The essential basis for analyzing strategic interactions is a proper understanding of each player’s individual objectives and preferences. Every player uses his strategic options as levers to optimize his position according to his individual goals. Identifying a competitor’s objectives is not always easy and straightforward, and executives often feel uncertain when asked to do so. However, our process is particularly designed to guide our clients through this challenging task and form valid assumptions about each player’s interests and preferences.

To collect the knowledge required to model each player’s preferences, we typically conduct a one-day workshop with the client’s team and executives, bringing together the required knowledge about all players’ options. During this workshop, we go through a proven process to collect all facets of the issue and achieve consensus about the relevant preferences player by player. In some cases, consensus about the exact preferences cannot be achieved or simply cannot be estimated with the information available. We have several ways to cope with such situations, e.g., by running sensitivity analyses and distinguishing critical strategic breakpoints from less important factors.

Finally, the workshop results in a catalogue of specific preferences for every relevant player in the decision to be made. These preferences subsequently form the basis of our analysis of strategic interactions (sometimes also called strategic wargaming) that unfold in two particular, complementing settings: Analytical wargaming simulation and interactive model-based wargaming workshop (optional). Depending on the specific goals of the project, we can combine both settings or stick to the simulation only. This could also be decided as we move along the process.

Based on this knowledge, we – together with the client’s core team – resolve the issue, answer our client’s strategic questions, and develop recommendations for action for our client, which are also based on sensitivity analyses and robustness checks. In addition, we deduce higher-level action-reaction patterns regarding subsequent changes.

All this aims to derive a recommendation for action together with the client based on an intimate understanding of the underlying dynamics. To achieve this, we work with the client team to come to an overall recommendation, taking qualitative issues, discussions, and executive judgement into account as well. Our objective is to develop a result that is fact-based, understood, accepted, and actionable.

It is key for us to create buy-in and work together with the client’s core team to understand the why’s and how’s of these analyses. In doing so, we do not claim to be able to know what the players will be doing. We admit that we do not have a crystal ball that gives perfect foresight or removes uncertainty. Rather, Straint’s approach to analyzing strategic interaction helps executives make the best fact-based decisions, taking upside potential and downside risk into account.

For a model-based interactive wargaming workshop, we implement the model built specifically for the conflict at hand on a proprietary multiplayer software platform enabling our clients to experience the dynamics of the conflict and its action-reaction-patterns: Within a 0.5 to 1 day wargaming workshop, the workshop participants actually play the conflict in teams against each other. During the workshop, each team takes the role of one actor in the market and is asked to put themselves into the shoes of this player, to formulate their strategies and to test these strategies against the other teams. By switching between different roles and scenarios, workshop participants can actively experience future dynamics of the market, experiment with different strategies to test the reactions they provoke, and envision the potential rationales behind competitors’ actions and reactions. The actual gaming phase is framed by a structured preparation phase (teams develop their strategic plans,…) and a moderated discussion round where results of the simulation, rationales of the teams and a concluding evaluation are presented.

The specific power of the interactive approach is an improved common understanding for the dynamics in the team, a shared perspective and fact-based approach to the issues and also an increased buy-in, also for implementation later.