War Gaming
War gaming role-plays your strategy against a live, adversarial simulation of competitors, customers and regulators, so the holes show up in a workshop instead of in the market.
Six steps run left to right: define the move, assign roles, brief incentives, run the response rounds, debrief where it broke, then feed it back into the plan.
Reach for this when…
- You're about to launch and are confident nobody will react, which is usually wrong.
- Leadership keeps planning against a static market that ignores your own moves.
- A major move, pricing, entry, acquisition, is too risky to test by just doing it.
How to run it
- Define the specific decision or move you want to pressure-test.
- Assemble a team and assign roles: your own company, each real competitor, key customers, regulators.
- Brief each team on their role's real incentives and likely playbook, then present your move.
- Run rounds: your move, then each other team responds in character, then you respond to that.
- Debrief on where your plan broke, not on who 'won' the game.
- Feed the specific weaknesses found back into the real strategy before you commit.
A worked example
Situation. Giulia Bruno led strategy at a regional bank in Bologna, Italy, about to cut fees on a flagship savings account to win market share, assuming rivals would hold their prices.
Applied. She ran a war game with a team assigned to play the two largest rival banks in character, briefed on their actual cost structures and recent moves.
Result. The rival teams matched the fee cut within one round and then undercut it further, wiping out the projected gain. Giulia's real team redesigned the launch around service features a price war couldn't erase.
The catch
War gaming is only as good as the competitor role-play - a team that plays the rival too politely, or too aggressively, teaches you the wrong lesson. It surfaces risks, it doesn't rank them, so a wild but memorable scenario can dominate the debrief over a boring but likely one. And it takes real senior time, which is exactly the time under-resourced teams don't protect.
If the 'competitor' team in your war game never once seriously damages your plan, you didn't run a war game, you ran a pep talk.