"I've made up my mind." At Arnhem in 1944, photos of German armour on the landing zones were explained away and the messenger sent home. Holmes's fifth disease of leadership: a mind closed by momentum. Exercises surface it while the cost is still rehearsal. #Leadership #Wargaming

Four months of human plus machine at Evocatus: 1.63m words of working memory, a website brought in-house, and now a new pillar article. "Horizon Scanning: The Discipline of Keeping Watch". Please do give it a read. www.evocatus.co.uk/articles/hor...

The Government has added new risks to the National Risk Register and told us to prepare for power cuts and extreme weather. A register names the risk; a plan only builds confidence once exercised. Which should your team warm up against? #BusinessContinuity #Resilience #ContingencyPlanning

There is always a gap between "Work-as-Imagined" and "Work-as-Done", and human psychology sits in it. Exercising turns the indifferent into advocates, then stress-tests the plan against reality. What plan do you wish you had wargamed first? #Wargaming #ExperientialLearning #ChangeManagement

New leaders mean new teams: forming, storming, norming before performing. Tuckman also saw two development tracks, interpersonal relationships and task activity. Scenario-based exercises build trust and shared mental models, moving a team along both. New team forming? Get in touch.

The UK has a new PM. Whatever your politics, the incoming leader inherits titanic problems and genuine dilemmas from day one. What carries any organisation through a change at the top is rarely the person arriving, but the shared picture of where it is heading when the plan meets reality.

If a game as simple and abstract as Association Football can offer decision-making at speed, trust and composure under pressure, just imagine what a game designed specifically around the needs of your organisation can do. Get in touch to talk about where you'd like to start.

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” Patton knew a decision has a shelf life. The 100% solution comes too late; the 70% call in good time wins. Wargames build the confidence to decide on an incomplete picture, where taking too long is just a lesson.

A quiet advantage of being based where the work clusters: this week the Defence BattleLab hosted the South West Regional Defence & Security Cluster's Summer Conference at Dorset Innovation Park. The weekly BattleLab Coffee is where it all connects. Where's the local network you draw strength from?

Holmes's disease of leadership #7: equating the quality of advice with the rank of the person providing it. The people closest to the problem often have the most relevant insight, and the least chance of being heard. Exercises can build the habit of hearing them, before it matters for real.

When the money won't stretch, decisions stop being about the best option and become about the least-bad one: which priority is low enough to reject. Balancing competing priorities is harder than it looks. Rehearsing that trade-off, before it's real, is what we do.

Ten years ago, Evocatus was an idea, a logo and a conviction: that the skills of leading and training teams could be applied beyond defence. A decade on, that conviction still drives us, from cyber resilience to early life nutrition. Thank you to all who've come along. Here's to the next ten!

Today is Reserves Day 2026. A reservist brings back leadership under real pressure and calm decisions on incomplete information; the gap they leave is repaid with interest. To the reservists who serve, and the employers who release them: thank you. The value flows both ways.

Bowling with the bumpers up: every ball hits, everyone feels like a champ, and nobody learns to bowl. A wargame where no decision can fail is the same thing. If nothing you decided could have failed, it was not a wargame. We're at DSET this week. Come and bowl without the bumpers.

18 June is International Panic Day. Panic is a herd response to the unfamiliar. You keep your head by making sure the moment isn't unfamiliar when it lands. A crisis game lets your team meet the bad day while nothing's at stake. What crisis do you need to inoculate yours against?

A plan you have not tested to destruction is one you do not yet understand; the rest is cheery optimism. Swinton's 1904 Defence of Duffer's Drift made the case for wargaming: fail fast, learn, go again, where failure costs nothing. Where is optimism doing the heavy lifting in your planning?

This Saturday, over 1 300 soldiers make Trooping the Colour look effortless, to the minute. It looks easy only because every fault was found in rehearsal first. Most organisations write a plan and hope. What plan should you be rehearsing before the watching world sees it?

Every plan has two versions: the one on PowerPoint, and the one that happens under pressure. The gap is where things break. Run live exercises long enough and you learn it the hard way. What plan of yours looked great on a slide but was never tested?

86 years ago today, Operation Dynamo ended. 338,000 men came home. Almost nothing else did: 700 tanks, 64,000 vehicles, enough equipment for 10 divisions. Churchill warned the Commons not to mistake survival for victory. Real resilience is maintaining focus until the win is actually won.

Most teams don't run shakeouts. They go from PowerPoint to crisis. The first time you discover what you don't know shouldn't be the time when it matters. When did your team last spend a day finding out what doesn't quite work yet?

The British Army ran a NATO corps HQ from a disused tube station last week. The press got the photos. The value was in the notebooks: lessons you only get by actually doing it. What should your team be practising before the crisis?

New @evocatusuk.bsky.social Gizzits for DSET ‘26 have arrived!

Gaming through #scenarios, incorporating a little #redteaming, is a great way to test the assumptions underpinning your plans before exposing them to the real world. How confident are you that your planning assumptions will hold up when it matters?

At Evocatus, we rarely work alone. We have plenty of skills and experience designing and delivering exercises and wargames, but we have also run enough events to understand the importance of getting the details right, and the value of real subject matter experts to keep our scenarios credible.

Socks and Spice take their responsibilities as the Greeting Team for Evocatus Hospitality very seriously. They know that they are responsible for making sure that our regulars keep coming back, whether they are the daily lunchtime walkers or just occasional visitors passing through.

The orange dice hanging in the cockpit of the Evocatus Hospitality tuk-tuk aren't just there as an excuse for more branding. They are there a reminder of how we approach our work. It's easy to reject dice and games as childish and unprofessional, but we find the reverse to be true.

Our #coffee tuk, fuelling #innovation one cup at a time!

Making exercises better, starting with understanding what good looks like