Winning the Uncertainty Game: Turning Strategic Intent into Results with Wargaming

by Daniel F. Oriesek, Jan Oliver Schwarz

This book is about the challenges that emerge for organizations from an ever faster changing world. While useful at their time, several management tools, including classic strategic planning processes, will no longer suffice to address these challenges in a timely and comprehensive fashion. While individual management tools are still valid to solve specific problems, they need to be employed based on a clear understanding of what the greater challenge is and how they need to be combined and prioritized with other approaches. In order to do so, companies can apply the clarity of thinking from the military with regard to which leadership level is responsible for what and how these levels need to interact in order to produce a single aligned response to an outside opportunity or threat. Finally, the tool of business wargaming, while known for some time, proves to be an ideal approach to quickly and effectively bring all leadership levels together, align them around a common objective and lay the groundwork for effective implementation of targeted responses that will keep the organization competitive and in the game for the long run.

The book offers a comprehensive introduction to business wargaming, including a historical account, a classification of different types of games and a number of specific real-world examples.

This book is targeted at practicing managers dealing with the aforementioned challenges, as well as for students of business and strategy at every level.

201 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 29, 2020

Reviews

[Alireza Hejazi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book acknowledges that the world is unpredictable, requiring organizations to react appropriately. This approach to dealing with uncertainty is known as strategy, and the authors agree that wargaming is an important method among the many resources available for strategy development. The book situates wargaming in the wider context of an environment characterized by increasing volatility, uncertainty, uncertainty, and ambiguity (VUCA). It explains how organizations must rethink and how they can acquire anticipatory skills. It helps readers plan strategically and make sense of what is going on around them. It enables them to evaluate and discern the importance of the meaningless to mobilize their organizations. This book is intended for corporate leaders and managers coping with the above challenges, as well as management and strategy students.