Wargaming: Unlocking a responsive path for turbulent times

Over the past five years, leaders in every sector and industry have been forced to adapt to multiple geopolitical, geoeconomic, environmental, technological, and societal disruptions at breakneck speed – often concurrently. How can wargaming provide critical value that enhances leaders’ decisions, and in turn, strengthens organisations’ future readiness?

What is wargaming?

Wargaming is akin to a strategic or operational adventure game for decision-makers that tries to predict and understand the actions of other players in a given ecosystem, equipping leaders with the insights to make winning moves in the real world. Instead of toy soldiers, business wargaming uses ideas, numbers, and tailored scenarios to see what might happen in the future. It’s practice for real life, carried out in a safe way to assess what works and what doesn’t. The evidence-driven, testing-focused methodology brings clarity to difficult decisions and plans – before they become reality.

Wargaming in practice

Wargaming offers tailored, scenario-based exercises that bring ecosystems to life. Simulated future scenarios enable leaders to explore, test, and stress-test plans and processes, zooming in and out to see both ‘the forest and the trees’.
Wargaming boosts organisational readiness and resilience across four core areas:

• Strategy and policy – strengthening strategies and policies to determine the best strategic path through an ecosystem of threats and opportunities. For example, we worked with a global pharmaceutical company who wanted to enhance its strategic responsiveness in a fast-moving market for the next few years. We ran for their leaders a deeply researched business strategy wargame so they could be in their competitor’s shoes for a day, enabling them to be ready for those competitive future moves.
• Operating model – exploring, testing, and stress-testing ‘as is’ and ‘to be’ operating models and organisational designs against a range of drivers and challenges, enhancing organisational readiness, and sustained competitiveness. For example, we supported a UK government department to develop an operating model able to utilise category management to segment business activity. We designed and facilitated multiple wargaming exercises to explore, test, and refine the proposed operating model, and prepare for successful roll-out.
• Major projects and programmes – enhancing project and programme readiness across the full lifecycle, using scenario-based contingency planning and wargaming to be ready for day one. Working with a government agency, we delivered a two-year negotiation strategy readiness project to underpin their major re-procurement programme. We helped the agency’s negotiation teams to build confidence in team roles and responsibilities, define their negotiation strategy, and rehearse key upcoming negotiation meetings.
• Resilience exercising and improvement programmes – building the ability to handle, and recover from disruptive events, while strengthening processes and preparing teams through resilience improvement plans. For example, we worked with England’s National Highways to establish a new level of digital resilience capability to reduce the risk of disruption to road users and protect critical road infrastructure. We identified three areas of focus: enhancing the digital resilience ecosystem to meet customer needs; building digital resilience muscle through wargaming; and establishing a new digital resilience mindset.

The critical value of wargaming

Tailored wargaming programmes give leaders the chance to understand the possible consequences of critical decisions and actions within their system of interest. Through roleplay or real resistant interactive external environments, leaders can get inside the heads of competitors, customers, patients, regulators, or the media. Exploring inside-out and outside-in points of view is particularly helpful in mitigating unintended consequences, biases, false assumptions, and blind spots. It also helps leaders to break down siloes and accelerate internal or consortium-led alignment, cultivating a behavioural transformation mindset shift.

Wargaming can test an upcoming decision, strategic, or operational plan, providing a proven de-risking methodology. Running specific readiness and resilience wargaming exercises can help leaders to prepare for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) issues and events, testing plans and strategies against different scenarios, ranging from good conditions to the absolute worst case. Armed with insights gained from those exercises, leaders can create practical, robust plans that cover a vast range of eventualities. Importantly, teams are well-prepared to handle whatever comes next.

Wargaming and system thinking

Wargaming also works hand-in-hand with system thinking, a crucial approach for examining how different parts of a system and system of systems interact. Take an aircraft. System engineers can zoom in on components, break them down, and create rich pictures of the system both as a whole and the sum of its parts. Wargaming applies social science to bring rich pictures to life, zooming in and out with different teams and functions to identify as-yet-unseen challenges, efficiencies, and inter-dependencies. This three-dimensional view brings more nuance and depth to understanding, boosting responsiveness, readiness, and resilience.

Seeing ‘the forest and the trees’

Today, organisations can’t afford to sit tight and see what happens. They need to be ready for every possibility, even unthinkable ones. With wargaming, they can zoom in, zoom out, and adjust decisions in light of real-world impacts. They can see the forest as well as the trees, getting close to the bark while charting the entire ecosystem from a birds’ eye view. Through wargaming, organisations can safeguard against critical future shifts – whether tiny or tectonic.