Scenario Planning Template: Workshop Kit With a Competitive War Game

Four quadrants, and nobody played the rival

Picture the end of a two-day scenario workshop. Four futures on the wall, each with a good name. The team tests its three options against them and picks the robust one: expand into the neighboring region with a lower-priced service line. Everyone agrees it holds up in every quadrant.

Six months later the market leader matches the price in that one region and nowhere else. No scenario had predicted it, because no scenario had a competitor in it who could think. The rivals had been treated as part of the weather.

That gap is common. Kevin Coyne and John Horn report that in a McKinsey survey, two-thirds of strategic planners strongly believed companies should build expected competitor reactions into strategic decisions, while in a separate survey published in 2005, fewer than one in 10 managers recalled having done so ¹.

This kit closes the gap. It is a scenario planning template for a two-day workshop: eight worksheets, a timetable and a war game. Day one builds four futures around one decision. Day two plays your rivals, with real teams, inside two of those futures. You leave with an options grid, a map of how rivals are likely to respond to each option, and signposts with owners. The scenario planning page in this series explains the method in depth; this page is the kit for running it.

Competitors are not weather. They watch your move and answer it.

Use the builder below to draft the workshop brief that goes out with the pre-read.

When to run this workshop, and when not to

Horn, writing from experience with more than 100 war games, puts the sweet spot for a game at a moderate level of uncertainty: enough that analysis cannot settle the answer, not so much that planners cannot give players enough to reason with. He also requires real competitive dynamics, a game to be played, and a clear way to represent the most relevant players ². Where uncertainty is too great, he points to scenario planning; where competitive dynamics are absent, to standard tools such as cost curves and profit pools ².

Before the workshop: worksheets 1 and 2

Four to six weeks out, the organizer fills in two worksheets and gathers the inputs. Most of the workshop's quality is set here.

• Ask the players what to test. To keep a strategic game from reflecting only its designers' hypotheses, one defense contractor Horn describes asked all 40 executives who would play which trends, scenarios and decisions should be tested ². A short survey a month out does the same job.
• Build a dossier for each rival. Recent moves, stated goals, financial room, leadership and what they have said publicly about your market. The rival teams will play from this.
• Recruit the rival teams with care. Put people on them who know the competitor: sales staff who lose deals to it, and hires who once worked there. Horn notes the value of mixing functions and putting people in roles less familiar to them ².
• Name the control team. Two or three people who know the industry, run the clock and rule on what each move would plausibly do.

Day one: build the board

1. Worksheet 3: Rank the uncertainties (09:00–10:30)Score each uncertain force on two questions: how much would it change the best option, and how unpredictable is it? Keep the three to five that score high on both. Roxburgh recommends trying several 2×2 combinations of these critical uncertainties: some turn out to be correlated and can be merged, and an unusual pairing can reveal a real insight ³.
2. Worksheet 4: Frame four scenarios (10:45–12:30)Choose two uncertainties that are independent of each other and cross them. Roxburgh argues for at least two variables, because a single variable only produces a spectrum from good to bad, and for at least four scenarios: “Show three and people always pick the middle one” ³.
3. Worksheet 5: Write the stories (13:30–15:30)One small group per scenario. For each: a name of two to four words, as Roxburgh advises ³; the chain of events from today to the horizon; what customers, suppliers and regulators do; and the predetermined elements, which appear in every story.
4. Worksheet 6: Test the options (15:45–17:00)Fill the grid: each option against each scenario, rated strong, acceptable or damaging, with one line of reasoning. Mark the robust options, the ones that fail badly somewhere, and the uncertainties that decide between them.
5. Close (17:00–17:30): choose the two arenasPick the two scenarios for tomorrow's game: usually the one where your leading option looks best and the one where it looks most exposed.

Day two: the war game

The game puts the options into motion. In Horn's opening example, a high-tech company's two-day game, with teams representing competitors and stakeholders playing against a company team, showed executives that a strong competitor on the sidelines was likely to enter the market aggressively and that the low end would face more price pressure than expected ². That is the kind of finding a scenario on its own cannot produce.

