Business is often compared to warfare. Indeed, Sun Tsu’s 6th-century military strategy treatise The Art of War has long been required reading for ambitious executives.

Business is often compared to warfare. Indeed, Sun Tsu’s 6th-century military strategy treatise The Art of War has long been required reading for ambitious executives.

Now the analogy is being taken further. Simulstrat is a small consultancy that was spun out from the war studies group at King’s College London and applies war-gaming methodology to its clients’ business strategies in order to test their validity.

The simulations involve real stakeholders from the various parties involved in a given strategy: internal departments, business partners, lawyers, even government.

Rather than have these stakeholders talk through all the possible implications of a given strategy, they instead play it out in such a way that allows unforeseen consequences to arise. It is this unpredictability that gives simulation its power, according to Simulstrat’s CEO Ken Charman.

Most of Simulstrat’s “business games” have been conducted confidentially, but in July, the company ran its first public simulation, pitting UK- and US-based CEOs against each other in a bid to win funding of $1 billion. Predictably, the US-based CEOs got closer to the prize, Charman states, although this was not a question of nationality: all three were British-born.

At the moment, an activity like this requires a lot of preparation and co-ordination of different groups. But Charman believes that with increased automation, possibly combined with technologies such as virtual worlds, simulations could become a widely used business tool.