What a tabletop exercise is, and what it is for.

Where the method comes from

Its ancestor is the military wargame, which the Prussian army formalised in the nineteenth century as a way to train officers on a map. The civilian form dropped the battlefield and kept the idea: put decision-makers in front of a situation before it happens. Today emergency services, hospitals, security teams and governments all use tabletop exercises to rehearse events that are too rare, too costly or too dangerous to practise for real.

How one runs

• A scenario. A situation described in enough detail to be argued about.
• Roles. Each participant speaks for someone who would have a decision to make: an agency, a company, a country.
• A facilitator, often called a game master, who keeps time and rules on what happens.
• Injects. New information released as the clock advances, so that plans meet events.
• A debrief. The table looks back at what it decided and why. Most of the value is here.

Tabletop, wargame, simulation

The three terms overlap. A tabletop exercise is led by discussion. A wargame adds opposing sides and a way of deciding outcomes: rules, dice or an umpire. A computer simulation runs a model with nobody at the table deciding anything. In practice they blend, and a good exercise borrows whatever makes its participants take their decisions seriously.

What it can and cannot tell you

An exercise is not a forecast. Its outcome depends on the scenario that was written and on who happened to be in the room, and running it twice gives two different stories. What it does reliably is expose assumptions. People discover what they expected others to do, which decisions depended on information they would not have had, and where a plan that looked sound on paper breaks on contact with other people’s plans.

Why it suits emerging technology

Questions about new technology rarely have a historical record to learn from, and they are decided by many actors at once, each with partial information and their own incentives. A model can describe some of that. An exercise lets people live through it for an evening and say afterwards what surprised them.

How the salon does it

The Prism Salon runs an exercise of its own, Racing the Machine, in which writers and scientists play nations, laboratories and universities in the years before the generative era. Writers are at the table on purpose: a scenario is a piece of world-building, and it is only as good as the world holds together. More on that in how fiction is used to think about the future.