Wargaming for Leaders: Strategic Decision Making from the Battlefield to the Boardroom

Before the advent of the General Staff system, military decisions were usually made by the commander in chief after taking council from his subordinates. The system was not very efficient as most subordinates would advocate boldness so as not to be found lacking in courage or decision, as was famously shown at the council of War which General Meade called on the field of Gettysburg on the night of July 2, 1863, when all corps commanders voted "to stay and fight it out". In the nineteenth century, the Prussian military started running wargame to train their officer corps, and they have been adopted by many nations since then. Consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton offers professional wargames to military and corporate clients.As described in this book, wargaming is before all a cognitive method allowing organizations to share knowledge and opinions in a more efficient way than traditional business meetings or other communication and training techniques such as brainstorming sessions, where middle managers are often reluctant to challenge the boss' view leading to groupthink. Wargaming is thus an alternative cognitive tool, a bit like "wise crowds", Delphi methods or prediction markets as described in James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds", which demonstrates that information aggregation can be rendered more efficient within organizations. Wargaming is particularly adapted to situations where several competing sides can be defined: military conflicts, business competition or industry concentration (mergers and acquisitions) for example.Wargaming is also a planning method to prepare for the unexpected, although, as the authors stress, the scenario must be plausible but not necessarily predictive. It is not a forecast exercise. On this aspect, however, it relies significantly on the model used by the control team (in this book, the consultants from Booz Allen Hamilton), which is why I suppose that the value of the exercise as a planning tool is very dependent on the quality of the organizers of the game.The book goes through a number of interesting examples of wargames run for the Pentagon, for corporate clients and for non-profit projects, usually played with teams of high level executives, and with sometimes very powerful results. One thing wargames seem to be very good at is identifying bad ideas and projects that are about to be implemented at the client company: competing teams seem to take a great pleasure trashing those in the context of a wargame, because they they know their company's weaknesses but probably would'nt dare exposing them in a meeting situation.

I primarily purchased this book because of the reputation of Mark Herman. I’ve played his commercial wargames for 30 years and heard him speak at the second Serious Games Summit. I even had the privilege of playing in his Empire of the Sun tournament this last summer. So, it’s no wonder that I was fascinated about the opportunity to read about applying his skills as a designer of military simulations for dabblers like me to the professional military, corporate world, health industry, and government. Wargaming for Leaders is even more fascinating than I anticipated.Wargaming for Leaders both begins (p. 4) and ends (p. 261) with the suggestion that wargaming offers the participants an opportunity to probe the probable future, make strategic choices, and evaluate the consequences before the decisions become expensive and irrevocable.The book recounts military wargames based on a campaign in Iraq that called out the likelihood that Operation Iraqi Freedom (the aftermath of the military action in Iraq) might reflect a victory in war but was likely to be a loss of peace (p. 47)), especially when the 400K troops requested (p. 48) were reduced to a deployment Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) (p. 54) in which the participants sought to analyze how force commitments impacted the high demand/low density forces and platforms and, by considering scenarios using different force alignments, evaluating the needs for reform and realignment in the armed forces (pp. 58-60).In that regard, the new military approach features basically a six-part campaign: 1) Shape (building a coalition building and diplomacy), 2) Deter (use intelligence to earn DBA (dominant battlefield awareness) that will prepare troops to defend and, if necessary, attack), 3) Seize Initiative (executing offensive operations), 4) Dominate (break the enemy’s will), 5) Stabilize (provide essential services and initiate humanitarian assistance), and 6) Enable Legitimate Authority (helping restore government with a legitimate civil authority). (pp. 64-65) Of course, if you do the first two phases right, you may not have to fight (p. 65).I also liked reading about the ConAgra business “wargame” and its CEO saw within the game that the silo mentality of its various subsidiaries was unhealthy. One result of the wargame was to go from 50 different incentive plans based on each independent operating unit to one plan determined by ConAgra’s overall results (p. 101). There was also a great account of an aviation company that discovered in a wargame that they needed to scrap two different mergers and acquire an entirely different suitor. Ironically, this was after the “boss” made the wargame control group revise the model four different times (pp. 149-151).In a wargame dealing with energy innovation, the takeaway was, “Leading the way may be financially beneficial in the long run, but you’d better be ready for the pushback.” (p. 136) I liked the instructions given in several of the wargames, “You make decisions every day with imperfect information.” (p. 162) But the most important take-away from the book for me was: “It’s better to innovate around a plan than to invent a plan on the fly.” (p. 187)This is a terrific book and I am certain to return to it again and again.

The whole book is full of ambiguity. Many times you will read things like:"There was this X company (name is not revealed in the book either), they had a competition with company Y. We did some scenarios and the outcome was formidable." Really? How is that even worth mentioning if you can't prove a point with facts and figures?One of the worst books I ever read.

This text brings a new voice to the field of game theory and the applications of simulations to for-profit and non-profit (and, of course, battlefield) decision making platforms. It represents a fundamental shift from scientific game theory to applied simulation design and implementation for its value-added effects. I recommend reading the first two reviews, especially the second, as you will get a fairly good description of the gist of this book. I want to add that it can serve as an excellent source text for an advanced business strategy course, or perhaps as a reference for simulation design, research, and future implementation. The authors, by the way, are all extremely experienced in this field, so what we have here is a little "window" into their everyday world, a real place where history, game theory, game design, management science, and systems analysis all integrate in ways that provoke lessons, warn of hopelessly false assumptions, and enable strategic excellence. In my view the text is a wonderful introduction to the whole notion of simulations for pragmatic intent. It's no secret, I think, that kids who play first-person shooters on their PCs wind up being excellent marksmen--their brains get hardwired by all that exposure. This book demonstrates that business and government can become hardwired for success, too.

A very interesting read.

Great Book, met expectations and arrived within the expected timeframe

Through various examples from the military, business and public policy, the book demonstrates how useful wargaming can be as a tool supporting strategic decision making. Apart from being repetitive and drily written, the book can fairly be critized for not being a how-to guide to wargaming. As probably intended by the authors who earn their living as wargaming consultants, the book reveals hardly anything about how to design a wargame. I also got the impression from the book that the effectiveness of a wargame as an aid to decision making depends heavily on the skills and the experience of those who design, stage and interpret the wargame.

The book is nicely written, but when I finished it I felt it gave me nothing, apart from a couple of entertaining anecdotes. I expected to learn more, but it was like a talk-show, not much substance.