The Need for Organisational Resilience Chapter 5

culture of ‘letting go’, supporting and guiding ‘front-line’ employees and mindfully adapting to

a situation.

Adapting to a situation, never mind improvising is a skill in itself, and need preparation. If

people are supposed to slip into the shoes of a leader, they need a specific form or training

that is less based on obedience but rather on establishing a set of mindful flexibility. In the

armed forces as well as in management, the importance of war gaming can not be

overstated. Forms of wargaming, scenario planning, ‘real-life’ exercises, are not only tools

and techniques to provide direction to an organisation at a strategic level (see Chapter 2),

but also help and empower those at a tactical level to establish situated human cognition,

and thus to assume adaptive leadership.

[Text Box starts] War Gaming]

War gaming of the courses of action.

War gaming is a flexible instrument designed to develop, compare, and improve COAs. It should

be used, whenever time permits, in order to evaluate the potential of the COA to accomplish the

mission against foreseen opposition with respect to the different opposing COAs, as well as to identify

and correct deficiencies. However, the real value is its ability to permit the JFC and his staff to

visualise the conduct of operations and gain insight into opposing capabilities and actions, as well as

conditions in the operational environment. War gaming should help them anticipate possible events

and foster the mental agility to deal with them. The war game should also help identify potential risks

and opportunities, which may drive the need for branches and sequels to counter or exploit such

situations, as well as decision points for the commander to take action. Ideally, each own-force COA

should be war gamed against the ‘most likely’ and ‘most dangerous’ opposing COAs. War gaming is

regularly conducted in OLPP Step 4 to compare COAs. Additionally, it can be used in other steps.

Then, however, its purpose would not be comparison, but development, improvement, or revision of

COA. Besides being used in operational planning, war gaming can also be applied as a dry run in

mission rehearsals.

General preconditions

Some preconditions have to be met, without which war gaming will fail or only achieve biased

results:

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