Wargaming For Business Leaders
If you are following along in our series about leadership principles for business leaders, we need to talk more about the future and how to plan for it. Wargaming tests future scenarios and is an absolute necessity for warrior leaders. But wargaming is not just for the Department of Defense. Intelligent executives use wargaming to prepare their businesses and teams for the days ahead. If you want to drive innovation and profitability in your business, start here.
Every entrepreneur and Senior executive must spend time wargaming. Wargaming allows you to test and even stress test potential courses of action. In other words, wargaming is the tool that will enable you to improvise, adapt, and overcome. If you are in the construction business, wargaming is for you. Investor, wargaming is definitely for you. Entrepreneurs looking to grow your business in the face of a potential economic downturn, wargaming is the secret tool you need to overcome Murphy.
Even if you didn't grow up with a GI Joe, never spent time in the military, and haven't seen Band of Brothers, you can still learn to wargame effectively. Don't worry if this is your first time doing it; wargaming is a skill you can learn. Wargaming by definition: A war game is a strategic planning and decision-making tool where you anticipate the future and talk about and test potential and competitor actions and responses and even "Murphy" reactions. In the simplest form, wargaming is where you play out a series of thoughts or plans in your mind or with others and ask them for feedback on what they think will happen and how you need to react.
How to make it work for you, the business executive? Start with a premortem. A postmortem, of course, is where experts discern how something died or failed. A premortem, then, is figuring out how your business might fail and then coming up with ways to anticipate those potential courses of action and wholesale avoiding them. So again, look at one of your plans, informally work through the plan or course of action and determine not what can go right… but what can go wrong? To be sure, we don't want to spend our lives in the "negative ."But concentrated, short-term scenario testing and crisis contingency planning go a long way. So, make a short list of the possibilities in your business's future, and focus on the ones that can really hurt your chances of success. Build contingency plans that address those worst-case scenarios, and communicate them to your team.
