A War Game for a Situation That Is Not a War
What a simulation of the parties around a contested award gives a board, and why the same method holds for a stake, a screening decision or a takeover.
Avihu Marom · · 5 MIN READ
You have just won a large public contract. The losing bidder has a short window to challenge the award, and has said nothing. The board will ask what happens if it does, and so far you have an opinion, not an answer. The case is illustrative, but anyone who has sat on the winning side of a contested award will recognise the silence.
Nobody in that room would call it a war. Every ingredient of a war game is there all the same. Parties who want different things. Decisions taken in turns, each one changing what the others can do next. Rules that set deadlines and cost money to use. That is the whole requirement, and it is why the situations I am asked to simulate are usually quieter than a map with arrows on it, and more expensive to get wrong.
Who sits at the table
When I simulate a situation like this, I seat every party whose decision can change yours, and I give each one its own interests and its own constraints rather than a script.
The losing bidder weighs the cost of a challenge, in fees and in management attention, against the chance of reopening the award. It also weighs something a legal memo rarely prices: its relationship with a buyer it will bid to again. A challenge that succeeds on the law can still cost it the next tender.
The contracting authority wants the programme to start. It has also just defended an evaluation it wrote, and it does not want that evaluation taken apart in public. Those two wants pull in different directions, and which one wins on a given day shapes everything the other parties do.
The body that would hear a challenge has its own timetable and its own rules of procedure. It is not a neutral backdrop. Its pace is a constraint every other seat plays against.
And you, holding the contract. You decide how much to say, to whom, and whether to start spending before the challenge window closes. Silence is a move. So is mobilising staff early.
What comes back
Round by round, the simulation plays the weeks forward, then plays them again under deliberately varied conditions, because a situation like this does not have one path through it. What a board receives is not a verdict on whether the challenge will arrive. It is the shape of the problem, written in terms a board can act on.
The decision points, with the dates they expire. Not "watch the other side", but the point after which a particular option is no longer open to you. Mobilising staff before the challenge window closes is a decision with a deadline, whether or not anyone wrote the deadline down.
The key assumptions, each with its confidence and what it costs if it is wrong. Every plan rests on a few, and they do not carry equal weight. That the buyer will defend its own evaluation is one. Stated plainly, with what it would cost you if the buyer wavered, it stops being a background belief and becomes something the board can test.
The most dangerous course the other side could take, with the indicators that show it starting and the countermeasures that answer it. In this case, a challenge that freezes the programme start. The value is less in naming it than in knowing what the first week of it would look like from your side of the table.
The rare branches, each reported as how often it appeared across the runs, so nobody mistakes a rare branch for the expected one, or forgets that it exists.
The fuller engagement adds every party's available courses of action, the second-order effects that follow from them, and an hour with me to argue the whole thing through. The Executive Simulation Briefing carries the decision points, the assumptions and the most dangerous course, for a reader who will decide without the analyst in the room. The Intelligence Brief is the read of the run. The simulation underneath all three is the same one.
Change the cast and the method holds
A foreign investor takes a minority stake in a supplier you depend on. The seats are different: the investor, the supplier's board, a screening body that may or may not look, and you as the customer deciding how much exposure you can carry while nobody has decided anything.
A screening body is deciding whether to intervene in your deal, and on what conditions. Here the question is less whether it intervenes than which conditions it could attach, and which of them your deal survives.
A takeover where the other board has not shown its hand. Every move you make before it does tells it something.
Each of these is several people deciding against each other, in turn, on a clock. That is the question a single expert opinion cannot answer, however good the expert, because it is not one person's decision. An opinion tells you what someone thinks will happen. A simulation of the parties tells you which decision you face, by when, and what would make your plan wrong.
What it is not
It is not a prediction, and I do not sell it as one. It is a structured, repeatable reading of how the parties behave across the window in which you have to decide, delivered in days rather than weeks, and re-run as the situation moves. The board still decides. It decides knowing where the ground gives way.