This is an interesting post on a couple of levels.
This post is about how groups surface assumptions, think, makeThe term "war-gaming" is thrown around alot inside of SAP, but we're not really doing war-gaming because we're not simulating mistakes and rerunning the game. I don't think we're exceptional on this point either. The other side of the coin is that strategy and decision making in far too many companies I've seen occurs in an echo chamber where public messaging become assumptions upon which strategy is built. For all of it's faults and warts, there is much that can be learned from the way that the public sector works, case in point is military strategy development.
decisions and set effective strategy (or fail to) when they don't know
everything they'd wish to. Iran just happens to be a really good example right now of why it's important (for any organization) to be able to do all that under pressure and in depth.
Technorati Tags: war-gaming, strategy
To your point, the "wrong definition" of war gaming in most companies seems to be more the reuse of entrenched ideas into a response plan as opposed to simulating something and then bubbling up the response plan. The latter is the way to go, but is expensive and time consuming. I think the typical consultant run wargame is a 4 week project with a $200K+ price tag.
Not sure what the answer is to a quick alternative to war gaming to avoid the echo chamber ... aside from maintaining a broad, diverse network which won't parrot your thinking.
Posted by: Rob | Jan 24, 2006 at 03:34 PM
Very good observations from Jeff and Rob. However, go back 20+ years and look and business school education. The field was crowded with computer-based games in which alternative strategies were trashed or rewarded. Go back 30+ years, and game theory was part of the curriculum. Now, fast forward to the present and look for these and other artifacts of analytical approaches to strategic planning. What do you see? Answer: Not much. What's this about?
Posted by: Jack Moore | Jan 24, 2006 at 07:11 PM
Jack,
You will enjoy reading this paper:
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_2/ronfeldt/
Posted by: jeff | Jan 24, 2006 at 07:24 PM