What we learn from the examination of various historical disasters is that effective planning is crucial to success and failures in planning are often at the root of failure. ‘Wargaming’ has been one response that business has made to the risk of underestimating adversaries.
Jon Chandler 
20 Jan, 2009
War Games: From the Spanish Armada to Brand Wars
The Lessons of History
2008 marked the 420th anniversary of the demise of the Spanish Armada. Although often portrayed as a piece of miraculous luck, in practice the superiority of the English fleet was never in any doubt. History is riddled with similar failures of planning. If Phillip of Spain had done what many modern Generals now do, he might not have failed so persistently. If Phillip had played some wargames first, the Armada might never have sailed. Napoleon would not have invaded Russia, Russia would not have invaded Afghanistan... and so on.
The Doomed Armada
The popular mythology surrounding the Spanish Armada has been recurrently
reinforced by films like ‘Elizabeth; the Golden Age’. In this film
England is shown as the small plucky underdog, rescued from the brink of disaster
through a combination of an inspiring and youthful queen, a dashing Sir Walter
Raleigh and freak weather that smashed the Spanish fleet.
In reality Elizabeth by this time was ageing, with rotting teeth and little hair, but more significantly she was indecisive and pennypinching. Sir Walter Raleigh was marginal in the Armada campaign and the weather finished off a Spanish fleet that was already in tatters. What defeated ‘the Great Armada’ (and five other Armadas sent during Elizabeth’s reign) was an underestimation of the vastly more effective English fleet and the catastrophic failure of King Phillip of Spain’s campaign plan.
Phillip possessed the greatest and most powerful land based army in Europe,
much of it was in the Netherlands where it had been fighting for years under
the Duke of Parma against the Dutch. Phillips Armada plan rested upon gathering
a vast fleet that would sail up the Channel from Spain to Holland where it
would pick up the Duke of Parma’s army and then double back across the
Channel and land somewhere on the south coast of England. There is little doubt
that had this army successfully landed, it would have faced little effective
opposition.
This never happened. Phillips ‘plan’, such as it was, was a disaster. Amongst other fatal flaws:
- The English fighting fleet was vastly superior in maneuverability and their firepower whilst in contrast with Armada its crews were tight knit well honed fighting units.
- The Armada had no means of rendezvousing with the Duke of Parma’s army. The lumbering Spanish ships could not get close to shore in the shallow Dutch waters and the Duke of Parma could not row his army out to the Armada for fear of being cut to pieces by the Dutch ‘fly boats’.
In practice the Armada did not get as far as attempting the rendezvous with
the Duke of Parma. By the time it got close, anchoring off Dunquerque, Phillips
fighting ships had been so shot up by the English fleet that they were in no
shape to continue. The fire ships that scattered the Armada and the storm that
dispersed and wrecked it put the seal on what was already going to be a defeat.
It was the defeat of a plan that could not succeed.
Failures in planning, like the underestimation of the opposition and the task in hand, often underpin disaster.
War games have a long and varied heritage. War games have long been played within the military as either abstract/paper exercises or as mock field events/manoevres. War games are also played by hobbyists enacting fantasy battles (eg. Lord of the Rings) or re-enacting historical battles (eg. Napoleonic wars).
More recently, some of the principles employed in War games have been applied in the business environment. Generally business wargaming processes are undertaken to identify and explore emerging opportunities and threats. Wargaming can allow organizations to predict the ‘games’ that competitors might play and develop strategies and responses to these scenarios.
War Games in Business
There are a wide variety of different approaches to business wargaming, but
a number of common elements are often found:
- Time is frequently built in as a key issue. Games are not static one off contests, but attempt to take account of the passage of time; how will events and strategies unfold and play out over time.
- War games are typically team based, with teams planning their own strategy and anticipating the moves of their opponents, then following through or acting out the consequences of plans. Typically this occurs over a number of sessions or rounds.
- Typically the gaming process will end with a review of outcomes, the participants discuss what happened and what has been learned.
Successful war games have two key pre-requisites:
- Generally these events require an independent game leader whose role is to facilitate and act as umpire.
- A significant level of competitor intelligence is required as a start point. War gaming attempts to model competitor activity based on intelligence of products, resources and competitor culture.
War Games in Market Research
The use of war games outlined above typically involves running workshop sessions
with internal client teams, with these including outside agencies as appropriate.
Beyond this, the principles of war games can also be applied in a market research
setting.
In the market research situation the objectives remain the same, but the participants change. Consumers in a market place (in this case Doctors) play out future strategies and scenarios. There are a number of benefits that this brings with it:
- Health care professionals are in a better position to make independent assessments of competing parties (they have no vested interests in the success of one side).
- Health care professionals can make a more ‘customer focused’ assessment
of competing parties; they have ‘insider knowledge’. This insider
knowledge can be either;
- Directed towards current scenarios
- Directed towards possible future situations, through the use of approaches aimed at developing a more future oriented mind set.
Over time a variety of leading edge variants of these research approaches have been developed. Amongst these approaches ‘Brand Wars’ methodologies aim to push wargaming to its optimum in healthcare research:
- Variants on this approach have been used both with clients and with Health Care Professionals.
- Variants on this approach have been developed for each individual project (no two ‘wars’ are the same).
‘Brand Wars’ methodologies can work on a number of key principles:
- At an overall level respondents (particularly professional) can readily take up and work with the principles of a contest between opposing forces. Most significantly, if presented in an open and straightforward fashion the process can be stimulating and enjoyable: people enjoy playing games, professional people enjoy playing intellectual games.
- In principle Brand Wars need to focus at a number of different levels;
- Assessment ‘on paper’ of the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing sides
- Testing these out in some kind of simulated campaigning (how robust are strengths in practice, how vulnerable are weaknesses really)
- Identifying where these are each more or less relevant and therefore what market segments do they relate to.
Next month we will look at a more detailed account of what a Brand Wars methodology can look like and discuss the benefits that this can offer.
Necrons image courtesy of Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia. Retrieved January 19, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Necron_warrior.jpg
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