Business wargaming: a practical guide (with template)

The orders arrive late, so you order more. The next week the beer you asked for three weeks ago turns up, along with everything you ordered since, and your warehouse is full. Somewhere further down the chain, a classmate is doing exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason. By the end of the class, every team has stock it cannot sell and costs nobody planned for. Nobody lied and nobody was careless. The delays and the silence between teams did it on their own.

If you studied business, you probably have a memory like this. For some people it was the beer game. For others it was a lemonade stand they ran for maximum profit, a smartphone they launched into a crowded market, or a trading floor where prices moved under them. Most of the people I talk to about wargaming recognise the idea from these classes, and that is a good place to start.

These exercises work for a simple reason. They strip an industry down to a few levers, put you in the driver's seat and let you watch your decisions unfold. One afternoon of that leaves a stronger impression than a chapter on supply chains ever did.

They also had limits worth paying attention to. You usually ran one only once. And once you understood the lesson, you could beat it, because behind the screen sat a simple branching scenario or a spreadsheet with hidden formulas. The exercise was built to teach one point, not to test a decision you were about to make.

From a classroom simulation to a business war game1:34

A business war game keeps the driver's seat and changes the purpose. Instead of learning a lesson someone already knows, you test a decision you have not made yet, against the people who will react to it: a rival, a key customer, a lender, your own board. You make a move, they respond, and you find out whether the plan survives contact.

That changes what the exercise needs. A classroom simulation can be simple, because the point is fixed in advance. A war game has to be rich enough that nobody in the room knows the answer, including the person who built it. Otherwise you are rehearsing a conclusion.

If you want the longer story, from Prussian officers moving pieces on a table to consultancies running pricing war games, I covered the history and the definition on the business wargaming page. This guide is about running one.

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How to run a business war game, step by step2:32

I will use Halyard as the worked example throughout, because it is public and you can work through it yourself. Halyard puts you in the seat of the first Chief Innovation Officer at a listed CRM software company in Amsterdam. It took four stages to build and run, and they are the same four stages I would use for any war game, with or without an engine.

1. Understand the world before you write a single move

Start with the space: the industry, the company, the people who matter and the trends pushing on all of them. Most of the work of a good war game happens here, and most bad ones skip it.

For Halyard, that meant a company with about 14,000 customers and €1.06B of recurring revenue, mostly per-seat licences. Three years ago it grew at 25%. Now growth is in single digits and the operating margin is about 4%. Three forces hit the core at once: AI-native rivals selling agents that do the work a seat used to do, customers renewing on fewer seats once they deploy those agents, and operations teams building their own CRM on their data warehouse.

Then the people. Halyard has 18 stakeholders inside and outside the company, and each of them wants something. The CEO used to run finance and asks "What does it do to the seat line?" The CFO has promised investors a margin recovery and treats it as hers. The revenue chief is not against agents, only against anything that makes his sales team poorer before it makes them richer. Outside, a former Halyard engineer runs the fastest-growing AI-native rival and is aiming his migration offers at Halyard's mid-market.

If you are building your own, write one short file per stakeholder: what they want, what they fear, what they know that others do not, and how they talk. One page each is enough.

2. Choose the challenges, and leave room for surprise

Next, decide which decisions the participants will face. A war game without a clear decision becomes a discussion. Pick the few moments where the plan could break.

In Halyard there are four:

• Round 1: an innovation thesis for the board, two pages at most.
• Round 3: the pricing decision, in writing, with the bridge from today's numbers.
• Round 4: a recommendation on the rival: partner, acquire or leave it alone.
• Round 5: the capital markets day story, then a final memo to the board.

Then add uncertainty. Real markets do not wait politely for your plan. In our engine, randomness is part of the world, so two participants who make the same move will not necessarily get the same outcome. Risks build in the background and send warning signs a round ahead, and the careful participant sees them coming. If you are running a tabletop version, give the control team a deck of events (a competitor launch, a key customer at risk, a bad quarter in the press) and let them draw from it each round.

3. Run the rounds

Each round follows the same rhythm. First the frame: participants get up to speed on the situation, the levers and the numbers. Then they decide. Then they watch the decision unfold, and the world changes in response. A rival cuts prices. A customer delays a renewal. The CFO asks whether this is inside the guidance or on top of it. Then the next round starts from the new situation, not the old plan.

What makes a war game different from a spreadsheet is that the people in it have their own motives. In NewReLLM, stakeholders push back, they hint, and sometimes they tell you something that is not quite true. What gets said in a meeting is not always what gets decided. Rather than making decisions in a vacuum and letting the formulas produce the outcome, participants have to read people as well as numbers.

In a tabletop version, the teams playing the rival, the customer or the board carry this. Brief them to argue from their stakeholder file, not from what they think the company team ought to hear.

4. Debrief after every round, and once more at the end

The debrief is where the value is. In NewReLLM there is a short debrief after every round and a longer one at the end, because every change in the world is recorded with its cause. That means the debrief can show where the plan held, where it broke and what to change before the next attempt.

Good debrief questions are simple:

• What did you expect to happen, and what happened instead?
• Which signal did you see too late, and where was it visible earlier?
• Who did you not talk to, and what did they know?
• What would you do differently with the same information?
• What in your real plan changes because of this?

