Scenario Strategy Workshops

Overview

Strategies are about planning for the future. Unfortunately, the future has a nasty habit of being different from what we expect.

Legislata offers scenario strategy workshops to help organizations test and develop strategies for what might happen, not simply the most likely course of events. This helps organizations be prepared for when something unexpected inevitably happens and you and/or your competitors are scrambling to react.

This workshop is run using a matrix game, a technique that has been used by militaries, security services, and multinational corporations to test their plans and help develop resilience in the face of an uncertain environment.

What is a Matrix Game?

In the world of wargaming and corporate simulation, the most derided approach in the BOGSAT - Bunch of Guys/Gals Sitting Around a Table. As everyone who has sat through a long meeting knows, throwing out a scenario and discussing it without direction is the fastest way to an unproductive discussion. Bureaucratic maneuvering skews the debate. Groupthink can set in. Rabbit holes are chased.

In Matrix Games, this kind of rambling is prevented. Teams have a finite amount of time to prepare their moves for each round and the discussion is constrained to what matters. You get the value of the debate without the hours lost to muting and unmuting. By focusing on the probability of a move's success and by keeping score, you get a sense of what strategies work better than others.

What participants receive

For this workshop, each participant will receive a briefing book on the simulation at least one week in advance so they can read up on the game's mechanisms and the scenario.

One week after the workshop participants will receive a report summarizing the simulation and its results.

The workshops can be run repeatedly with different groups of people to test out different outcomes and strategies. A final report summarizing all workshop results can be distributed afterwards, with the timing dependent on the length of the report.

Cost and Logistics

One of the best parts of matrix games is how simple they are to run. There's no need for big conference facilities or a large table for the game board. They can be run in person in a conference room, via Zoom, or via Slack or email.

A typical matrix game takes about four hours to run. This can be all at once, or broken into multiple Zoom calls over a number of days. We recommend 90 minutes for the first session, and 60 to 90 minutes for subsequent ones.

The price of these workshops is dependent on the level of detail of the scenario, whether it is conducted in person or via Zoom, and whether you want additional subject-matter experts to join the simulation. As a general guideline, they cost between $15,000 and $50,000. Users of the Legislata platform receive a 10% discount as a perk of being already a member of our community.

About Chris and Legislata

These workshops are run by Chris Oates, the founder of Legislata and a Lecturer at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.

Legislata is an information platform and productivity suite for the political and policy industry. Research from its development has been cited in Politico’s Massachusetts and New Jersey Playbooks, the New York Post, and City & State NY.

Chris previously worked at Oxford Analytica (not Cambridge Analytica), as the North America analyst for their Daily Brief subscription and as an Advisory Associate, leading projects for the Department of Defense, European Parliament, and Fortune 500 companies. He has also worked in business intelligence, consulting in Iraqi Kurdistan, and on the Ranked Choice Voting / Yes on 2 2020 campaign in Massachusetts.

Chris has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a BA with Honors and Magna Cum Laude from Brown University.

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