War-game an office move before commute pain, lease math, and customer visits fail in public instead of in private review.
Office moves often solve a facilities slide and create an attendance, hiring, and client-experience problem. People lose workable commutes, hybrid norms stay unspoken, and the real cost shows up as attrition and missed visits. Announcing before you can name who must be on-site, when, and why is how trust drains in the first month.
Freeze the move
State the from-and-to sites, the date people and customers feel the change, the attendance rule you will actually enforce, and the success metric you will honor. Name the teams and regions that move first. If the memo mixes a move, a return-to-office policy, and a headcount cut, split them. A war game needs one move under fire at a time.
Write the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new. Also write the kill criteria: the lease, commute, or legal flag that would force a delay within a stated window.
Seats that matter
- People. Commute, caregiving, and retention risks the announcement ignores.
- Facilities and IT. Build-out, network, and security gaps that slip past the ribbon cut.
- Finance. Lease, fit-out, and dual-rent costs buried in footnotes.
- Customer or partner. Visits, demos, and local presence that get worse before they get better.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least sourced.
Attach the same source pack to every seat: lease summary, attendance rule, commute maps, budget, and the FAQ you intend to send. Secret data for one seat creates fake agreement.
Loop the review
Feed Pingpong the move brief, budget, and seating briefs. First pass steelmans the plan. Later passes attack from people, facilities, and finance seats. Final pass turns surviving objections into clearer rules, named owners, or a hold. Agreement across passes is not proof. Keep the objections that still have evidence gaps.
Force a first-month drill: invent the three toughest employee and customer replies and ask each seat for the approved answer with an owner. If answers invent bus routes, skip legal review, or contradict hybrid policy, fix the package before announce. A move that only works in a facilities channel will fail on the first all-hands question.
When attendance rules change with the move, force people and ops seats to state the exception path and the enforcement owner. A soft "we expect more presence" without a dated rule is a rumor. Write the rule into the package, then ask the skeptic seat to attack it with a real team example.
Pair with stress-test a remote work policy, war-game an all-hands message, war-game a budget reforecast, pretend you are the COO, and the war-game decisions hub. See how to run a Pingpong.