Chaos in the Kitchen
A strategic thinking and scenario planning simulation.
You run a professional kitchen. The bookings are in. Your ratings need to stay high and your revenue needs to keep flowing. You can see the challenges ahead — the weekend rush, a supplier who's been unreliable, a key member of the team on shaky form — you just don't know exactly how they'll land.
This game isn't about having the right answer. It's about being ready for multiple possible futures at once.
What the Game Is
Chaos in the Kitchen is a strategic thinking and scenario planning simulation. Participants manage a professional kitchen, balancing ratings and revenue while preparing for unpredictable service events. The game rewards teams who think ahead, prepare contingencies, and negotiate smartly with other kitchens — and exposes those who react to each new challenge from scratch.
Deals can be struck. Alliances can be formed. The future is uncertain, but it's not entirely unknowable — if you're thinking about it carefully enough.
What It Reveals
Chaos in the Kitchen surfaces how leaders think about the future when the future is genuinely unclear.
You see who prepares for multiple scenarios and who bets on a single outcome. Who builds optionality into their strategy and who locks in early decisions that become liabilities later. How teams handle the gap between the future they planned for and the one that actually arrives. Whether people negotiate proactively from a position of preparation or reactively from a position of pressure.
The debrief draws out practical frameworks for scenario thinking and strategic preparation — grounded in the specific choices made during the game.
Who It's For
Chaos in the Kitchen works well for senior leaders and strategy teams who need to get sharper at planning under uncertainty. It's also effective for teams navigating significant change — where the challenge isn't executing a clear plan but preparing well for a range of possible paths.
It's one of the stronger games for organisations in volatile industries or periods of rapid growth, where thinking in scenarios is a genuine operational advantage.
What Happens in the Room
Teams receive a situation and make initial resource allocation decisions. The plans feel solid. Then conditions change — sometimes incrementally, sometimes dramatically. The game is not about making good initial decisions. It's about what happens when those decisions need to be revisited.
Teams that built rigid plans suffer. Teams that made flexible, reversible decisions at the start keep options open. By the mid-game condition shift, the key pattern emerges: do teams explicitly revisit their decisions, or do they keep executing the original plan and hope it still applies?
The most common observation across sessions: groups spend so long in planning that they run out of time to act. They arrive at the decision point with an excellent plan and no runway to execute it. That pattern — over-investment in analysis at the expense of action — is one of the clearest signals the game produces.
Specific Patterns That Surface
- Who treats the initial plan as a commitment — versus who treats it as a hypothesis to be tested and revised
- How quickly teams process new information and change direction — and whether that decision happens explicitly or by drift
- Who advocates for reversing course when conditions change — and whether the group listens or defends the original decision
- Whether teams make explicit strategic trade-offs or let resource allocation happen by default
- The planning-to-action ratio — teams that plan optimally but execute poorly versus teams that act early and adapt
When to Bring This In
- Strategy offsites — gives teams a shared experience before discussing real strategy; the debrief surfaces how the team actually makes decisions before they make consequential ones
- Leadership teams where post-mortems repeatedly identify "we planned for X but Y happened and we didn't adapt" as a failure mode
- Organisations in fast-changing markets where planning cycles can't keep pace with conditions
- Pre-strategic-planning sessions — surface how the team decides under uncertainty before the real decisions start
When This Isn't the Right Fit
- Operational or frontline teams — the game is designed for people making strategic and resource allocation decisions; it doesn't land as well with execution-focused roles
- Groups without budget or resource allocation responsibility — the core mechanic requires participants to have something real to trade off
- Teams where the challenge is execution quality rather than strategic decision-making — a different game, or a different intervention entirely
The Debrief
Every session ends with an EPPA debrief: Experience, Patterns, Principles, Application. Participants don't leave with general reflections — they leave with a named behaviour to change and a specific situation to apply it in. The debrief is facilitated by the same person who ran the game. That continuity is what makes the insight land.