1. Round 1 (09:00–10:30), first scenarioThe company team makes its opening move. Rival and customer teams respond in writing. Control rules on the result and moves the clock forward a year.
2. Round 2 (10:45–12:15), same scenarioEveryone moves again, knowing the first round's outcome. Control injects one event from the scenario story.
3. Round 3 (13:15–14:45), second scenarioReset the board in the second arena and replay the company's leading option against the rivals there.
4. Debrief (15:00–17:00)Rival teams speak first: what did you see, and what were you trying to do? Then customers, then the company team. Fill in Worksheet 8.

Horn's advice on cast size scales with the stakes: a tactical pricing game can use a small group, a strategic game should cast a wider net, and a game meant to align an organization behind a move should include leaders of every function involved in carrying it out ².

Debrief: from moves to a decision

The signposts are the part that keeps working after the workshop. Put them on the agenda of the quarterly strategy review with their owners, so someone checks them on a schedule.

A worked example

How the kit fails, and the case against it

• The rival plays like us. Rival teams staffed by people who think like the company produce rivals who behave as the company wishes they would. Staff them with people who know the competitor, and judge their moves against the rival card, not against your plan.
• The company team must win. When senior executives sit on the company team, control teams soften rulings. Brief control privately that its job is plausibility, and let a rival win a round if that is what would happen.
• One game, read as a forecast. A game shows plausible responses, not certain ones. Horn calls well-designed war games powerful learning experiences, though “not a panacea” ². Record the reasoning behind each response, not just the move.
• The favorite scenario. Roxburgh argues that decision makers deserve a base case, the scenario judged most probable, stated with clear caveats ³. The scenario planning page in this series warns that naming a favorite can turn the rest into decoration, and its checklist says no scenario should be labeled most likely. This page parts company with it on timing, not on the danger. Both are right at different moments. Do not name a base case until every option has been tested in every scenario and in the game; then, if the decider needs one, name it and say how confident you are.

The fair objection to the whole kit is cost: two days of a senior team, plus weeks of preparation, to test one decision. For most decisions that is too much, and a short options memo will do. The kit earns its cost when the decision is expensive to reverse, a few rivals can change its outcome, and the people who must carry it out need to understand why it was made. Horn notes that repeating a game can also bring along people who did not play the first one ².

Scenarios ask what the world might do to you. A war game asks what your competitors will do about you. A decision that has faced only the first question has been tested against half its risk.

Questions

What should a scenario planning template include?

The decision the scenarios must inform, written as a question with options and a horizon; a sorted list of driving forces; the ranked critical uncertainties; a frame for four scenarios; the scenario stories; an options grid rating each option in each scenario; and signposts with owners and triggers. This kit adds a rival card and a war game record.

What is the difference between scenario planning and a war game?

Scenario planning explores how the environment might change: demand, regulation, technology, costs. A business war game explores how competitors, customers and other players will respond to your moves, with teams playing each side. Scenarios suit high uncertainty about the environment; a war game needs real competitive dynamics and players you can represent.

How many scenarios should a workshop build?

Four is a practical default. Charles Roxburgh argues for at least four, because with three people tend to pick the middle one, and for building them from at least two independent variables so they do not collapse into a single good-to-bad spectrum. Shell's well-documented scenario practice, discussed in more depth on our scenario planning page, also moved away from three.

Who should play the competitor teams in a war game?

People who know the competitor well: sales staff who compete against it every week, and hires who once worked there. Brief them to play to win by the rival's own goals, not yours. Teams staffed by people who think like your company tend to produce rivals who behave the way you would like.

Where to go next

• Scenario Planning That Changes a Decision: How Practitioners Do It
• Competitor Analysis: A Practitioner's Method for Predicting Moves
• Scenario Planning: Framework & How to Apply It
• Scenario Planning: Definition & Examples
• Game Theory