Most corporate war games are a one-off event run from a generic script. Force Majeure runs business war gaming as a rerunnable simulation, generated against the sectors and countries you actually operate in and scored into a board-ready report.
Business war gaming puts a leadership team inside a competitive or crisis scenario and forces decisions under pressure, so strategy is stress-tested in the room rather than discussed on a slide. The method is sound, and executives know the vocabulary.
The usual delivery is the weak point. Most productized war games are a single facilitated event built on a generic script that fits any company and therefore none in particular. It runs once, the energy fades, and the world moves on while the exercise stays frozen.
The war game is generated against your real operating geography, calibrated to real data such as V-Dem and ACLED, rather than a script that fits any firm.
The scenario set updates each quarter at low marginal cost, so the exercise tracks a fast-moving risk picture instead of going stale after a single session.
Decisions are graded on a published rubric that weighs financial and cultural judgment together, and the run is written up as a board-ready after-action report.
A slide-based scenario workshop talks through possible futures and ends in a deck that no one rereads. A Force Majeure war game is played: a leadership team works a crisis on its own footprint, the decisions are scored, and the result is a documented record rather than a discussion. Because the scenario set refreshes quarterly, the board gets a new scored record each quarter instead of a single event. The judgment built into it was pressure-tested in the hardest markets on earth, calibrated to a 2021 Harvard Business Review finding, from research the founders co-authored, that community-embedded firms were far more likely to stay profitable and to survive a crisis.
We are glad to map a Force Majeure war game against whatever scenario work you run today.
See the enterprise briefing →This example follows the public sample after-action report: a consumer-goods company with operations in Indonesia and West Africa, played to quarter 24. The company, its people and its figures are invented for illustration, and the sample report is labelled the same way. A pilot of this kind runs as a half-day facilitated session for 8 to 15 participants.
The room plays the leadership team of one firm. We propose five seats: a chair, a country lead for Indonesia, a country lead for West Africa, a communications lead and a finance lead, with other participants supporting a seat. Country leads work their market panels, where the firm can build, expand, engage the regulator or fund the community. Communications handles incoming calls, where a community delegation can be answered on the record, answered off the books or left to ring. Finance tracks valuation and cash runway, the first two figures on the Force Majeure report.
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Briefing | The facilitator sets out the footprint, the seats and the four-part rubric. |
| Round 1: cost spike | Input costs jump in the first quarter. The team decides whether to keep local hiring or cut it to protect margin. |
| Round 2: regulator or community | A regulator offers faster access if the firm moves ahead of a community council. The team decides which relationship to spend. |
| Round 3: supply shock | A supplier fails. The team lives with whether it pre-cleared a backup, and decides what to cut next, including the local liaison budget. |
| Debrief | The facilitator walks the room through the scored report and the decision behind each score. |
In the sample, two calls scored as right: keeping local hiring through the first-quarter cost spike, and pre-clearing a backup supplier before the shock. Two scored as costly: trading community standing for regulator speed in the second quarter, and cutting the local liaison budget to hit margin. The firm exited Resilient, valued at $2.4 billion with 7 quarters of cash runway. Community standing closed at 77 and regulator relations at 54.
The four-part rubric scores living authentic values, supporting community, treating culture as a system and communicating clearly. In the sample the team scored 82 on values and 61 on culture as a system. The score describes decisions made inside the simulation, so the board reads it as a record of how the team reasoned under pressure. Regulatory tests stay separate, and we map each exercise to DORA, NIS2 or the UK regime on request.
Discovery sets which of the roughly 200 markets appear and which sectors the firm runs. A bank playing the same markets meets supervisors and sanctions. An energy operator meets transit shocks and disputes over its social license. Sector versions are written up for financial services, energy and consumer goods on separate Force Majeure pages.
A discussion-based tabletop suits a team rehearsing one written plan, such as a cyber incident runbook or a site evacuation; the tabletop comparison sets out the differences. A war game suits decisions that trade money against local standing across several markets and quarters. Trades of that kind are the pattern the 2021 Harvard Business Review research tracked.
Business war gaming puts a leadership team inside a competitive or crisis scenario to test strategy under pressure rather than on paper. Most productized war games are a one-off facilitated event built on a generic script. Force Majeure runs it as a rerunnable simulation generated against your real sector and country footprint.
A slide-based scenario workshop discusses hypotheticals and ends in a deck. Force Majeure is played, scored on a published rubric, and written into a board-ready after-action report. It runs on your real footprint, is calibrated to data such as V-Dem and ACLED, and refreshes quarterly rather than living as a single event.
Yes. The scenario set is refreshed each quarter at low marginal cost, so the exercise tracks a fast-moving geopolitical and socio-political risk picture instead of going stale after one session. Each rerun adds a scored record the board can report against.
See the full FAQ, the geopolitical risk training guide, or what a crisis simulation is.
Tell us your footprint and what you want the war game to test. We reply with a customized brief.
Tell us your sector, footprint, and objective.
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