Making room to develop wargamers
I took a call last week from a recruiter. He’d mentioned to a mutual connection that he was looking for a “wargaming specialist”, and my name popped up. We chatted a bit at the start of the call, with the usual preamble about Evocatus, our backstory and our base here on Dorset Innovation Park. He talked about how he’d recently moved across from recruiting for technical staff to a defence-focused role and how invested his company is in supporting the people within the sector.
The small talk over, we cut to the chase, and he asked me if I already knew his client, who it turned out I did. The same person had stood in my wargaming space a few months ago and talked about “building ecosystems” to take advantage of the demand for wargaming across defence, in support of the bottom line for a new business. It turned out pretty quickly that what the recruiter really wasn’t looking for was a wargaming specialist, but for either an interested young graduate who could realistically be billed out as one or a unicorn looking to leave an organisation like Dstl.
It was a nice enough chat, but it did leave me frustrated; yet another call that I hoped might be about a potential project, but turned out to be someone scouring their network for someone with a high-value line on their CV. Yet again, an organisation with more BD budget than context has landed some work and is now looking to make their margin with a new hire. Rather than pushing work to where it will be done well, and where new wargamers can be developed, it ends up going to service a back office and shareholders. No matter how much effort we put in as a Community of Practice, there will always be more noise coming from those with the time and resource to make it.
We talk about growing the wargaming industry, but this means different things to different people. It’s not about labels, but about vocation. In a sector with very little formal training (as opposed to postgraduate education) available, organisations like Dstl do much of the heavy lifting, but they always have. For the industry to grow, become more diverse and to develop rigour and value over labels and spin, people need to be invested in over time in an environment which celebrates the detail and nuance of both design and delivery. The model is genuine apprenticeship and craft within an SME team, not the corporate opportunity.
When anyone starts talking about ecosystems and about developing genuine capability, it’s worth looking past the team paid just to capture the work, to the ones too busy just getting by.