A verbal exchange with Rep. Arjan Singh on wargame design.
While many groups and organizations are embarking on situation planning, most don’t go far enough. Arjan Singh, a representative and assistant professor at Southern Methodist University, says a more disciplined approach, borrowed from the military, can help leaders verify the facts. how your strategies, operations, and tactics hold up against the competition, changing market dynamics and unforeseen events. He has helped many companies identify dangers and find new tactics to innovate by guiding them through corporate war games. It explains its procedure and results. Singh is the author of the e-book Competitive Success: Creating Winning Strategies with Corporate Wargames.
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to Harvard Business Review’s HBR IdeaCast. My name is Alison Beard.
As a leader, how do you think about the other tactics your plans might just fail, how your strategy and business style might be altered, what would the surprise look like for your operations, how your current competitors might outwit you??
Our guest today says that while many groups and organizations interact in situation planning, they don’t do so in a disciplined or thorough enough way to prompt them to think beyond their existing realities. He believes that more and more corporations are borrowing from the military and interacting in war games.
Arjan Singh is an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University and teaches popular courses on war games there and at other universities. As a consultant, he has also helped many corporations use this procedure to de-risk their methods and new tactics to innovate. And it offers recommendations on how Americans can do the same to advance their careers. His new e-book is Competitive Success: Creating Winning Strategies with Corporate Wargames. Arjan, pleased to speak with you today.
ARJAN SINGH: Alison, thank you for having me.
ALISON BEARD: Now, I need to be sensitive with this term war games because, as we know, many other people around the world, from Ukraine to Israel to Palestine, are facing genuine war lately. But tell us why you use it and what it means exactly.
ARJAN SINGH: War games are necessarily dress rehearsals for corporations to review and verify their methods before implementing them in the market. War games are very popular in the military. This spread to the business world about 40 or 50 years ago. Since then, the terminology has remained. They are also known as competitive simulations.
Most wargaming shows in the advertising environment rely on army concepts, so there are a lot of them. Obviously, the topics are very, very different. It follows a very different design in terms of understanding its key competitive landscape, its environment, key players, and typical conditions that would possibly arise when you enter the battlefield. It’s very much in the military world and it translates very, very perfectly into the business world.
ALISON BEARD: And how is it different from classic situational planning?
ARJAN SINGH: Traditional planning is about thinking about other outcomes that can happen in a competitive environment. You hope for the best, but you prepare for the worst and strategize based on those worlds of choice that exist.
Wargaming takes the scenarios to another level. So, it’s not just about what you can imagine in the future, but also about adding elements in terms of the most likely moves of key competition and market stakeholders. And then, the steps that a company needs to take So, it actually highlights the capacity for action and takes it beyond an intellectual training to the really pragmatic next steps for organizations to actually bring them to life.
ALISON BEARD: So, give me an example of a war game training that you can give to your students.
ARJAN SINGH: The one we’ve been presenting lately at SMU is The Battle for Mobility. And this total perception and central theme revolves around “Who will control mobility in the future?”So we have six other groups represented there. We have some classic car brands like GM, Volkswagen, Toyota. We have next-generation suppliers like Tesla, we have represented Uber as well as Waymo. And the overall perception is, “Who’s going to win in this war, the war for mobility?What would happen if the world evolved towards a scenario of not owning cars, technologies and artificial intelligence?What would this be like the way other people move?and use transportation in the future?
ALISON BEARD: So this concept of “the war for” is perhaps the way that corporations or groups look at it, the war for this specific market or customer group?
ARJAN SINGH: Yes, exactly, these are wars. But also of the definition of what this war is and how it defines its industry and the location of the war and who is it competing against?
So, I’ll give you an example. When we faced the COVID situation, everyone was at home and familiarized with online collaboration toolkits. And when we returned to the post-pandemic world, business came back with a marvelous force. So when you look at the classic competitors, you can see that airlines are competing with other airlines and other transportation providers.
But in this new authenticity, there were many other competitors. So were American Airlines, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, the virtual global desire as opposed to the genuine desire to be able to travel. And because of that, the definition is vital in terms of what this companies that define it too narrowly can find themselves in conditions where they risk being caught off guard due to the arrival of new competitors. That’s why this definition is very vital in terms of what this war is going to be.
