How wargaming can help your team make better project decisions

Wargames are a great way to test ideas, responses to situations and teams’ ability to work well under stress. At a basic level, a wargame is a bit like an escape room: the team faces a series of challenges, and their (or their organisation’s) typical responses are evaluated.

The military uses wargames to put pre-planned strategic and tactical responses to the test – either in rooms where officers are dealing with incoming intelligence and issuing orders, or out in the field, commanding troops in mock engagements.

In business, the same applies. Gather your project team in a room (or remotely) and feed in intelligence about a developing situation to see how they respond.

We caught up with Sara Ulrich, PA Consulting’s Global Wargaming Lead, to find out more.

“Wargaming is a 3D sandbox,” she says – like a game of Grand Theft Auto, then, where the environment is built for you and will react to you, but you make decisions.

“You see the impacts of one element on another, uncover false assumptions, identify unintended consequences and reveal potential efficiencies. It is about derisking, as well as uncovering possible efficiencies and new opportunities.”

Q. What’s the difference between ‘planning’ and ‘training’ wargames?

A. ‘Planning’ ones explore or stress-test plans, including those for project or programme management, strategy or business continuity. With ‘training and learning’ wargames, you aim to practise skills or new competencies, such as negotiation skills, specific industry knowledge, leadership skills or essential project management skills.

The value of wargaming applies across both types:

You see the consequences of decisions. When you have a ‘resistant interactive ecosystem’ with red teams [knowledgeable ‘players’ injecting challenging variables] representing your project ecosystem, you can see the impact of decisions quickly.
You see what works and what doesn’t. We create a safe place to try and fail, and in doing so build psychological safety for creative thinking.
You see the wood and the trees. A wargame helps you understand how a team will function; but you also get to think hard about the whole project ecosystem with its interdependencies.
You don’t tell, you do. You’re not pushing ideas onto people – you pull them in, creating a common body of knowledge and building alignment.

Q. How useful are the lessons from wargaming once the team is back in the field?

A. The Prussian commander Helmuth von Moltke said: “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” But that just underlines the importance of planning – to prepare for all outcomes.

It also shows the importance of rehearsing and stress-testing plans in a close-to-real-life environment. We all operate in complex environments, with compounded, overlapping risks and perfect-storm scenarios.

So, we also plan for the blindspots – the unknown unknowns and those absolute worst-case what-ifs. COVID-19 showed we shouldn’t consider extreme risks unthinkable.

Q. Strategic plans are one thing. How do you adapt wargaming to more tactical decisions?

A. Wargaming applies to all levels: strategic, tactical and operational. We could frame it as ‘project readiness powered by wargaming’.

A bespoke project readiness planning and testing programme works at different levels. Project readiness set-up testing would focus on wargaming your project plan to give confidence to leadership that every strategic and key tactical aspect has been thought through.

A project readiness contingency plan, including key planning scenarios, enhances tactical awareness. Plan A assumes good outcomes; plan B, reasonable worst case; and plan C, absolute worst case what-ifs. All include draft mitigation actions. You would also focus on criticality: what are those priority areas that are most at risk?

Then you might have a bespoke project readiness testing programme. You run this at key milestones to test planning scenarios B and C, rehearsing the teams at all levels. That helps with derisking each project phase before it happens as well as strengthening your relationships with your suppliers and other important stakeholders.

Q. How can you tell a wargame has worked?

A. The aim is to have outputs as an integral part of the project governance and reporting derisking mechanism – it should be a normal planning tool for the entire project. Then we look for behavioural shifts – especially signs that there is a psychological safety culture being built. We know we’ve done well when everyone starts to think about perfect-storm scenarios, blind spots, ‘unthinkables’ and what-ifs.

The results would also be visible in later performance: fewer milestone slippages, shorter review meetings or enhanced communication across the project ecosystem.

Q. What advice would you offer to a project leader considering wargaming?

A. This is a bespoke methodology. It’s important to co-create, tailoring the approach to special circumstances. Start by identifying your project’s planning and behavioural ‘crocodiles’ – major challenges – that are closest to the project ‘canoe’. Map out the stakeholders’ ecosystem so the wargames are capable of testing those interdependencies. Then explore the levers they have available to them. It is vital we can make sure the wargames are as real as possible – and revelatory in ways that can make a real difference to what goes on in the field.