War Room - method and commonsense

Yves-Michel Marti founded the business intelligence firm, Egideria, in 1995, which has principally carved a name for itself for its “offensive monitoring” studies. It has recently added a new activity to its portfolio, however, - designing and running the War Room. Fundamentally a method of managing internal and external management, the War Room as practised by Yves-Michel Marti goes hand in hand with running the project itself and may be applied to all management lines in organisations.

War Room - with its belligerent overtones - surprises, intrigues and yet remains very confidential. The advantage of the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term lies in its sincerity. It originated, of course, in the United States, forming part of an arsenal of tools assisting managers the other side of the Atlantic in their decision-making and problem-solving. “It works well”, is the view of Yves-Michel Marti, one of the rare French consultants to offer designing, operating and running War Rooms as part of his services. “You may also hear the term Operations Room. Why not, but that is not really the point. I believe that the important thing is to understand clearly the difference between War Room and Crisis Centre. So what exactly is a War Room?

The most commonly accepted idea in France is that it is a branch of communications, the Accident and Emergency wing in medical jargon. It is not intended to deal with the roots or even the symptoms of crisis situations, but how they are discussed and explained to limit the consequences. This is world of the media. Failed communication can be the final blow, aggravating the already negative impact of the very crisis situations that made it necessary in the first place. The pharmaceutical group, Bayer, is a recent, surprising illustration of this. "We are headless chickens in communication in general and even more so in a crisis" was the comment by one manager on the radio.

The other version - the operational crisis centre - is established at the gateway to disaster, at the foot of volcanoes or the World Trade Center towers. When disaster strikes, it bolts from cover with its sirens blaring, just like the fire brigade. It organises, calms, directs and comforts. It attempts heroically to deal with the unmanageable, the chaos.

The War Room is a totally different beast. This support tool for decisions made through internal and external knowledge is more discreet and less media-conscious; it relies on almost industrial methodological processes - called "brain juice", by Yves-Michel Marti - with their purely informational and strategic value. Steven M. Shaker and Mark P. Gembicki, authors of the book War Room Guide to Competitive Intelligence (on-line abstract available at www.veillemag.com, heading Précis du Management), emphasises the fact the " intelligence" is an activity, a production. It is not enough to gather shrewd, well-informed and skilful individuals around a table. Actors and authors of a scenario must successfully take up the challenge in synergy with their hierarchy and fellow workers.

Improvisation is not on the agenda, at least in the preparation, supervision and development phases. Ultimately, the ends must justify the means. As elsewhere, return on investment here is measured by contracts won, takeover bids, plugging technological gaps and successful mergers and acquisitions.

Yves-Michel Marti has already several to his credit. Large numbers of photos are a visual reminder of key or mundane moments in his missions. Creative chaos turns to structured understanding on walls decorated with notes and doodles in coloured felt-tip pens. Papers are strewn all over the floor and a childlike disorder appears to reign amongst the coffee cups and sandwiches. Occasional beaming smiles march hand in hand with studied concentration. Memories flood back - “This team made tremendous progress. They dissected their competitor’s manufacturing processes and machinery as well as updating their shrewd distribution strategies that suited their production so well.” This trained telecommunications engineer had previously experimented with the internal War Room, both as actor and “student”, if you like, acquiring his knowledge directly in both the United States and Great Britain.

War Room examples

A joint War Room between Pacific Monolithics and Ford Aerospace to respond to a call for tenders. A $25 million contract won over Lockheed (California, USA).

Half-a-dozen War Rooms over two years to win tenders within the automobile and aeronautic equipment manufacturer Lucas Industries (Birmingham, Great Britain). We doubled the “won($)/tendered($)” ratio.

A War Room for a manufacturer in the food-processing industry, to schedule and launch a new, innovative product.

A War Room for a chemicals industrialist, to help accelerate technological catch-up in the face of international competition.

A War Room for a software company, to plan the commercial winning of a new market segment from a powerful, well-established competitor (Paris and London).

A War Room for a company in the electronics sector, to understand the commercial and export strategies of an aggressive international competitor resorting to a culture of secrecy and disinformation.

Yves-Michel Marti has yet to fail in this field, quite the contrary; some clients will testify to surprising successes. This is borne out by new contracts achieved for European subsidiaries. Luck plays its part, but introducing strict methods should be combined with an in-field knowledge of business " logics " the conflicts to be avoided, the internal alliances to be forged, with a clear desire to work in synergy with the most senior management levels.

"Taking part in a War Room is a wonderful opportunity for any professional, for it boosts his individual skills and role in the group, without mentioning the staff network!" In a word, taking part in a War Room is a chance not to be missed.

The first actor is the deus ex-machina of the play as it were: top management. Rarely seen, it has a pervasive, permeating presence. It is the silent partner, authorised by the intermediate management levels; it unblocks the necessary budgets and resources and is supplied with the results and conclusions.

The moderator	The assistant	The coach
A series of actors then troops onto the stage. Freeze frame. At its heart the team "captain ". The moderator carries 90% of the weight of the War Room on his shoulders. Yves-Michel Marti believes that the moderator must be an internal staff member, delegated by his management for full-time running of this project until its successful conclusion (one, two or even three months). He has roughly the qualities of a good project manager, i.e. virtually all of them! No typical psychological or professional profile is apparent. Yves-Michel Marti has met a wide-ranging variety of personalities in all his experiments. Be it the super-fussy veteran or the motivated, dynamic, naive youngster, they have always proved themselves in line with their objectives and their teams.	The moderator's assistant is the go-between and reinforces his action. No question of getting under each other’s feet when resolving the multitude of details - finding a room, the men and women, the IT infrastructure, harmonising diaries, dealing with internal politics, writing memos and reports, keeping the hierarchy informed - on the non-exhaustive list. “It’s hard to believe, but the most difficult thing is finding a room. You have no idea what is involved in dealing with internal priorities."	The coach is the backdrop behind this leading pair. A key figure, it is the consultant who understands the method and brings his experience to this type of situation. He knows, senses and sees when the boat is going to founder, when it loses way or tension is running too high. He is also there to distance the team from the knots of incomprehension, suggest alternatives and steer the project onto a survival course before passing the helm back once the storm is over. “I remember one particularly tricky meeting where no progress was being made. At the end of the day I realised that different people were understanding the words differently. Their differences were not in their ideas but in the definition of the terms used. I simply had to leave them that evening, and just before I left I suggested that they all wrote their definitions down and pinned them to the wall. Upon my return a few days later, they had moved well past the problem and it was no longer worth mentioning."


War Room participants: sharing information in action.