Sometimes they even discover that none of their strategies is aggressive enough, and to achieve their goals they must generate new ideas. Those insights translate directly into competitive advantage.
Pre-empting the competition. They found out later that the competitor planned to do exactly what they figured out in the war game, and that their pre-emptive move was the reason why the competitor did not make their move.
Change the rules? Shell Oil worked with ACS to conduct a business war game before rolling out a change-the-rules strategy. They discovered that their strategy, which had previously passed through multiple reviews, would almost certainly trigger a competitive war that would devastate the industry. Change the rules! Marketing They created a by-the-book, Marketing strategy. They were so confident in the strategy that most of their strategists questioned the value of a war game…until their strategy caused their competitor role-played by their own colleagues to go ballistic.
Their strategy had panicked their competitor, thereby triggering a ruinous price war and out-of-control losses. The chastened team rolled back the clock, tried a less confrontational strategy, and accepted somewhat slower forecast growth in market share in return for strong profits.
Triple sales. ACS developed a simulation of the business, and tested thousands of scenarios. The conclusion: trebling sales was not possible except for under unrealistically optimistic conditions.
Top management agreed to more-realistic goals, and the business-unit managers were saved from what would have appeared to be failure. High road or low road. The objective of a War Game should be to improve corporate planning processes, and use the lessons learned from the War Game in business strategy. Generally, but depending on the actual purpose and scope of the game, these teams represent different competitors. However they can also include key customers, or other organisations such as regulatory bodies.
There are a number of ways of carrying out a war game — and different practitioners will suggest various approaches and methodologies. However generally, the actual War Game process involves a number of rounds. Each round represents a different time period, which depends on the exact focus for the game. 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. In addition to offering these advantages, war gaming provides a number of auxiliary benefits to a company, its managers, and intelligence teams, such as the following. Help build competitive awareness throughout all units and levels of the organization.
Develop a deeper understanding of the impact of roles, functions and actions across the organization. This can improve team building, coordination of efforts, and knowledge sharing. Enhance intelligence generation by more clearly defining intelligence needs, direction, and focus, as well as engaging more personnel in information collection other ways of participation. Our ever evolving business battleground require continuous vigilance and efforts toward understanding the emerging and likely scenarios that involve our competitors, customers, markets, regulators, technology and other factors and influences.
The war game is an effective tool for anticipating and managing a landscape that contains a host of situations, factors and potential outcomes. By understanding our business landscape and gaining more control over our environment, we can map more secure and efficient routes, develop contingencies for the inevitable shifts and detours, and gain necessary advantage for our organizations.
Plan and coordinate: participants, teams, timeline, resources, budget, etc. Conduct competitive research for the war game issue: published source collection and human source collection.
Conduct preliminary analysis based on research results. Pre-game team preparation: provide briefings, instructions, tutorials, assignments, and the research and analysis materials kit to participants.
Conduct war game exercise s : simulations of likely actions and reactions under specific scenarios and conditions. Draw conclusions to likely scenarios and outcomes and form recommendations. Devise formal strategy, plan s , contingencies, next steps, etc.
Debrief participants regarding the process: identify key lessons and ways to improve exercises. Identify additional intelligence efforts that are required such as establishing a continuous war gaming process or an early warning system for your war game issue. Geospatial Newsletters Keep up to date with the latest geospatial trends!
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