborate effectively. These are a few examples of complex challenges that managers and decision makers are increasingly faced with, and for which an in-depth understanding of the underlying psychological, cognitive and social dynamics of collaboration is required. SmallWorld Simulations (SWS) represent a promising approach to address such challenges through advanced learning technologies that support immersive, simulation-based collaborative learning experiences. This paper offers an overview of the key design principles underlying SWS, and of current research and developments in this area.