Open Strategy — Calibrated Openness at Chimiq Distribution

A four-round, advanced strategy and management-control simulation set inside Chimiq Distribution SA, a Lyon-based specialty-chemicals distributor (EUR 480M revenue, 7.5% EBIT margin, 1,300 staff across four hubs) that has made strategy behind a closed door for thirty years.

After a third flat year against a 4% market, an engagement pulse shows only 24% of managers understand the link to strategy and 19% believe the targets are achievable, while bottom-up forecasts run 11% hot.

You are the new CFO, recruited from a firm that practised open strategy, and you must reopen the next strategy cycle — but a PE board confidentiality directive and a refinancing covenant (Net Debt/EBITDA 2.9x against a 3.25x limit) bound how far you can open.

Across four rounds you (1) diagnose the closed process on the two dimensions of openness — inclusion (who participates) and transparency (who sees information) — and decide which Chimiq most lacks; (2) design the participation-and-disclosure architecture, classifying each data class (hub cost and growth, margin-by-customer, M&A pipeline) as open, gated or closed to the right audience under the governance constraint; (3) design the performance-measurement dashboard as a management-control system — a Balanced-Scorecard cascade, an OKR commitment system or a hybrid, balancing shared, interactive measures that build ownership against board-only diagnostic control, with a calibration rule that counters the 11% forecast bias; and (4) present to the PE board chair and CEO, then respond to a live recovery test — a plan leak to a trade journal and bottom-up targets coming in 4% below the refinancing requirement — re-gating without re-closing participation and reconciling the gap with the hub directors rather than over them.

The math rewards calibrated openness and punishes the five classic errors — radical transparency, communication-not-inclusion, a control-only dashboard, constraint-blind openness, and imposing the reconciliation top-down. Final KPIs track Strategic Alignment, Control Effectiveness, Employee Inclusion and Target Attainment, under a Leak-Risk gauge and a fixed transformation budget.

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.