When It Takes a Network: Creating Strategy and Agility through Wargaming

Abstract

When the basis of competition shifts from product features to an experience delivered by a network of independently acting participants in a complex and fast-evolving world, it creates new and unexplored challenges for strategy development and execution across organizational boundaries. Approaches based on reason are ineffective in these situations as reason alone will not inspire others to participate or motivate voluntary actions in the interest of a common purpose when conditions change unexpectedly. This paper looks at what it takes to effectively make strategy at the network level in the face of ill-defined and time-pressured conditions.