Mi Estrategia en la Picota

A 90-minute, 4-round Express simulation in the learner's own chair on defending a strategy that peers are second-guessing: hearing the critique before answering it, talking to the critics before the boss, re-examining the direction with a pre-mortem and the data cut three ways, keeping the direction while changing the sequence with continue/stop criteria written in advance, taking the committee a decision rather than a performance, escalating the decision rather than the person, applying the criteria at the checkpoint, and reviewing the year with the people who were right.

Laia Farreny Queralt (fictional) is the director of strategy and digital business at Pinsos Vilaltella, a fictional family-owned dog and cat food maker in Golmes (Lleida); three months after the executive committee approved her plan to sell direct by subscription with the shops paid as partners, the sales director and the finance director take it apart at the first-quarter review.

You decide how you answer in the room and whom you talk to first, how you re-examine the strategy and what you change, how you take it to the committee and what you do when the finance director proposes to halve its budget, and what you do at the October checkpoint when your own criteria give a mixed result, and how you review your year.

Scored on the quality of your strategy, the chance that it holds, the plan's budget put to good use, your time and energy, your credibility with your peers and the chief executive's trust, and open risk; two shortcuts (sending the chief executive a colleague's bonus formula, redefining the checkpoint metric so that it reads met) come back and cap the score. Spanish primary, English included.

An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.