Business is war game

The competition: This group may consist of one or more teams, each representing a different company in the market. The market: This team represents the market and the consumers, and usually consists of sales, marketing, and product development professionals. This team assesses the decisions of the home team and competition and determines the reaction of the customers and the market as a whole. The team facilitators: In some ways, the facilitators act as the control team, and there is usually one facilitator per team.

They can also introduce significant changes in the market, like policy changes or technological developments, changing the market environment to add real-life dynamics, and often pose challenging questions to the teams that those participants are not asking themselves. Strategy formulation: The home team and competitor teams use the information to better understand the competitive mindset of the company they represent.

They focus on assess their drivers, strategy, assumptions, and capabilities. This then leads to addition forecasting of potential moves and countermoves of particular future scenarios.

Reaction and feedback: The facilitators take the strategies of the home and competitor teams to drive discussion with the participants around who wins and loses in the future market scenarios outlined. There will be discussion and debate on how the choices made will affect the world at large, and if any new dynamics, like technological advances or changes in government policy, will emerge and how they will impact the market. The Benefits of War Gaming Using business war gaming for strategic planning is an exciting and engaging way to get ahead of the competition.

Align leadership: War gaming helps your business leaders, from functional leaders to unit leaders, develop aligned strategies and priorities based on demonstrable data. They can then take the information learned from the war games to create a complementary plan of attack, ensuring better company-wide implementation that can address the competitive landscape more effectively.

Improve success: By simulating the competition and playing out their potential future actions, businesses can better predict what their challengers are going to do and develop more robust strategies in response.

These well-planned strategies are more likely to be successful. Evaluate strategies: War games can run through any number of plans and variations, assessing them thoroughly so your business can be more confident in its decisions. This type of preparation also helps develop alternative plans of attack in the event of an unforeseen change of circumstance, reducing the risk involved.

Recognize opportunities: By viewing the market from multiple angles, participants are more likely to find hidden or unnoticed opportunities to exploit. Enhance teamwork: War games bring cross-functional people together for the exercise, allowing professionals from all departments to collaborate and communicate. Predict efficiently: War game simulations can cover several years of strategy over a few days, making it a highly time-efficient way of testing strategic initiatives and theories.

Instead of spending years evaluating your strategies in the real world, your business can evaluate them in a safe, closed environment in days, saving time and money. Participants playing the role of your competitors can also provide feedback, identifying any weak points that posed easy targets. Investigate opportunities: In a war game, participants are looking at the same market from wildly different perspectives — while some are operating as stand-ins for your own company, others may be playing as competitors or as consumers.

Identify shortcomings: In addition to strengthening your strategy, war gaming can bolster your company as a whole. Simulation allows you to take a hard look at your established internal practices and strategies and identify how they might interfere with communication and collaboration internally and externally.

Pharmaceuticals and health care: Competition is the heart of the health care and pharmaceutical industry in the modern era. War gaming can help companies in these industries uncover actionable insights that can help them stay ahead of the curve. Financial services: Technology and productivity are two significant drivers and disruptions in the financial sector, and war gaming provides a solution that can help develop new strategies for handling these challenges.

Consumer goods: Consumer preferences are always changing, so foresight is an essential tool. Manufacturing and industrial: Assess your strategies and principles from a new perspective with war gaming. Next, the market team awards a percentage of the market share. Finally, the control team opens a dialogue about how things worked. In the next round, each team tries to counteract the moves made in the previous round. Each round can represent a month, a year or a custom timeline.

Depending on the desired outcomes, this may be a one- or two-day event. Your war game facilitator can help you determine what kind of simulation is best to meet your needs. You may choose to run two separate games, one where you raise prices and one where you do not.

Or, you may run a business simulation where you raise the prices and increase your marketing spend. Tactical war games are best when you have a few small tactics to test out, and foresee several potential competitor counter actions.

Strategic games are more comprehensive. You can test-drive wider-reaching strategic questions, such as how to increase market share or which ad campaign to run.

The possibilities for what you can pressure test with a strategic game are vast. Strategic games can simulate years of strategic development, and react to competing strategies in real time. Some methods use a computerized model. In this case, you may input a set of moves for the computer model to respond to. Corporate wargaming simulates these moves in an open-ended setting, where real people face real problems and adapt as they go. Traditional strategic planning helps you create strategy assuming current trends continue.

When you take a disruptive approach, these trends may shift. Old-school scenario planning predicts the future based on informed speculation, which might still be biased. With traditional analysis, you form new plans by examining your environment and evaluating existing strategies. The traditional analysis only predicts discontinuities. War games play them out. A competitor team might vertically integrate, which transforms the market.

While this may not fully predict disruptions, it shows how likely they are and prepares your organization for any scenario in the process. With scenario planning, you and your team develop a set of narratives that are likely outcomes of your current strategy. A well-organized scenario plan takes several months to form. War games, in contrast, happen move by move.

The tactics each team takes in one round determines the conditions for the next round. Business simulation adapts to change as it happens. Market research informs war games. Wargaming predicts the market better than market research alone because there is a group of real people playing the market. The home and competitor teams can ask questions to the market team and learn why they behaved how they did. You may be wondering if business wargaming is a good fit for your company.

A war game can prove most fruitful when:. Wargaming is a reliable option when you are unsure how your strategy will work, or if you have a problem with an unclear solution. For example, if your company understands your biggest competitor but knows little about other competitors. Wargaming puts your employees into the shoes of competitors and regulators and forces them to play to win. Business wargaming is an engaging, exciting and energetic experience.

Unlike other exercises, wargaming is designed to provide helpful insights for actionable strategic decision-making. The competitive advantage of business wargaming is exponential. This pushed back the competing launch by six months. After a war game workshop, leaders can better evaluate their alternative strategies and recognize hidden opportunities to seize and real threats to blunt.

Some of the top merits of business war games include that they:. Many are moving away from a strictly data-based strategic analysis, and wargaming offers high-end qualitative analytics. Here is how you can leverage these powerful insights:. Proactive Worldwide offers full-scale business wargaming consulting services.

Our business war game practice is lead by a sought-after wargaming authority, and the president of Proactive Worldwide, David Kalinowski. The time period will usually be from several months to one to two years.

Shorter periods are less common, as the decisions taken will become tactical, rather than strategic in nature. Longer periods are also uncommon, as the uncertainty factors mean that War Gaming gives less direction. For such longer-term cases scenario planning often provides a safer approach. One approach to war gaming is to set up a computer simulation, mapping what is believed to be the business situation.

At the end of each round, the computer scores each team giving financial and market share parameters for the following round.

Although these programs allow participants to play out various scenarios, they are artificial as they do not allow participants to fully play out the real situation operating in the industry or to come up with innovative strategies outside the scope of the computer programme.

As a result, using such simulations are unlikely to accurately reflect the real world and their main benefits are as training exercises in business strategy — allowing players to model the results of particular plans based on probabilities. From a competitive intelligence perspective, computer simulations hold little value.

Rather, a key requirement for a successful war game is information on the organisations being modelled. Prior to the start of the game each team should be thoroughly briefed on each organisation. Typically, teams will then meet independently, in workshop sessions and use the briefing information to plan what they would do during the first time period, playing the role of their chosen or allocated organisation.

Following the completion of the round, players then announce their strategies and plans, leading to the second round. This process then continues for the agreed number of rounds. During each round, players need to anticipate the moves of other players, develop their own strategies, decide on what resources and funding are needed and ensure that these exist and are allocated as necessary in their plans.