Role-play strategy review means seating the hard rooms against one decision package on purpose.
Great strategy work often starts with a simple instruction: think about what great looks like, then war-game the decision. The war game is not a brainstorm. You freeze the scenario, cast seats that would actually show up, and force each seat to press the plan until something breaks or holds.
Role-play is how you make that seating chart concrete. You do not ask a model for "feedback." You ask it to become the platform gatekeeper, the competitor, the buyer, and the skeptic, each with a mandate and constraints, each looking at the same source pack.
Core seats
- Platform or gatekeeper. The reviewer, partner manager, or trust team you must convince. See war-game your message to the platform.
- Competitor / enemy. The cheapest counter and the narrative that travels. See pretend you are the competitor.
- Buyer. Trust, switching cost, and the walk-away message. See pretend you are the buyer.
- Skeptic. The strongest-looking unsupported claim.
- Finance and counsel when cash, disclosure, or contract exposure can kill the move.
Two seats are not enough for this ritual. Arguing both sides clarifies a binary. Role-play review needs the leadership seating chart for the actual decision. More than six seats usually repeats the same conflict.
How to run the seating chart
Write each seat as a short brief with goals and constraints, not as a cartoon. Attach the same source pack so disagreements are about judgment. In Pingpong, use sequential passes: steelman, gatekeeper attack, competitor and buyer response, skeptic hunt, then a final pass that turns surviving objections into tests or a changed recommendation.
Stop when you have a short conflict map: which seats agree, which seats block, and which facts would move a blocker. If every seat somehow agrees, your briefs were too similar. Rewrite the seats until at least one material conflict appears.
Capture the best message to each hard seat after the attacks land. The point of pretending you are the platform, the competitor, or the buyer is not only to collect objections. It is to leave with the strongest message each seat would accept that you can still defend. That message becomes the board line, the launch copy, the diligence answer, or the reason you change the decision.
Use this umbrella with war-game your strategy, multi-perspective strategy review, CEO decision review, AI for high-stakes decisions, AI decision review, and the war-game decisions hub. Mechanics: how it works and multi-model AI review.