What is a War Game and How to Do One?
What is a War Game and How to Do One? Have you heard of Competitive Intelligence? So, you may be looking to move ahead of your competition. Do you need fresh insight to make important decisions while keeping your team onside? Are you facing a tricky situation and need to change the direction your ship is heading? This article asks what a War Game is and how to do one.
What is Competitive Intelligence?
Competitive Intelligence is the ethical collection and analysis of competitive information to help you avoid surprises, think more moves ahead, and minimise uncertainty, enabling more informed strategic decisions. It gives you the ability to differentiate yourself and stay ahead of the competition, and in many cases, can be the unspoken, hidden key to success.
Make better-informed decisions
Here’s a great way to make better-informed decisions. It’s called War Games, and it’s one of the best tools in the Competitive Intelligence armoury. A War Game is a military or business exercise you conduct to test or improve your tactical expertise. Various scenarios and actions are introduced into the exercise, and teams have to respond to them. These teams represent your company and your competitors. It’s a highly effective way to test your assumptions about your ever-changing competitive environment. It also helps your organisation better understand itself and move forward with confidence.
How to play a War Game
Playing a War Game is rather like playing a board game such as Risk or Chess. First, split your people into teams. Each team should represent a competitor and other external influences such as a government or regulator. One team must represent your own company. The teams acting as your competitor must become your competitor. They should study them, and think how they think.
They should research them and get under their skin. Each team maps the current business situation and assesses what could happen in the future. You will need an umpire to assess each team’s success and determine how realistic their plans are, and an independent external facilitator to avoid your company culture and viewpoints leaking into the findings. Next, create several rounds to represent a period spanning a couple of months (if you are being tactical) or one or two years (if you are being more strategic).
Creating a new strategy
Once each team understands the competitor they represent, they go away to develop a growth strategy to help them win the game. The strategy and plans must be realistic. Each team must be able to achieve its strategy in real life.
Read More: Divide and conquer: What war can teach you about business
The teams must then reconvene and present their plans. The opposing teams and judges can ask probing questions. This questioning represents the end of the 1st round. Assumptions are explained, and the teams can use a myriad of software analysis tools available to do so. However, the War Game must be run in an old-fashioned way. This means people interacting face-to-face in the same room (with breakout rooms), using paper, flip charts, pens, and Post-it notes. You need to feel what’s going on and watch the teams’ reactions to feedback and comments from the umpires and other teams.
Reviewing plans
The 2nd round consists of each team going away and reviewing their plans and strategies following the 1st round’s presentations. In addition to presenting its plans, each team should attempt to anticipate the other teams’ thoughts and ideas and perhaps counter what they plan to do. For each strategy and action plan, teams must detail the required resources and funding. If they are not currently available to the competitor, they should tell the judges how they intend to get them.
Rule nothing out
The whole process can get very heated and feel very real, and the passion will bring some great ideas into play. War Games also prove to be great fun for everyone taking part. Military and intelligence organisations play such strategic games all the time, answering questions like “What if Israel joins the bombing campaign in Syria?” or “What if Russia invades Lithuania?” You can do the same. “What if Competitor X brings out a game-changing product?” etc.
Throughout, nothing should be ruled out. Judges can throw a spanner in the works, and if it makes sense for two teams to merge, then this can happen too. You can bring “What if…” rounds into the game asking the teams to devise their actions on a scenario. The reactions and outcomes are really powerful and give you amazing insight into what your enemy could do and feel.
Selecting the winner
Once your War Game is finished, each team writes up its findings and the umpires bring everything together. The winning team is decided by the umpires, but there is nothing wrong with opposing teams providing input too. Ultimately, the result is that your entire organisation wins, with the War Game process answering your most pressing and important questions. Given the situation you face, are there any benefits of a surprise, and how much do you think it will cost you?
Read More: How will your competitors win the war in the future?
Strategy
So War Gaming is useful to:
- Focus on one strategy or test several alternatives
- Develop a company-wide culture of strategic thinking to help you develop new ideas, services and product
- Manage and predict those immediately, let’s do it now crises
- Find a great way to bond your team together, which does not include the pub and a karaoke machine
Consider this a valuable extension to your War Game
Another extremely useful tool, as used by the CIA, is the Red Team model. The Red Team is a group of people who have not been involved in your War Game so far. It looks at what you have decided to do and your reasoning behind it. It will then attempt to completely discredit the plan and provide reasons it would not work.
Read More: Key player people-related intelligence questions
This is not as daft as it may sound. Looking to discredit the plan could (and does) reveal glaring gaps in the decision-makers’ thinking and helps counter groupthink. Red Teams can save a lot of time and resources by at least making you think about every possible scenario.
Find out more today
War Games offer you new ways to think about your business, competitors and your decisions – as well as getting your team onside with a complete understanding of your strategy – as a simulated experience. War Games are a great weapon to help you win in real life. This article asks what a War Game is and how to do one.
We are Octopus. The Global People-Powered Competitive Intelligence Agency.
Outsmart your competition. Make the unknown known. Octopus helps you gain clarity in complex markets. With clients and tentacles around the world, we deliver sharp, actionable competitive intelligence through a blend of deep primary (HUMINT) and secondary research. If you’re looking to make smarter decisions, beat the competition, and reduce uncertainty, we’re the partner you want on your side.
