Scenario four · The Challenge
Thorncastle Brewing Co.
Eighteen months as Managing Director. Five disciplines. One family business that only holds if you do.
Thorncastle Brewing is a family brewer and pub company founded in 1908: fifty-five tied pubs, a canning plant, two hundred and forty people, and fourteen family shareholders across three living generations who all, one way or another, still call it theirs.
The Family Council backed the Continuity Plan ten months ago: build the off-trade business the supermarkets actually want, professionalise how the company is run, modernise the brewhouse without losing the recipes that built it. They backed it around a table that has hosted every family argument for four generations. Then they appointed you to carry it, and family arguments do not pause for a plan.
What comes next arrives the way trouble actually arrives inside a family business, one thing at a time and never at a convenient one: your Head Brewer turning out to be a bully, a takeover approach fronted by a cousin's name, a burst pipe, a leak, and a Council meeting nobody wanted to call.
What is at stake
Every choice tests one of the five RESOLVE disciplines, and every discipline you let slip makes the next month harder. The favour you grant an aunt, the target you soften for an old friend, the conflict you leave for someone else to referee: all of it comes back, and in a family business it comes back at Christmas as well as in the accounts. Reach month eighteen with the disciplines intact and you will have proved something worth proving to fourteen shareholders who share your name. Get there having quietly traded them away, and the score will tell you what it cost.
Thorncastle Brewing leans hardest on Behavioural Integrity and Enterprise-First Accountability, the disciplines that get tested hardest when the people you'd let down are also the people you'll see at Christmas.
You will pick a difficulty and, if you want, challenge a colleague to the identical run before you start. It plays in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.