ALISON BEARD: What are the main games or scenarios that you teach your students and use with your clients?
ARJAN SINGH: So when you look at war games, you see them on three other levels. There are strategic war games, indeed rooted in a long-term strategy, that read about how key macroeconomic trends are transforming the competitive environment. Basically, it answers the question, “What will the game look like in the future?”These are usually much higher-level executives who can get involved in strategic games.
The next point is operational games. And when you have a space explained, you have the competitors explained. And it’s about where to play: “What spaces does a company want to compete in?”
And then you get into the execution-type games, which are tactical games. Therefore, these projects have a much shorter duration. They aim to concentrate on advocacy and regularly have a time horizon of one to two years. The question is “How do we win, how do we sell more products in the marketplace, how do we convey an opposite message to our competitors, and how do we end up winning in this space?”
ALISON BEARD: Ouais, so how do you expand the scenarios?
ARJAN SINGH: So, scripts are a domain that. . . It has been very well documented and written in the business world. There are other tactics to take a look at the scenarios. The scenarios can be very undeniable. Therefore, it can also be as undeniable as asking the organization participating in a war game to think about a set of key elements that can also affect the environment. And then, vote on it and prioritize those that they’d like to address. At its most undeniable, it’s a very fast exercise. It may take a few minutes.
The criteria for examining scenarios are really about having an effect on situations. So those are things that will have an effect on a competitor’s environment and you actually have to think about it from an effect perspective, not a probability perspective, because you really need to play the scenarios that will have the maximum effect.
ALISON BEARD: So when you promote this war games proposition to your academics and clients, what opportunities do you express yourself point out that it will bring compared to other types of strategic planning?And then, what concrete disruptions or dangers do you think only corporations can overcome?
ARJAN SINGH: Yes, the opportunity facet of war games is to help corporations avoid blind spots. This tends to be the case with incumbents who own significant market shares. The attitude tends to be, “That’s the way the industry is. ” We have experience in this area and we know it well, hence our success. And we hope this continues. There are many business school examples and case studies of how this led to the downfall of many corporations, adding many iconic names. So, it helps-
ALISON BEARD: Kodak, Blockbuster, all that.
ARJAN SINGH: Exactamente. Et so, it’s a forum to have those conversations. And this is especially vital when conversations are going to be awkward. This will challenge the prestige quo. This will cause an organization to think differently.
And that’s one of the real advantages, because in a war game, other corporations are represented. You break the organization up into other teams and tell them, “Think like this company. “Think about the question, “What does winning mean to this organization?”And how are you going to attack our organization?And what are you thinking?
You start to deepen this process of ideas and it generates a lot of information. Doing that research from start to finish, getting into the head of the competition and exploring the market from their perspective, is incredibly valuable.
ALISON BEARD: Why do you think many organizations struggle to engage in this kind of deep thinking about other forward-looking futures and where their assumptions are wrong?
ARJAN SINGH: Often, it’s just a matter of resources and time. You know? Because corporations are busy. They are busy in terms of execution. There are things to do. And a lot of times I feel reluctant when corporations talk about creating war games and say, “Oh, can we do this in two hours?”And the answer is, “Well, you can do it, but it’s probably not. “be very good. To make a well-thought-out game, you need anywhere from a day to part of a day.
So, there’s some logistics to getting other people together, especially if you’re in a strategic game and superior control is involved. Their calendars are highly monitored and difficult to consult, let alone require 8 to 12 hours of your time to do so. Time and resources tend to be components of it. And the other component is cultural. Some organizations don’t feel comfortable when their assumptions are questioned. Many structural hierarchies come into play. And if you ask certain senior officials and their way of thinking, they don’t take it intelligently. So, culturally, this can also be a problem.
ALISON BEARD: What data do participants want or get before they start?
ARJAN SINGH: So for a game, you need to have a data document with enough data so that everyone can be familiar with a domain. And one of the key distinctions is that, for corporations that operate in a specific domain and are betting with this domain that they’re very familiar with, their pre-briefing documents tend to be much lighter because it’s a domain that other people are familiar with.
