About the Exercise
Project Threshold puts you in the seat of a named company leader navigating rapid AI adoption from 2026 and beyond. Over four rounds — Y1, Y2, Y5, and Y6 — you make real strategic decisions for your company, with real trade-offs, immediate scoring, and cross-company dynamics that reveal how interconnected the consumer-facing economy actually is.
Not a Workshop
You make binding decisions with real consequences — not brainstorm ideas on sticky notes.
Not a Simulation
The goal is better questions, not computed answers. Reasoning quality matters more than numerical precision.
Not a Test
No scores are "good" or "bad." The value is in how your thinking changes across the rounds.
What Happens in the Room
Each round follows the same structure. The scenario changes, the stakes escalate, but the rhythm stays constant — so participants spend their energy on decisions, not figuring out the format.
Round-opening framing
The facilitator sets the situation — what's changed in the world, what's true now that wasn't last round, and where the live tensions are.
Solo prep + cluster huddle
You think through your position individually, then caucus with the other companies in your cluster — Retail or CPG. The huddle surfaces shared pressures without forcing a shared decision.
Decision submission
Worksheets are locked. No revisions, no take-backs. In Y2, the worksheet includes a Strategic Stance Card committing you to Aggressive growth, Operational discipline, or Strategic pivot for the years ahead.
Public Resolution phase
Voice of God — the facilitator — reads through the decisions, names the companies impacted by each one, asks them for short verbal responses, and resolves outcomes incorporating those responses. The room watches every confrontation. This is where decisions become consequences.
Peer Ranking
Private rankings on Most Likely to Succeed and Greatest Impact, plus a public Aggressiveness poll. Layered on top of facilitator scoring, the peer signal often diverges in interesting ways.
Cross-company discussion
Open debate informed by the rankings. The retailer discovers that the CPG just rerouted promotional spend in a way that breaks their forecast. This is where assumptions break and intuitions sharpen.
This cycle repeats across Y1, Y2, Y5, and Y6 — with the Resolution phase as the centerpiece and accumulating consequences from prior decisions feeding directly into each company's starting position in the next round.
The Four Rounds
Y1
Early 2026. Capability is broadly available but unevenly deployed. How much do you bet on first-mover advantage — and what do you risk if you're wrong?
Y2
Early movers are pulling ahead. Regulators are waking up. Talent wars are heating up. You react to what your peers did in Y1, then commit to a strategic stance for the years that follow.
Y5
2030. A long-jump round. The bets you placed in Y1 and Y2 are now constraints you have to live with. Competitive conditions have shifted substantially, and your Y5 starting position reflects everything that came before.
Y6
Final round. Outcomes resolve, patterns are surfaced, and the room reflects on the strategic intuitions that held up — and the ones that didn't.
How Decisions Are Scored
Every decision is evaluated immediately — by the facilitator on Strategic Fit and Execution Risk, and by your peers on Success and Impact. Scores are transparent. You see the reasoning, not just the number. Cumulative scores across Y1 and Y2 feed into Company Health Signals (Surge, Tailwind, Steady, Headwind, or Crisis), which set each company's starting trajectory in Y5.
Strategic Fit
Facilitator scoring. Does this decision align with your company's fundamentals and the macro environment? Is the logic sound given what you know — and what you don't?
Execution Risk
Facilitator scoring. Can your organization realistically pull this off in the timeframe? Do you have the talent, capital, and operational capability — or are you overcommitting?
Peer Ranking
Peer scoring. After each round, the group ranks Most Likely to Succeed and Greatest Impact privately, with a public Aggressiveness poll. Where facilitator and peer signals diverge is often the most interesting moment in the round.
Each dimension is scored in bands — not on a precise numerical scale. The exercise deliberately avoids false precision. What matters is the quality of your reasoning, not the exact score.
What You Walk Away With
Cross-company intuition
See how decisions in one company cascade into others in ways that are invisible from inside a single org.
Stress-tested assumptions
Confront what you actually believe about AI timelines, competitive response, and regulation — then watch those beliefs get pressure-tested in real time.
Second-order clarity
Move past the obvious impacts — automation, cost cuts — to the downstream consequences that separate winners from losers as conditions shift.
Peer perspectives
A full day of structured discussion with leaders facing analogous but distinct challenges across the consumer-facing economy.
No-regrets actions
Leave with a concrete list of strategic moves that are robust regardless of which AI adoption scenario actually plays out.
Who It's For
C-Suite Executives
CEOs, COOs, CTOs, and CFOs making AI investment decisions under genuine uncertainty.
Senior Strategy Leaders
Heads of strategy, corporate development, and strategic planning at large organizations.
Investment Professionals
Portfolio managers and managing directors evaluating AI-related risk and opportunity across consumer-facing companies.
Enterprise AI Decision-Makers
Anyone responsible for deciding where, when, and how to deploy AI at scale.
No AI technical expertise required. You bring company knowledge and strategic judgment — the exercise provides the AI context.
The Day at a Glance
| Activity | Duration |
|---|---|
| Arrival & Setup | 15 min |
| Welcome & Rules | 15 min |
| Y1 Round | 55 min |
| Break | 10 min |
| Y2 Round | 75 min |
| Inter-round break — facilitator briefs any reassigned participants | 20 min |
| Y5 Round | 95 min |
| Y6 Round + Closing | 45 min |
| Total | around 5 hours |
A single intensive day. The Resolution phase in each round is protected time — it's where individual decisions become collective consequence and the cross-company dynamics actually play out in the open.
Why a Tabletop Exercise?
The format originated in military and government planning: gather decision-makers around a scenario, force real decisions under genuine uncertainty, and expose the gaps in your assumptions before they become failures in the field. Over the past two decades, the approach has migrated into corporate strategy — where the stakes are different but the underlying problem is the same. Project Threshold applies this methodology to the most consequential strategic question facing enterprises today: how AI adoption will reshape competitive dynamics across an interconnected consumer-facing economy.
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