Legal Stratego
A Global Game of People, Process and Strategy
Session Description
Game thinking is being used throughout the business world to stimulate innovation and bold management approaches. Sharpen your business acumen and stretch your strategic thinking and leadership skills in a high-level test of wits with your colleagues and peers. In this team-learning game, a new global competitor disruptor makes a bold move, and the landscape changes overnight for an entire industry. Some players will thrive, some not. You’ll lead the business strategy as well as the legal strategies. Winning will demand risk-taking, risk management, teamwork and leadership.
The Context and Set Up
The session will operate at two simultaneous levels. First, the tables (companies) in the room will comprise a market and will need to make strategic choices to deal with market-wide developments. Second, because each person at the table will represent a different member of the management team, participants will need to work together to make good decisions. Therefore, the simulation will provide learning opportunities about both strategy and group dynamics.
The bulk of the session will include a simulation of firms that are jockeying for position in the grocery industry, an industry that is currently highly segmented and potentially being disrupted by online alternatives. Each table will represent a traditional grocery company and individuals at the table will play different members of the management team.
Each person will receive two sets of instructions: a description of the company (in common with everyone else in the room) and a role description that will reflect the goals of the individual as well as some other information pertaining to the role (for ex: employee data for the HR role, marketing data for the CMO, etc.).
After a short introductory lecture sharing two strategy frameworks (Porter’s Five Forces and a and resource-based view of strategy), the simulation will begin. In each round, the management team at each table will need to make a strategic choice, taking into consideration new information that is given at the beginning of the round. Choices will have costs associated with them. After the choices are made, there will be additional information given about a subsequent event facing the industry. The choice selections will be simplistic enough that they can be market share enhancing, market share detracting, or neutral, depending on what happens next. After two rounds, the simulation will end and we’ll determine which team has won based on a combination scoring determining market share and profitability.
After the simulation, there will be a debrief where we’ll talk about what happened as well as elaborate on the strategy framework used by the participants. A second part of the debrief will be to talk about the dynamics within their management teams and how they were sharing and integrating critical information needed to make good decisions. Finally, we will have two in-house experts share their views on the in-house legal role in strategic decision-making.
Learning Objectives
●How to understand and use strategic frameworks to make strategic decisions in a quickly changing market
●How to recognize and overcome issues of group dynamics that can undermine decision-making in groups