For spaces where companies are looking to grow or acquire knowledge very quickly, games are a wonderful way to do it very, very quickly. And in those cases, the data documents would be much more comprehensive.
Generally speaking, the reports are based on market data and competitive intelligence that you have. And then, dig deeper into the corporations and not just into the core of the apparent measures, but delve into the past battles, which they have already fought in the past. cases, other kinds of history that can be implemented here.
ALISON BEARD: So what’s going on in the game itself?
ARJAN SINGH: So, the game is a series of plenary sessions followed through breakout rooms, where groups paint together. So, in a typical game, you’d start with an introduction. You will give an explanation in terms of the topic, the central challenge. that you’re looking to resolve, the moves that you expect from him. You can provide a small component of the briefing paper so that everyone is on the same point of knowledge.
And then, you perform a series of exercises. And on the first lap, I would normally say, “Okay. For the company you represent, expand a strategy to win in the market and think about the other levers you’ll use. But also think about the question, “What does it mean to win?”What does winning mean for you? »
Because in a market, even if you have direct competitors, every company regularly has another definition of success. Therefore, it is a matter of understanding what is the procedure of that idea, the victory and then the direction of the strategic issues that are going to follow.
You can also ask express questions such as “How would I attack your organization?How do you see the organization, and what are the express things you’re going to do to eliminate market share, sales, or other metrics you might be looking for?In? And then from there, the groups will prepare their presentations, come back, present. Potentially there will be a panel of judges who will give their opinion. And the groups go backwards, revising their methods based on the feedback. , based on how the festival is going through to attack that. And then, you start following a series of workouts that go deeper and deeper into this topic.
And then the games, usually, end with a twist from the company’s point of view. And the central question is, “Based on those rounds of wargames and battles that you’ve experienced, what are the key insights that you’ve generated?What do you see as the biggest opportunities for your business?Where are the biggest risks? The plan you have right now, are you prepared to deal with some of those situations?
And then at the end of the day, it’s literally about driving the movements. And you prioritize, “What are the must-have things that need to be done now, proactively?”What are the things we have to wait for until they start appearing on the market? And a successful game has the names of departments or Americans next to each of those moves that are guilty of getting things done.
ALISON BEARD: yes, that’s helpful. I think everyone enjoyed getting off the site and exchanging smart ideas, and then nothing happens. You talked about the mobility war you led with your students. Can you give us an example of a war game you’ve made recently?done with a client?
ARJAN SINGH: So, war games tend to be a very common activity in the field of pharmaceutical biotechnology. I don’t think I know of any primary pharmaceutical biotech company that hasn’t introduced a war game. And part of the explanation is that more than a billion dollars are being spent to bring a drug to market. There is an important aspect to the game. And so, speaking, in the pharmaceutical industry, there’s a lot of war games as assets are brought to market, at the end of phase 3, at the end of phase 3, in dossier validation, and then once they start. to be introduced to the market.
And so, a recent game I did in the pharmaceutical field. And it was a potential blockbuster that they’re releasing to the market, so their expectations are more than $5 billion in revenue from the product. And so, the game followed a similar design to the one I defined. We’ve gone into detail. And when we started to get into the scenarios, one of the scenarios that came up in the discussion was, “What if the FDA doesn’t approve the product?”
And as you can imagine, there was a lot of criticism in the room: “Well, that would never happen. We know what we’re doing. Also a lot of defensiveness. And we said, “Look, here’s what you have to do is prepare for the worst and hope for the best. “
So, they reviewed the script and asked, “If the FDA doesn’t approve the product, what will you do?”They have developed a manual on what to do there. The war game is over. And less than a year later, when the FDA approval date rolled around, the product was not approved.
And so instead of panicking, instead of saying, “Oh, now, what do we do?”They went to see the result of the war game and said, “Look, here’s a manual for the game. We know exactly what we want to do. There are sure signs in knowledge that we want to reanalyze. There are other things they had to do. He was executed and sent back to the FDA. The product was approved later because they had been there.
ALISON BEARD: It turns out that part of the goal is to figure out how you can fail before you do, or how you’re going to deal with a crazy surprise like COVID.
