Competitive Dynamics Workshops

These workshops can come in various shapes and sizes, but at the core, they  are all experiential workshops that allow organizations to practice their strategic choices in a risk-free environment before facing the  pressure of the real world.

Targeted strategic practice is crucial for improving performance, yet very  difficult to create for most organizations because a controlled  environment does not readily exist. Competitive Dynamics Workshops  create just such an opportunity to practice your decision making to  improve your performance when faced with real world situations.

Example: For a building products client with $1.5 billion in revenue at stake, we played a game that focused on price and capacity management  decisions, with the added dimension of exploring mergers and  partnerships. The outcome of the game led the client to stop “hoping” a small player would stop adding capacity and instead led to the client’s development of a strategy to preempt the smaller player. There were also some innovative strategic options that emerged from game (the client had not considered them previously, but when competitor teams were successful using these strategies in the game, the client began to  explore how they could make the same moves in the real world).

Focus on a subset of existing and/or potential competitors (or stakeholders more broadly) and explore their likely strategic moves and the rationale for them. These workshops can be thought of as pre-cursors to war games: they allow you to get into the head of your competitor to try and understand what their likely strategic objectives and actions will be. At the end of the exercise, you will no longer think “They’re  irrational,” but instead realize why what they do makes sense to them.

These specialized war game-like exercises focus on a particular negotiation between two counter-parties. The workshop allows clients to practice different strategic positions: overall posture, ordering of tactics,  framing of positions and responding to the counter-party’s position. The first time you communicate with the other side in a negotiation should not be the first time you've rehearsed your lines: just like a skilled theatre actor, you need to practice what you say and try it several different ways before you are comfortable and ready for what is thrown at you when you are in the crucible of the negotiation.

Example: A healthcare supplier had an upcoming negotiation with a GPO (group purchasing organization that acted on behalf of multiple providers). The supplier felt like they had no options to counter the strong demands of the GPO, with millions of dollars at risk. The mock negotiation allowed  the client to test three critical contractual demands from the GPO by  trading off other issues of less importance to the supplier and the  order and manner in which to raise these alternatives. After the  workshop, the supplier reengaged with the GPO to continue the actual  discussion and ended with a signed contract in which the GPO agreed to  drop all three demands. The supplier went from having no options to  getting the contract they were happy with.

Give customers a reason to do business with you. My  strong economics background and years of working across industries  allows us to pull from the right theoretical concepts, but more  importantly, the right set of analogous competitive situations from  other sectors and geographies. By listening to the particular issues you  are facing, I can help you to better understand why your sector is  behaving the way it currently is, and to think of creative ways of  changing the rules of the game in order to create more opportunities for  your organization.