Any organisation’s strategy, from the startup to the blue chip, eventually runs into the same problem: it is built on assumptions about what has worked so far. Most strategic planning is fairly linear, a standard set of tools applied to sensible extrapolations of the present. But if the pace of change over the last decade is any guide, sensible extrapolation will not produce the original insight needed to sustain and grow a business through the next one.
Bespoke games lead to bespoke strategy
At Evocatus we are not admirers of linear process, or of simply repeating what worked before. The world is a complex place in which better answers tend to come from innovation, whether by improvement or by a genuinely new idea. We do not arrive with those answers ready-made; we are not the kind of consultants who promise to have them. What we bring is an approach that helps you find your own opportunities to innovate, using the insight of the people who know your business and market best: your own team.
We use a range of gaming techniques to engage people and energise their thinking. Through competition and challenge, teams start to think creatively not only about how they might work differently, but about how the market they are operating in might itself change. By putting people into the shoes of customers, competitors and stakeholders, we broaden perspective and unpick the biases that build up inside close, like-minded teams.
Strategy has to hold under change
The point of taking a strategic view is to build plans with the resilience and agility to thrive in changing circumstances. We use scenario-based games to challenge assumptions and preconceptions: an immersive experience that lets people engage with potential change on an emotional level, which is what releases the flow of insight and ideas that leads to real innovation. Where a strategy already exists, running an exercise is still valuable, both to refine and stress-test the plan and to communicate it across the team. It is the same principle behind scenario analysis, and behind why energising strategy development often means playing it out rather than presenting it.
Breaking free of preconceptions
Adding an element of red teaming pulls decision-making away from the linear activity it often becomes. When members of the team play adversarial or hostile influences, the group is forced to reckon with real risks and threats and to build coherent plans to meet them, rather than assuming them away. That produces a strategy designed for likely future conditions, not merely an extension of the current way of doing business.
If your strategy would benefit from being tested against the future before the future tests it, that is the conversation to have.