ARJAN SINGH: Exactly. How you can fail before you do it. The COVID surprise has been interesting. We did, with the academics in 2017, The Battle for the Traveler, which was a game where we had some airlines, American, Delta, we had OTAs, Expedia, ebooking. com. We had TripAdvisor, Marriott, which is a classic hotel chain. The general concept is that everyone is trying to control the traveler and everyone says, “Hey, book on our website. Everywhere else, airlines are now saying, “We will give you loyalty bonuses not only for flights, but also for credit card spending, meals and other matches. “
And in this game, interestingly, in 2017, we really had the COVID situation, where academics had come up with fundamental situational methods for the corporations they represented, how they were going to win. And one of the things that came here after the first circular, what was discovered after the first circular was that each and every company present in the room had a particular assumption on which their methods were based, which was, “The boom in America will most likely continue. And that’s what we’ve built our methods on. “in.
So, we made the situation we gave them very generic by simply saying that “there have been events in the world that are going to have the effect of reducing the call by up to 95%”. from a fictional analyst who says, “The boom in the United States, as we knew it, is dead. Leisure is dead and it will take about 3 years for businesses to recover. So it was essentially the COVID situation. “
And the first reaction of the academics was, “Oh, no way. That will never happen. These are silly scenarios. And we said, “No, get over this. “And each and every company has had to rework its strategy and playbook. It’s based on this transformative assumption, which is that the market boom is over. This will end in the next 3 years.
ALISON BEARD: So it turns out that the end results of those sessions are a manual for a variety of scenarios that you can then put into practice and make sure that it applies if those scenarios arise?
ARJAN SINGH: That’s right, and that’s the key to fostering action after a war game. As you mentioned, we’ve all attended those meetings, which I describe as engaging, engaging discussions and a lot of engaging idea processes. But hey, that es. no leads to nothing. And the actionability, actually, of a war game comes from the playbook. And the handbook is regularly structured around the question, “What movements deserve an organization to adopt?What are the next steps? What are the moves that need to be taken in relation to certain scenarios?
So if a situation occurs, create a playbook in response to that. Do you understand the key insights you’ve generated about your competitors, what their hot topics might be, what are the spaces they’re vulnerable in, where can you focus?All those main points in a very undeniable format, to be used in the future.
Then, the other advantage of a manual is that they are the end results of the organization’s stakeholders. So, it’s not a third party telling them what to do or just one person, but everyone aligns as an organization in terms of” We perceive the basic problems. We sense where our opportunities are. We are aligning ourselves with what our next steps will be. It’s a much faster way to mobilize an organization toward a specific purpose or actions.
ALISON BEARD: yes, I like the point you made in the e-book about how experts can come in and say, “That’s right. That’s what you deserve to do. And besides, they’re never guilty of the end results of what they’ve done. “recommended. There’s a big difference, so how do organizations deserve to repeat this process?
ARJAN SINGH: Many organizations play war games on an annual basis. So, some of the corporations have incorporated war games into their planning process, that is, into their annual planning process. They’ll start with a war game, take a look at other facets of their competitive environment, and then embark on their plans.
So it’s kind of a clever practice. Depending on the industry, this will vary. So if you’re looking for strategic problems and you work in a classic industry, you probably want to do one every two years or so. If you work on a quick swap box as a generation or whatever, you can do it once a year, you can do it several times a year. And then, it also depends on the covered box. So, for example, if you’re bidding on a big contract worth billions of dollars and you have an 18- to 24-month sales cycle, I know corporations in those situations, who play a war game each and every week.
ALISON BEARD: Hmm. Wow.
ARJAN SINGH: Well, I mean, for some of the bigger contracts, like the Jedi contract, I know that some corporations have done weekly contracts. When there’s $10 billion on the table, you’re looking to perceive not just what you’re thinking. , but also all the key players, and what that war could look like, as well as all the permutations and combinations imaginable, for which you would want giant sums of money. Plans for the creation of scenarios and series of war games.
ALISON BEARD: yes, so you seem to be saying that express groups within organizations can also use this procedure to think about their smaller-scale competitive strategy, like signing a big contract.
