Strategic wargaming and tabletop exercises.
Play the decision before you make it. I design and facilitate exercises in which your team takes the roles of rivals, regulators, customers and the public, then follows their moves into consequences.
A plan meets people with other plans.
A strategic wargame puts competing aims into the same situation. Participants make decisions, respond to one another and discover the choices and dependencies their own plan creates. The scenario supplies the world; the players give it conflicting intentions.
I work from the question you need to explore, your evidence and the actors whose responses matter. We agree the scope and output, then develop the exercise with your team. I can contribute inside an existing consultancy or client relationship.
Choose the form the decision needs.
The format follows the question. A short tabletop exercise, a facilitated role-play game and an interactive film offer different ways to put participants inside a situation.
- Tabletop exercise: an exercise script, the injects and the evidence behind them.
- Role-play wargame: moves and counter-moves, followed by a debrief on where the plan broke.
- Playable film: an interactive drama that puts the audience in charge of the decision.
Five years at Dstl.
From 2020 to 2025, I developed future concepts, scenarios and strategic wargames at Dstl, the UK Ministry of Defence’s science laboratory. I designed and facilitated games for government and NATO audiences, co-developed and taught foresight methods, and worked on future trends.
Much of that work cannot be shown. The public futures here demonstrate how I develop a premise through incentives, institutions, technologies and human responses. They are exploratory work, with commissioned projects identified separately.
A policy question becomes a playable film.
I conceived, wrote and directed Balance of Power, an interactive film and serious policy game on the future energy system, commissioned by USEF from RANJ. The audience follows a minister and chooses whose advice she takes. The project won the Energy Institute Public Engagement Award in 2019.
Bring the decision, the participants and your time frame. We can discuss which form of exercise would help your team explore it.
Tell me what you’re working on.
The subject, the people involved, your timescale and what you need to make.