Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 291 | Strategy & Business Model | 3

Extractive summaries of and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 291 | April 7-13, 2023

Using Black Hat Workshops to Understand Your Competitors

By John Horn | MIT Sloan Management Review | April 06, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

How do we arrive at a better understanding of our competitors’ capabilities, plans, and thought processes? By conducting a competitive insight workshop is an effective way to model how your competitors might behave in a particular scenario, and it’s a crucial method to avoid walking into traps ahead of launching any strategic initiatives.

As a competitive insight exercise, a black hat session helps you understand what it’s like to wear a competitor’s hat. What’s it like to view the world from its perspective?  A black hat exercise is focused on a particular strategic situation you’re facing — such as your plan to introduce a new product to the market, the potential entry of a competitor, or a change in government regulations. In its simplest form, a black hat session focuses on role-playing one competitor to analyze how it would approach that circumstance. There are three steps to conducting a competitive insight workshop, regardless of the specific form. 

1. Define the parameters. Involve stakeholders at this stage, including workshop participants and others who will need to use the information generated. The latter group includes colleagues both upstream (such as senior managers) and downstream (such as front-line staff members). Clarify the scope of your planned exercise by working through the questions such as Why is the black hat competitor considering this strategic decision (in other words, what is its objective?), and how will other players view its potential move?
2. Build the materials you need for the workshop. You should create the following materials for participants to help them participate in the workshop:  n industry fact pack, so all of the participants are on the same page; role-playing fact packs; 
3. Run the workshop to generate and capture competitive insights. Putting the planned scenario into play and watching the interactions of the role-play teams should surface examples of how competitors are likely to act and react when faced with certain situations.

3 key takeaways from the the article

1. How do we arrive at a better understanding of our competitors’ capabilities, plans, and thought processes? By conducting a competitive insight workshop is an effective way to model how your competitors might behave in a particular scenario, and it’s a crucial method to avoid walking into traps ahead of launching any strategic initiatives.
2. As a competitive insight exercise, a black hat session helps you understand what it’s like to wear a competitor’s hat. a black hat session focuses on role-playing one competitor to analyze how it would approach that circumstance.
3. There are three steps to conducting a competitive insight workshop, regardless of the specific form: First, define the parameters of the exercise; second, build the material used in the workshop; and third, run the workshop.

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Topics:  Business Strategy, Competitors Analysis, Role Playing