Elsevier

Long Range Planning

Volume 40, Issue 6, December 2007, Pages 535-558
Long Range Planning

Policy Gaming for Strategy and Change

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2007.07.004Get rights and content

This article summarizes the major insights collected in a retrospective comparative analysis of eight strategic projects in which ‘policy gaming’ was the major methodology. Policy gaming uses gaming-simulation to assist organizations in policy exploration, decision making and strategic change. The process combines the rigor of systems analysis and simulation techniques with the creativity of scenario building and the communicative power of role-play and structured group techniques. Reality is simulated through the interaction of role players using non-formal symbols as well as formal, computerized sub-models where necessary. The technique allows a group of participants to engage in collective action in a safe environment to create and analyse the futures they want to explore. It enables the players to pre-test strategic initiatives in a realistic environment. Gaming/simulation proves an appropriate process for dealing with the increasing complexity of organizational environments and the problems of communication within complex organizations and their networks.

Introduction

Anyone who thinks play is nothing but play and dead earnest nothing but dead earnest hasn't understood either one. (Dietrich Dörner)1

Over the last few decades, the formal strategy making approaches that once dominated the planning departments of large firms have come under attack from reflective practitioners and management scholars who have argued that rapidly changing environments require emerging and creative strategies.2 From this criticism a number of alternative strategy-making models have been developed that emphasize collective efforts and highlight the need for bottom-up processes in which managers have more autonomy in strategy making. These approaches stimulate ‘market creation,’ ‘planned emergence,’ and ‘entrepreneurial opportunity formation’ in which softer roles and characteristics such as coordination, communication, creativity and commitment are more important.3

Outside the mainstream of strategy literature, the discipline of gaming/simulation offers great potential in this regard. Scholars from the gaming/simulation discipline have frequently reported on the use of gaming in policy and strategic change projects in a large variety of organizations.4 In the leading professional and academic strategy journals, however, one finds little about successful gaming applications. With this article we want to make clear to strategy practitioners and academics how we have come to understand policy gaming as a unique and effective process for solving the most difficult strategic issues an organization can face.

We will argue that policy gaming derives its strategic functions from two central features of this methodology:

  • The interactive and tailor-made modelling and design of the policy game. The actual run of the policy game is only one - albeit important and highly visible - step in this collective process of inquiry and communication. A policy game or exercise is a dedicated gaming/simulation constructed in collaboration with the members of an organization to help it in its strategy making process.

  • Through the unique combination of simulation with role-playing, participants themselves actually create the future that they want to study, rather than it being produced for them as in projects where formal simulation models are used. At the same time, the future is more than an object of discussion and verbal speculation, such as in most strategic seminars. No other technique allows a group of participants to engage in collective action in a safe environment to create and analyse the futures they want to explore.5

The empirical database of this article is the systematic comparison of eight strategic change projects in which gaming/simulation was the major methodology. Most of the projects were systematically evaluated by both the client organization and the consultants, and several were also the object of evaluative public debates in press and other media. Projects using policy gaming have also been subjected to in-depth empirical analyses reported in PhD theses. The cases in our study were selected to create a very diverse database, from Europe and the US, from public and private and third sector organizations, and cover a period of 25 years of gaming/simulation for strategic intervention. Most cases are about intra-organizational strategy and change, but some also deal with developing cooperative processes between several independent organizations.6

The structure of this article is as follows. The first main section on the Practice of Policy Gaming is descriptive and, from the group of eight in our database, summarizes one strategy project in which policy gaming was the main method. In five subsections it presents policy gaming as a form of interactive or participatory modelling and simulation. The second main section - The Potential of Policy Gaming - is interpretive and explanatory, with five subsections focusing on the ways in which gaming/simulation proves particularly helpful in strategic decision making. Each subsection defines a class of ‘effective ingredients’ or ‘relevant mechanisms’ we have discovered in policy gaming. From the strategy process literature we derive explanations as to why gaming mechanisms can help to develop the emerging and creative strategies modern organizations need, and illustrate how these mechanisms can actually be made operational. The final conclusions section summarizes our main insights, while the appendix contains vignettes of the other seven examples in our database.

Section snippets

Strategy games without the generals

One of history's more successful entrepreneurs, the Russian Czar Peter the Great, loved playing war games near his castle. He owned a specially created and well-trained mock army that he could activate at any time as his tool for doing what he liked best: testing his strategic talents and arousing his war fantasies.7

The first war games were probably developed by Asian strategists more than a thousand years ago. Modern military gaming efforts have reached high levels of sophistication,

The 5 C's of policy gaming

To understand the actual contributions of all the eight policy games in our database, we derived from their project files references to clients' perspectives on the nature of the policy issues and their motivations for selecting gaming. From the evaluations we extracted participants' and clients' statements on their experience of the gaming projects' contributions. Using an inductive comparative analysis we interpreted these data and grouped them in five categories labelled ‘The Five Cs’:

Conclusion

We set out to document and interpret the contribution policy gaming has for managing strategic issues. Our analysis of the theory and practice of policy gaming has identified as its unique features the ability to combine the rigor of systems analytical and simulation techniques with the creativity of collective scenario building and the communicative power of role-play. The analysis of our eight cases yielded five categories of functions of policy gaming for strategy development. Empirical and

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Stuart Hart and Sean Miskell for their kind assistance in preparing this article, and the Long Range Planning Editor in Chief and his referees for their useful guidance and support in refining both our ideas and their expression. The data base for this article was created with the help of many clients, game participants and colleagues: we express our grateful thanks to all those who contributed.

Jac. L. A. Geurts is Professor in Policy Science at the Department of Organization Studies of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and teaches strategic management at the TIAS/Nimbas Business School of this University. He previously held positions at Philips International and at the University of Nijmegen, Cornell University and the University of Michigan. Tilburg University, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Organization Studies. P. O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, the

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    Jac. L. A. Geurts is Professor in Policy Science at the Department of Organization Studies of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and teaches strategic management at the TIAS/Nimbas Business School of this University. He previously held positions at Philips International and at the University of Nijmegen, Cornell University and the University of Michigan. Tilburg University, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Organization Studies. P. O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands. E-mail [email protected]

    Richard D. Duke is Professor Emeritus of the University of Michigan's College of Architecture and Urban Planning and former Chairman of the Certificate in Gaming/Simulation of the Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan. 329 Lake Park Lane, 48104 Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. E-mail [email protected]

    Patrick Vermeulen is associate professor of Organization Studies at Tilburg University. Previously he held positions at the Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and the University of Nijmegen. He has a Ph.D. from the Nijmegen School of Management. Tilburg University, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Organization Studies. P. O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands. E-mail [email protected]

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