By: Brant
- Develop scenarios that push participants to get into the full range of issues, without getting hung up on how realistic some aspects of the scenario are. The idea is to get people to propose courses of action that haven’t been contemplated. Preparing good scenarios is probably the area in which wargaming expertise based on prior experience is most helpful.
- Include a broad range of participants who know enough to come up with new ideas and are outspoken enough to do so and defend their views.
- Put the most senior and knowledgeable people on “red” (adversaries) teams, so that you have the best chance of seeing the adversary played aggressively and well.
- Each team should have one “troublemaker” who will challenge everyone in the game with unconventional approaches.
- Avoid having a game with only senior decision-makers, especially if they share a point of view, again to ensure that alternative ways of looking at the situation get considered.
Do not allow any idea to be dismissed or suppressed without strong evidence that it really wouldn’t work.
- Concentrate on producing indicators and warnings that would let you know if a threat the game identified seems to be happening or about to happen.
- Go over the lessons learned, preferably revisiting some of the more vexing questions more fully in one or more subsequent games.
11 May 2011
Wargaming the Future for Civilian Companies
Non-military organizations are now looking at wargaming as a way to drive corporate strategy. One article spoke with Mark Herman, wargame designer extraordinaire and high-level Grand Mucky-Muck for Booz Allen Hamilton. The article offered some tips for people putting together corporate wargames.
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5 comments:
Hi Brant,
I'm interested in these things from another angle as well. A lot of newer games have a cooperative or "non-zero sum" element.
There are situations where the optimum behavior may have short term poor competitive consequences but long term non-competitive or "absolute" consequences.
On another note, I sent you an e-mail about a week ago concerning MtC. Did you get it?
I replied to that email... may want to double-check your spam filter :)
I think there's a lot of 'fuzziness' that can be explored in the real-world-based wargaming realm. There aren't nearly enough multi-polar games or mixed/cooperative outcomes. There aren't enough cases where supporting a market rival in a conflict with a challenging government makes long-term business sense for the company. And there's *never* an internal-focused wargame that considers the effects of the choices on the *employees* of the company.
Yup you were right about the spam filter!
I have an anecdote about your last point.
Many years ago, when I was a grad student, I remember having lunch with a visiting professor who said he didn't care how brilliant someone may be, they may have even won a Nobel Prize, but if they were a jerk and brought down the overall feeling in the lab, he didn't want them.
A few years ago, this professor himself won the Nobel Prize.
And Marc - don't be a stranger 'round these parts :)
Didn't check the links but business-related "serious games" go back to the beginning days of operational research. See Clark Abt's book of the same title for some early examples (though to be fair, Abt's background is military too).
What bugs me is the corporate world appropriating the language, metaphors and even (at least in its advertising) dress of the military. They're completely different things: the Suit is not there to literally kill his rival, and the Major is not there to "serve his stakeholders". Jeez. You've seen enough of this bilge to know what I'm talking about.
That being said, I liked Brant's comments about the limitations of business gaming. There's definitely room for improvement.
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