War-game a performance plan before a manager conversation that can damage trust, retention, and legal posture in one meeting.
Performance plans fail when success criteria are vague, when the evidence pack is thin, when timelines assume coaching capacity you do not have, and when the document reads like a paper trail instead of a path to clear outcomes. A template with dates is not a plan that survives a careful read.
Why this ritual
Managers already rehearse these talks in informal ways. They walk a draft past people ops, ask a peer for the hard questions, or invent the ten objections the person will raise. Those rituals work when the facts are clean and the circle is honest. They fail when incentives are mixed, when documentation is patchy, and when nobody wants to be the first person to say the bar is unclear. A structured war game scales that honesty without waiting for the meeting to invent it.
What to attach
One sentence for the gap, the measurable success criteria, the support you will provide, the timeline, and the outcomes if the bar is met or missed. Attach prior feedback, examples with dates, role expectations, and any constraints already treated as fixed. If people ops, the manager, and the skip-level disagree on what "good" looks like, reconcile before the review.
Name the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new, and the delay criteria if evidence or coaching capacity is not ready.
Attack surfaces
- Clarity: which success criterion a careful reader could interpret two ways.
- Evidence: which claim lacks a dated example or relies on rumor.
- Fairness: whether peers with similar gaps received similar plans.
- Capacity: coaching and tooling seats versus the claimed timeline.
- Legal and process: language that overclaims, under-documents, or skips required steps.
Optional counsel seat if regulated roles, protected class risk, or prior complaints bind the language. Optional people seat if the plan is really a delayed exit.
How to run it
Feed Pingpong the draft plan and exhibits. Early passes steelman the path to success. Later passes attack from the employee-advocate, people, manager, and skeptic seats. End with a pass that turns surviving objections into clearer criteria, stronger examples, or a different next step. Delete invented incidents and vague "attitude" claims that cannot be observed.
Force a day-after narrative: what the person hears, which peers gossip, and what happens if the plan becomes discovery material. If those stories are stronger than your evidence pack, fix the package before the conversation. Related: war-game a comp review, before you let someone go, war-game a hiring plan, war-game an all-hands message, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how it works.