Write the answers down. A war game that ends with a good conversation and no written changes to the plan has not done its job.

What I watch for when people play7:32

The mechanics matter, but the most interesting part of running war games is watching what people do. A few things keep coming up.

People take it seriously. When the CFO pushes back on a budget, or a customer goes quiet before a renewal, participants become more honest, more careful and a little stressed. It feels close enough to work that they stop performing and start deciding.

People look for help in very different ways. Some open their favourite AI tool and work through the data with it. Some go round the stakeholders, asking for clues and reading between the lines. Some rely on their own experience and instinct. I have never believed in simulations that force one way of learning, because the business world is too complex to dictate where information should come from. In NewReLLM the information is at your fingertips, and you can add anything else you like.

Each route has something to offer. An AI tool lets you work through a lot of data quickly, though it has blind spots. Talking to stakeholders tells you what might break and where you might find support. Experience and instinct still count for a lot. So far I have seen people rely on one route, or all three, and end up in the same place. What seems to work best is deciding first what success will require, then choosing the method, or the mix, that fits. Comparing those routes is one of my favourite moments in a debrief.

Some double down, some adapt. When the challenges start piling up, some participants stick to their plan and push harder. Others change course and look for what works. I have seen long-term and short-term strategies both succeed, in different scenarios.

The second run is different. After a debrief, people change their approach more than I expected. Someone who went all-in on the long term the first time spends longer reading the situation the second time, instead of reaching for what they have always done. That change of habit, more than any single decision, is why wargaming belongs in leadership development as much as in strategy.

Here is one run I can describe in full, because both participants were agents I sent into an earlier version of Halyard. One was briefed to be bold: cut prices on every core segment at once, take the big bets straight to the CEO, skip the conversation with the revenue chief. The other was briefed to work through the people who own the roadmap and the money.

The bold agent got its price cuts signed by the CFO in round 2, and they landed. By the end of that round the operating margin had gone from about 4% to minus 8%, and a round later to minus 22%. The CFO closed the door on further pricing moves. The CEO kept refusing its big bets. The revenue chief, whom it never spoke to, watched his sales team's pay shrink and turned the field against the plan. Halyard ended in managed decline.

The second agent spent its first rounds talking to the product chief and the CFO before each bet. They signed. By the end, Halyard Agents had grown from €18M to about €88M of recurring revenue and the margin was still above zero. Same company, same opening numbers, and the difference started with who each of them talked to first.

A one-page business war game template11:00

Here is the template I would start from. It fits on one page, and you can run a first version with a small team in an afternoon.

Download the template as a PDF. Page one is the template below, with space to write. Page two has stakeholder files, a round log and an event deck you can cut out and draw from each round.

1. The decision

• The move you are testing, in one sentence
• The time horizon (for example, the next 18 months)
• What a good outcome looks like, in numbers

2. The world

• The company: three to five numbers that matter (revenue, margin, growth, cash, retention)
• The market: the two or three trends pushing on it
• The stakeholders: one page each covering what they want, fear and know

3. The teams

• Company team: the people who own the decision
• One or two rival teams, plus a customer or market team
• Control: one person who rules on outcomes and draws events

4. The rounds

• Three to five rounds, each covering a fixed period (a quarter or a half-year)
• Each round: frame, decide in writing, respond, rule on what happens
• One planned challenge per round, plus one random event

5. The debrief

• A short debrief after each round
• A longer one at the end, using the five questions above
• Written output: the changes to the real plan, with an owner and a date

When to run one12:24

A war game earns its time when a decision is expensive, hard to reverse and depends on how other people respond. The most common cases I see:

• A pricing move, where the question is how competitors and customers will react
• Entering a new market, against incumbents who will not stand still
• An acquisition, including what happens to the teams on both sides
• A value creation plan for a private equity portfolio company, before you commit to it
• An AI rollout, where resistance, adoption pace and the business model all move at once

It is less useful when a decision is cheap and easy to reverse, because trying it for real will teach you faster, or when the decision has already been made and nobody is willing to change it.

You do not need to know every player before you start, either. Working out who matters most, and who can quietly block you, is often one of the first things participants learn.

Four things people get wrong about business wargaming13:26

"It comes from the military, so it is play-acting." The roots are military, and the military still uses it for good reason. A business war game borrows the structure (moves, counter-moves, an umpire, a debrief) without the theatre.

"It is Monopoly or Risk for executives." There is some truth in it. Both have turns, uncertainty and opponents. The difference is that a war game is built around a decision you actually face, with numbers and people that behave like your market.

"It is for students." Most people met wargaming at school, so the association is natural. But executives need a sandbox more than anyone: a place to practise, stress-test and make decisions before they are real. Pilots train in flight simulators long after they qualify, and business leaders can work the same way. I wrote more about why in the case for simulated consequences.

"It takes months to build." A traditional consultant-run war game takes four to eight weeks of preparation and one to three days of senior time. With an engine, a new scenario can be built from scratch in a few working days. And participants learn just as much from running a ready-made template as from building their own world.

Where to start14:45

The lemonade stand taught you something because you made the decisions yourself. A business war game does the same thing for a decision you have not made yet. If you want to see what that feels like before building your own, Halyard is a good place to start: the board wants a thesis in round 1, and the CFO will ask how you plan to pay for it.