Every organisation’s strategy, from startup to blue chip, eventually meets the same problem: it rests on assumptions about what has worked so far. Most strategic planning runs in a straight line, a familiar set of tools applied to sensible extrapolations of the present. That is fine until the ground shifts. And if the pace of change over the last decade is any guide, sensible extrapolation will not produce the original insight a business needs to sustain and grow through the next one.
Bespoke games lead to bespoke strategy
At Evocatus we have little time for linear process, or for simply repeating what worked before. The world is complex, and better answers tend to come from innovation, whether that is an improvement on the current model or a genuinely new idea. We do not turn up with those answers ready-made, and we are not the kind of consultants who promise to. What we offer is a way of helping you find your own opportunities to innovate, drawing on the people who know your business and market best: your own team.
We use a range of gaming techniques to engage people and get them thinking hard. Competition and challenge push teams to think creatively about how they might work differently, and about how their market might itself change. Put someone in the position of a customer, a competitor or a stakeholder and their perspective widens; the biases that settle into close, like-minded teams begin to loosen.
Strategy has to hold under change
The point of a strategic view is plans with the resilience and agility to thrive as circumstances change. We use scenario-based games to challenge assumptions and preconceptions. The experience is immersive: it lets people engage with possible change on an emotional level, and that is what releases the insight and ideas real innovation depends on. Where a strategy already exists, running an exercise is still worth the time: it refines and stress-tests the plan, and it communicates that plan across the team. The same principle sits behind scenario analysis, and behind why energising strategy development often means playing it out rather than presenting it.
Breaking free of preconceptions
Add a layer of red teaming and decision-making stops being the linear exercise it so often becomes. When people on the team take on adversarial or hostile roles, the group has to confront real risks and threats and build coherent plans to meet them, instead of assuming them away. What comes out is a strategy shaped for the conditions the business is likely to face, not a straight-line extension of the way it works today.
No plan survives contact with events. If your business development strategy would be better for being tested against the future before the future tests it, that is the conversation to have.