In an era of rapid disruption, the companies that survive are not necessarily the smartest — they are the most prepared. One powerful, yet often overlooked, tool for achieving that preparedness is corporate wargaming. Also known as competitive simulation, this disciplined approach to strategic planning is helping businesses of all sizes stress-test their strategies before committing to them in the real world.
In a recent interview with HBR, Arjan Singh, adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University and author of Competitive Success: Building Winning Strategies with Corporate War Games, describes wargaming as “a dress rehearsal for companies to really test and stress-test their strategies before they deploy them into the marketplace.” The concept migrated from military thinking into the business world roughly four to five decades ago, and its relevance has only grown since.
More Than Just Scenario Planning
Many organisations already engage in some form of scenario planning — mapping out possible futures and preparing contingency responses. Wargaming goes further. It layers in the likely actions of key competitors and stakeholders, then pushes teams to define their response. The result is not an intellectual exercise but a set of pragmatic, prioritised next steps that can be acted upon immediately.
Singh organises wargaming into three distinct levels: strategic games focused on long-term macroeconomic shifts, operational games that determine where a company should compete, and tactical games aimed at near-term sales and messaging. Each serves a different audience within an organisation, from the boardroom to the frontline sales team.
Avoiding the Blind Spots That Sink Incumbents
One of the greatest risks for market leaders is complacency. Kodak and Blockbuster are the canonical examples — companies that knew their industries intimately and, in part because of that familiarity, failed to see the threats closing in around them. Wargaming creates a structured forum for challenging those assumptions, even when the conversations are uncomfortable.
The exercise achieves this by asking participants to think from the outside in — to inhabit the perspective of a rival and ask: how would we attack our own organisation? What does winning look like for a competitor? This shift in vantage point consistently generates insights that internal strategy reviews simply cannot replicate.
A Playbook, Not Just a Workshop
The true value of a wargame is not the session itself but the playbook it produces. When a major pharmaceutical client faced a scenario in which the FDA might reject their blockbuster drug, the room pushed back — it would never happen, they said. But they worked through it anyway. Less than a year later, approval was denied. Rather than panic, the team pulled out their playbook and followed it. The product was subsequently resubmitted and approved.
That story illustrates the difference between a productive off-site and a transformative one. The playbook creates accountability, assigns owners to actions, and ensures that insight translates into movement.
Not Just for the Big Players
Wargaming is often associated with large corporations with substantial strategy budgets. Singh is clear that it need not be. Start-ups can run informal simulations internally, role-playing competitor reactions before launching a product or entering a new market. The toolkit scales.
For small and medium-sized enterprises, this is particularly valuable — a half-day wargaming session can surface competitive blind spots that might otherwise take years of costly trial and error to uncover. With leaner resources and less margin for strategic missteps, SMEs arguably stand to gain the most from thinking like their rivals before making a move.
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