A wargame is a strategic planning exercise addressing a specific competitive challenge where employees roleplay various market scenarios that may develop over a selected time horizon. Adapted from military wargames, business wargames can address gaining market share, purchasing or divesting a business, launching a new technology or product, managing a competitive product launch, mitigating a supply chain weakness and many other situations. The purpose is to get cross-functional employees into the mindset of key stakeholders and competitors to understand and anticipate:
• What are each competitor’s advantages and weaknesses?
• How will customers’ needs and wants change?
• How may competitors react to market shifts?
• How may customers react to these shifts?
• What opportunities and threats should we anticipate, prioritize and plan to address?
When executed well, a wargame produces concrete, actionable recommendations based upon a better understanding of the market and customers. The process requires rigorous preparation to ensure the intelligence is as complete as possible, relevant, accurate and timely. Teams of unbiased strategic thinkers use this intelligence and selected exercises to develop strategy and compete against each other. Depending on the industry, common functions represented on the teams include Sales, Marketing, R&D, Technical Service, Finance, Clinical, Regulatory and Executives. In the end, getting the most value from a wargame requires incorporating the new insights and analysis into strategic plans. Employees that participated in the wargame tend to embrace the resulting strategic plans and drive them to implementation.
Contact us to discuss your competitive situation and how a wargame can help you develop the optimal strategy.
Note: Next post will be on the first step in hosting a wargame: defining a meaningful purpose statement.