Expanding on the quote from Cares and Miskel, their brief article in the “forethought” section of HBR talks about using “coevolutionary gaming” to help organizations design more effective strategy. In traditional strategy making, they argue, you conduct an analysis of the market and what the “likely reactions” from competitors will be. With that information, you then develop your plan.
In coevolutionary gaming, you start with that, but then you have a team of people playing the role of the competitor and you have them actually react to your strategy. Then you react to their reactions, and within a few “turns” of this game, you start to see some real weaknesses in your original strategy. Or you start to see that the strategy has potential, but only after you make your “third” move, rather than just the first one by itself.
That’s why the title of the article is “take your third move first.” They argue that your strategic plan will now be better because you are “three or four steps ahead of the competition.”
I agree that we need more complex analyses of our strategic choices. The old-fashioned “I’ve scanned the environment and have chosen the correct path for the next three years” approach is gone. Their coevolutionary gaming is a process for more adequately exploring the complexity.
But they still end up with a surprisingly linear plan as the output. All this just to create a better strategic plan? They argue their process allows you to create better strategy BEFORE real resources are on the line during the actual competition. But I would think that the game would not provide you with all possible reactions either, so you’ll always have to react real time as well. I guess the game helps leaders develop that capacity as well, but they don’t get into that.
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