Scenario Design as an Act of Craft
Most exercises fail before anyone walks into the room. The failure is in the scenario, and the scenario is a writing problem.
A bad exercise is recognisable within ten minutes. The room is quiet, then polite, then performative. People give the answers they think the facilitator wants. The scribe captures actions that everyone already agreed to before the day began. The post-exercise report is warm and content-free. Nothing has been learned because nothing has been at stake.
The problem is almost always upstream. The scenario was written to be safe — credible enough to defend in a steering committee, soft enough to avoid embarrassing anyone, generic enough to apply to every business unit at once. What you get back is a discussion about a hypothetical, not a stress test of a system.
A scenario that earns the day is specific, plausible, and slightly unfair. It targets the seams between teams, not the centre of any one team's competence. It introduces ambiguity early and forecloses the comfortable answer by the second injection. It assumes the experienced incumbents are on leave. It rewards reading the brief and punishes guessing.
Writing one is a craft skill, closer to dramaturgy than to project management. The facilitator is a playwright with a stopwatch. The reward is a room that argues, sweats a little, and walks out genuinely surprised by something it now knows about itself. That is the only kind of exercise worth running.