MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Using Black Hat Workshops to Understand Your Competitors

If you’ve ever played chess against a grandmaster, you were likely frustrated by their ability to block or counter all your planned moves. That’s what it can feel like when making strategic business moves against a competitor: No matter how brilliant our ideas, by the time we execute them, the competition has beaten us to the punch or is positioned to pounce from the back row with its queen, throttle our strategy, and checkmate.

How do we arrive at a better understanding of our competitors’ capabilities, plans, and thought processes? You can’t call up the CEOs of your competitors and ask for that information. But 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.

About the Author

John Horn is professor of practice in economics at Washington University’s Olin Business School in St. Louis. His microeconomics, macroeconomics, and global economics courses are informed by his nine years of work on competitive strategy, war-gaming workshops, and corporate strategy exercises with the Strategy Practice of McKinsey & Co. He is the author of Inside the Competitor’s Mindset: How to Predict Their Next Move and Position Yourself for Success (MIT Press, 2023), from which this piece is adapted.

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