Use a Business Wargame to recognise your blind spots and opportunities for your future!
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Are you missing the really good ideas for how to make your business great again and robust for the future? Play a Business Wargame!
- Do you lead a company, a business unit or a team?
- Are you concerned about the future viability of your business?
- Are you plagued by fears about the future?
In all these cases, a Business Wargame can help you understand threats better and see the opportunities in them.
The Wargame principle
A very exciting and compelling experience. Here I want to give you a guide for your Business Wargame. Together with my team at FutureManagementGroup, I have conducted countless exciting wargames over the last 20 years.
A wargame is a workshop to simulate conceivable, likely and even surprising attacks by competitors against your company and to learn from them where the blind spots in your strategy are, where you are vulnerable, but also where your best future opportunities lie.
A Business Wargame is a role play, but do not invite your colleagues to a role play. If you call it a wargame, they are more likely to come and take part. You can also use other common terms such as “be the enemy” or “nightmare competitor” or “disrupt me”. And let me say this up front: I am a peaceful person and I am not advocating aggression or even wars here. This is only a harmless but very inspiring thought experiment in the world of business.
Battle of Dorking
In 1872 there was an attack by the German Empire on Great Britain. It was one year after the victory of the North German Confederation under the leadership of the Prussian army over France. And one year after the founding of the German Empire on 01 January 1871. The Germans were in the middle of strong industrialisation and, through the victory over France and the founding of the Empire, were also enormously motivated. The British Navy was destroyed by so-called „fatal engines“. Today we call them torpedoes. The German army landed in Sussex. Both the British Navy and the army were scattered all over the world to expand and maintain the Commonwealth. In addition, Great Britain had largely demilitarised and was poorly trained. So they were weak at home.
The attack was extremely surprising. Surprising because there was no obvious reason for the attack, no dispute, no conflict, no crisis.
What had to happen, happened. In the decisive Battle of Dorking, the Germans defeated the British. The Germans conquered Great Britain and turned it into a highly taxed province of the German Empire. Great Britain had to hand over its role as the leading sea power, as well as the huge Commonwealth, to the German Empire.
But wait: none of this ever happened. It was an invented story. A scenario. Written by George Chesney in 1871, one year before the alleged attack. Published in this book: The Battle of Dorking. When William came. Wilhelm, the Emperor of the German Empire.
The book was printed and read hundreds of thousands of times and caused enormous attention and heated, fearful debate. As a consequence, the British strengthened their army and navy again with great urgency and enormous investment. And they founded the Secret Service. In this way, by inventing a previously unimagined but plausible and frightening scenario of an attack by a strong opponent, it may have prevented the scenario from becoming reality. These considerations can be seen as one of the first documented wargames.
Goals of a Business Wargame
The purpose of a wargame is that you can imagine what competitors might do and how they might do it in order to take your orders and your customers away from you. To drive your company into irrelevance and bankruptcy. And how they might use the latest astonishing technologies and apply the smartest strategies to make you disappear from the market.
But a Business Wargame should only deliberately create fear in the first part, to wake up a team that may have become too self-satisfied. But fear without hope is harmful.
The second goal is that you protect yourself preventively against these attacks by preparing for them. This makes your direction and strategy more robust for the future. This is exactly why many authorities and companies simulate attacks on their infrastructure. To identify and fix the weak points.
And the third and most important goal is that, by reversing the competitors’ potential attacks, you recognise in them exactly your greatest opportunities for the future. And please apply them only with fair and legal means and for the benefit of your customers. And please not by directly harming your competitors. This makes your company and business model significantly more robust for the future and you will never again run the risk of missing major threats and opportunities through lack of attention.
With a Business Wargame, you calibrate your team’s attention to signals in the market. That gives you a kind of strategic future radar, and practically for free.
How to proceed in a Business Wargame
You can run a Business Wargame quite pragmatically in three hours, or very professionally over two or three days with several rounds.
1. Define the business field
You can take your current company and business model as the object of the attacks. Or, if you have a vision for your future company and business model, you can also take that as the object of the attacks. This allows you to test wonderfully whether your direction is robust for the future.
Determine which effects customers pay your company for. So do not focus on the tangible products and services, but on what your customers are really buying. So not on the car, for example, but on mobility, enjoyment and prestige, and not on health insurance, but on the feeling of security as the desired effect.
2. Define the competitors
Choose real, potential and even imaginary competitors. Take competitors you respect, competitors you despise, those that already exist or those that do not exist yet. Make sure you always include a rich, intelligent and aggressive Chinese competitor. And if that one is not there yet, be sure: it is coming.
And add Alphabet as a competitor, the parent company of Google, so that you also think through total digital disruption. In any case, you must bring the nightmare competitors into the game.
3. Put yourself in your competitors’ role
Put two, three or more employees into the role of a competitor, depending on the size of the overall group.
Give the teams thinking aids, for example a list of innovative technologies currently emerging in your industry. Or a visualisation of the elements of your business model.
You can also simulate in one round of the wargame that there is a new crash followed by an economic crisis, triggered by a not entirely unlikely collapse of the euro banking system.
4. Let the competitors attack your company
Then these competitor teams attack your company and business model. With knowledge of your business model. You will be amazed at all the nasty things your employees come up with. In this way, you simulate everything that could happen in the near or distant future.
You simulate the attacks you are actually afraid of. But you will only get rid of these fears of the future and the feeling of threat if you face them, deal with them and make provision for the case.
5. Determine the impact of the attacks
Now switch roles. Your teams now become teams from your company again.
Leave one employee from each competitor team in that role. He or she now presents to the team the attacks that the competitor team selected as the most effective, meaning the most dangerous and damaging for you. Now you can see what effects the attacks have on your company’s success factors. Where you are vulnerable. You can see where the hits would land and how severe the effects of the attacks would be.
The teams then assess and decide what can be neglected and what absolutely must be addressed.
6. Develop contingency strategies
In the next step, develop so-called contingency strategies.
These are preventive strategies, meaning measures that you can already implement today. Either to stop competitors from attacking in the first place, for example through patent protection or through better contracts with your customers, or measures that keep the consequences of an attack low.
7. Develop your opportunities
Your competitors’ attacks are – if you reverse them – exactly the opportunities you need for the future. After carefully evaluating and selecting all your opportunities, you have a clear picture of the business fields, business models and strategies that should support your company’s existence in three, five or ten years.
You recognise and use your opportunities in the market of the future. This helps you get rid of your fears about the future and see the future as less threatening and more full of opportunity. Through the simulation, analysis and reversal of possible future attacks, your strategic direction becomes robust for the future. What does not kill you makes you stronger.
I wish you a brilliant future!
Have a bright future!
The best thing is to set a date for your wargame right away.
If you have questions about the method, the necessary tools or the organisation, I will be happy to answer them. Email me: PM@futuremanagementgroup.com