Combining scenario planning and business wargaming to better anticipate future competitive dynamics

The deliberate exploration of how the future competitive landscape may evolve is critical to uncovering threats and opportunities for firms that seek to improve their core businesses and advance to a superior position in the markets of the future. While techniques such as business wargaming can effectively support this process, such techniques can benefit from placing competitive considerations within a broader future landscape shaped by geopolitical, social, technological and economic forces. Scenario planning allows for the exploration of interactions across multiple external forces to create a rich set of narratives on how the future may unfold. This paper will discuss the potential of combining scenario planning and business wargaming to enable strategists to anticipate moves and countermoves and foresee their consequences. We use a real-life case study to illustrate how a scenario-planning exercise can guide the crucial stage of selecting relevant future competitors of a firm prior to engaging in a business-war-gaming exercise. We then introduce what we term the prospective competitive strategy process to guide the analysis of potential competitive dynamics, emphasizing the synergies between scenario planning and business wargaming.