When The Future Pushes Back
Why We’re Designing Escape Rooms for Strategy
Leaders of the AI sector walk out of negotiations with business and policymakers, threatening to take their economic value offshore. A pharmaceutical company tries to squeeze control of a hot drug sector, but the black market is already exploding. Members of the public confront policymakers, demanding their jobs be protected from automation. Everyone wants success, but nobody can agree on a definition of acceptable progress. In all of these situations, you can feel the tension in the room as stakes increase and relative success or failure moves ever closer.
At Changeist, we've spent a good part of the last two years developing strategic simulations that compress years of technological evolution into three-hour sessions, yielding just these kinds of challenges. In these simulations, teams representing different stakeholders—Public, Business, Policymakers, Activists, Producers—make a sequence of independent decisions across multiple rounds, trying to shape the world around them with different interests and levels of influence. More often than not, the world has other ideas.
This is not just a set of pre-scripted b-school moves with a table full of paper and plastic tokens. What makes these simulations powerful is that the future in question evolves to reflect the impacts of whatever decisions are being made, from early days’ discovery of new market dynamics, through power conflicts, to brave new worlds. Not predictably, not controllably, but the way real futures do—through cascading consequences, shifting alliances and narratives that frequently escape their creators’ intentions. We think of it as unfolding experiential foresight in real time, engaging both the executive decision-making and social and emotional dynamics around uncertainty.
The Responsive Future
In these simulations, each team must consider the opportunities, challenges and surprise combinations amongst themselves then potentially negotiate or collaborate with other teams to influence what happens next. In each round, the teams vote, then, weighted by their influence, or lack thereof, the collective votes drive, or divert, progress.
Progress reshapes the landscape. Scenarios trigger—"Breakthrough Use Case Detected" or "Economic Lock-in Event"—and suddenly redistribute power across teams. The Producers (of a technology or new treatment, in our case) who were marginal become central. The dominant Policymakers find their influence halved. Activists or Consumers gain power as backlash rattles Business. As each round begins, the teams are presented with media which reflects the world as it is evolving.
The experience engine is powered by the very AI technologies being debated within these simulations, to better mirror how discontinuous change actually works. Success creates opposition. Moderation can create power vacuums. Acceleration triggers the very regulations you were trying to avoid. The simulation engine ensures that strategies can compound—what worked in Round 2 might destabilize you by Round 4.
The platform generates headlines that describe the world as it is evolving through collective decision-making. These headlines aren't just window-dressing. They're mirrors which show participants what their choices mean to those outside the room, in the world of the simulation. When news and data shift from breakthrough announcements to crisis warnings, or even with mundane illustrations of change in the community, teams viscerally understand that the narrative has its own momentum.
Coalition Dynamics as Discovery
What emerges naturally are coalition patterns that participants recognize from their own organizations. For example, without instruction, Business and Developer teams may start coordinating to advance mutual interests. Activists and Users find common ground in their concerns. Policymakers attempt to broker moderate positions and discover that doing nothing can mean irrelevance.
The scenario frameworks we generate via carefully set prompts are designed to stress or challenge these natural alliances. A team that spent rounds building consensus suddenly faces a scenario that doubles their opposition's influence. The careful balance breaks. Former allies vote differently because their incentives have shifted. The coalition you built for one future becomes a liability in the future your success created.
Learning Through Experience
With these simulations, we have created and are refining variants with different timely narratives mapped to a common structural core:
Foom: AI governance where AI progress means different things to different factions
Omm: Managing a breakthrough lifestyle drug that impacts far more than health
For a little fun and experimentation, we even developed a horror variant about population survival, to see whether these dynamics persist outside business contexts and to look at social dynamics when they are less clouded by corporate organizational objectives. In playtests, the same patterns of coalition formation, narrative escape and strategic surprise often emerge whether teams navigate AGI emergence or supernatural catastrophe. This suggests we're capturing something fundamental about how groups engage with discontinuous change, regardless of the domain.
Our core objective was for the learning to be embodied rather than analytical and from the way we’ve observed varying teams engaging around the world, this is happening. Participants don't read about how moderate positions can become meaningless, instead, they experience how extremes can dominate while attempting to hold the reasonable center. Teams don't study the narrative momentum, they recognize the headlines and more consequently, their world is turning against them.
If team members don’t feel things are going their way, they can walk across the room and negotiate with other teams, face to face. All teams experience the same breaking news and feel the time compression in the room. Some participants come with an objective in mind. Some find their identity and position as they move through the cascading scenarios. The role-play some participants immerse themselves in takes them into the experience more deeply without our having to encourage them.
Strategic Proprioception
What develops during the game is strategic proprioception—the ability to sense system dynamics through participation. This is not watching the system from outside but feeling how it responds to your moves while you're making them. Calculating uncertainty into planning, then adapting strategies, not barrelling through decisions assuming success. Learning to read weak signals as an indicator of future rounds’ directions, rather than executing a preset strategy.
Through this experience, participants can develop shared vocabulary for discussing uncertainty. They reference scenarios and decision patterns from the simulation when discussing real strategic choices later. The experience can be a touchstone for recognizing similar dynamics in their actual organizations, a safe reference point rather than a painful conflict or risky failure. As one early participant said, with audible excitement, “You can break something in the simulation without it breaking anything in real life.” And as with scenario planning, the exact circumstance may not emerge in the world, but it’s likely to rhyme.
The Continuous Creation
This is experiential learning for discontinuous change—not through simulation of specific futures, but through experiencing how futures respond to collective action. How decisions in the present create conditions for decisions in the future. How the landscape reshapes based on how you move through it.
The value isn't in surfacing some specific winning move in a pre-defined scenario, but in developing the muscle memory for navigating whichever one emerges. Participants leave these sessions with something more valuable than a strategic plan—they carry the embodied experience of how collective decisions cascade when narratives escape control.
What we're designing aren't traditional business games, but escape rooms for strategic adaptation, preparing participants to recognize the dynamics of discontinuous change as they're happening. The future, after all, isn't waiting to be discovered—it's being continuously created through the collision of competing interests, unintended consequences and narratives that take on lives of their own.
