Coevolutionary Gaming for Managing Groups and Teens

Managing Group and Teens

Strategic planning is the process of defining direction and strategy to make effective decision by allocation available resources to pursue this strategy. Strategic planning generally assists organizations to understand method to achieve short-term and long-term goals with available resources. However, popular notion of strategic decision is that it involves high degree of uncertainties, major resource implications, high stakes as well as long-term consequences. One of the strengths of traditional approach to strategic decision making is that it is consistence with business reality of business manager. However, traditional approach to make strategic decisions can only work better in a business environment where there are few possible outcomes.

In the contemporary business environments, traditional approach to make decision is no longer sufficient to make strategic decisions for multinational companies. Present complex competitions within turbulent business environments have revealed that management of global companies will face daunting challenges in using traditional approach to make decision since global companies operating in multiple countries are working in business environments with multiple outcomes. Thus, simple strategic planning is not sufficient for planning in this type of business situation.

Cares et al. (2007) argues planning within the military context is similar to planning of most global companies. Military uses complex competitive theoretical frameworks to make strategic decisions because of uncertainties in the number of outcomes. In the military planning, the outcomes are too large and impossible to quantify all odds to arrive at all possibilities. Thus, it will be challenging business managers "to plan in such an environment, when the outcome, by definition, is unknowable?" (Cares, & Miskel, 2007 p 20).

The objective of this paper is to explore strategic planning tool using coevolutionary gaming model to improve decision.

Strategic Planning tool to Improve Decision Making

Cares, et al. (2007) develops a non-traditional scenario form of planning using the co-evolutionary model. The co-evolutionary model mimics gaming design to navigate complex strategic environments.

In the game, which is " now played at the highest levels in the U.S. Department of Defense, as many as four teams, each with up to 20 executives and senior managers, engage in a highly competitive series of strategy moves and countermoves." (Cares, & Miskel, 2007 p 20).

The games normally last three days, however, the games assist all players to understand competitive dynamic environment to be used to create strategies that are more robust. Major benefit of the co-evolutionary gaming is that it assists organizations to design a strategy planning as well as making counter move against competitors in a dynamic competitive environment. In business environments, competitors are increasingly designing moves to heighten uncertainties making selection of appropriate course of action to be increasingly difficult. For example, a business organization that invests high costs in a long-term R & D. In remote sensing technology may achieve failure in the investment because of the counter approach of competitors who use the a low -- cost clandestine investment to counter the investment approach of the first company. Since the management of the first company does not integrate a strategic move to counter the action of competitors, management may interpret their product as being underperformed thereby increase the R&D investment, which is a costly major mistake because the strategic planning is uncorrected.

In the real world business environment, application of the coevolutionary gaming can assist business organizations to make long-term investment plan as well as developing strategy move to counter the action of competitors.

Typically, "Coevolutionary gaming mimics the dynamics fundamental to ecological competition in order to explore the effects of conflict and cooperation between teams." (Cares, & Miskel, 2007 p 21).

Business organizations can use a dynamic strategic of coevolutionary gaming to counter the action of competitors within a business environment. For example, a bank that is intending to make a strategy decision on the best product and services to deliver in the new market. To achieve competitive market advantages from the strategic decision, the bank management will need to design two approaches:

Analyzing the competitive market environment of the new market,

Analyzing the possible reactions of the competitors towards the introduction o f the product in the new market.

To enjoy the best market advantages from the new products, the senior management will need to use the coevolutionary gaming strategy to analyze the best product and services to introduce in the market as well as incumbent response to the actions of the competitors. Using these strategies, the bank management will need to form two teams:

First team to guide the bank into the entry into the stimulated market environment.

Second team to form counteroffensive against the competitors or formulate innovate responses to compete successfully within the dynamic market environment.

Effect of Coevolutionary Gaming on Communication Processes

The Johari Window is a simple model to describe communication system within a group (Chapman, 2003). The model comprises of quadrants:

arena (things that you know and known by other),

blind spot (things that you do not know, however, others know),

facade (things that you know, however, unknown to others ) and,

Unknown (things that you as well as others do not know).

Essentially, Johari model reflects essential importance of feedback, self-disclosure as well as social interaction among human. The feedback represents reactions, feeling and perceptions of other towards our behaviors. The essence of communication is to facilitate harmony and human relations among individuals. However, the application of coevolutionary gaming with reference to communication is the process of disclosing and concealing information to other. Typically, the gaming suggests that it is essentially to disclose minimum possible of information to opponents. However, application of coevolutionary gaming in business process set a setback to communication and human relations because the model promotes conflicts within human relations environment since it does not build positive relations within a business environment.

Coevolutionary Gaming Impeding Decision Making

The effectiveness of coevolutionary gaming might not be applicable in making every decision making especially in case where competitors are faking their intentions in order to exploit the opportunities put forward by an organization within a business environment. For example, competitors can speculate the intention of a business before making a strategic decision and make a planning to make a counter offensive attack. By coevolving, a competitor can fake opponents on its real intention and act in multiple level of actions to counter decision of the opponents. The process can thwart decision-making process within a business environment.