ARJAN SINGH: Absolutely. You know that the sales team can find a lot of advantages in selling more products and achieving their goals. This can be useful from a marketing standpoint. There have been others, studies and development, finance, strategy. Many other functional spaces can take advantage of this, but their themes will be different. Marketing would be interested in very different things than R.
It’s not just a toolkit for giant organizations. Large organizations put a lot of time and effort into it. It’s an undeniable set of tools that startups can use to get started, bring a product to market, play a role, and see how the festival will react. You can make a lot of costly mistakes if you do this internally before you start implementing your methods externally.
ALISON BEARD: Have you ever had a case where a war game took a company in the right direction because it didn’t come to the right conclusions?
ARJAN SINGH: There have been some. This has repeatedly happened in the wrong direction in terms of optimizing assets and prioritizing your progression plans. And one of the main reasons for this was not having the right fundamental data about the area. This was a pop-up box and so they had to make some assumptions. about what would likely happen.
The big challenge was how they saw things from their company’s point of view, not from the competitor’s point of view. It was a mistake that happened and they ended up going in another direction. But as you go ahead, as you proceed to look and have the first cautionary signs that, when you observe them, they can take the right shape very, very quickly. And so, in this case, they had certain assumptions and assumptions in an action plan that came out of the workshop. They started implementing it. And then, very quickly, they figured out in the feedback what they found they were thinking wrong, and then they fixed it pretty quickly.
ALISON BEARD: You say in the e-book that an individual can use war games to plan their career or lessen the dangers of their career. How would you do that?
ARJAN SINGH: I tell all my students to play against their careers. The truth is that whenever someone is looking for a new job, a new career, or a new venture, they will dedicate some time and resources to it. And in general, other people don’t like to replace jobs for at least a few years. Sometimes it takes longer.
And I’ve met a lot of other people around the world, where there’s been interesting conversations like, “Oh, I’ve taken on this task. I had the idea of doing it for 3 years, and I’ve been here for about 15 years. But that’s not what I need to do. My hobby is elsewhere. So, I say to other people, “Really, take your career and look at the career path. They have a sure advantage. ” You’re going to be running for about 30 or 40 years. Where do you need to be? What is your aspiration to win?Think about the trade-offs you have when it comes to engagement, and you can leverage those results to figure out what your next steps are worth to get to where you are. Look to get there and perceive things like who you’re competing with, what kind of skill set, especially with the conversion task market and the other skill sets needed.
And then, at the end of the day, it’s up to everyone to understand, “What does winning mean to you?Not everyone needs to be or be president of the United States. However, for what you need to be, there is a path you can take. And then, war games can help Americans prove it.
ALISON BEARD: So you talked about the pullback and the fact that, specifically in emerging markets, it’s hard to expect what’s going to happen. For those who tell you, “It’s all turning so fast. “I have a lot at stake. I think we can scale up a smart strategy without going through this process,” what do you say?
ARJAN SINGH: That’s a wonderful question. This happens a lot. The time invested in getting 15, 20, 30 more people out of the task and taking them in a day or two to a workshop is a challenge. And it’s rarely faster to overcome this challenge than simply showing up examples or past values. Sometimes it takes time.
I had a company that had the same reluctance. And they didn’t play a game for, I think, almost 3 years. And then, finally, they were in a position to do so. Once they finished it, the first reaction was, “Why didn’t we do it sooner?This would have saved us a lot of time, effort, heartache and resources. “
Sometimes, companies simply have to go through this total process to come to this conclusion, because at the end of the day, it’s all about blind spots, mistakes, and costly opportunities that they might have known about before. Often, the catalyst for the breakup is the fact that a team member has experienced a game. They are the champions of the discussion about war games and the benefits that come with them. It’s a procedure to follow. That’s one of the reasons I wrote this book: simply to teach everyone the benefits of that and of having effective, actionable games in their organizations.
ALISON BEARD: Arjan, thank you so much for introducing me today.
ARJAN SINGH: Great. Thank you.
ALISON BEARD: I’m Arjan Singh, an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University and the e-book Competitive Success: Building Winning Strategies with Corporate War Games.
And we’ll offer more episodes and more podcasts for you to manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them on hbr. org/podcasts or search for HBR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen.
Thank you to our team, Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks for listening to HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. My is Alison Beard.