This sort of reminds me a of a story Danny Hillis has told about Shell Oil and how they were the only major oil company that handled the 1980s oil glut [1] at all well, because the executives had played through a simulation of it. He talked about this in the 2000 game developer's conference keynote [2] (from about 12:30 - 15:26). I've transcribed that bit below:

I think sensible business people are also playful business people. And I think that any great development project, or any great engineering project, you can feel it, you can walk into the room and see people playing around, and you can see if they're acting seriously.

There was actually an interesting case, I don't think they would think of this as a game, but it was literally a game development story: Shell Oil.

Shell Oil -- in the 1980's, there was a time when the price of oil took a big dive, now Shell Oil it turns out was the only company that handled that situation well, and here's why:

Before then, oil was going up, up, up, and in order to be a good oil company you basically had to drill wells as fast as possible, increase production capacity as fast as possible, and pretty much all the oil companies were doing that. The strategic planners at Shell Oil realized that the price of oil might start going down, and that was bad news that no one in the oil industry wanted to do, nobody really wanted to believe it. So they thought about how to get these Shell Oil executives to actually pay attention to it, and they realized the only way they would actually pay attention to this idea was in the context of play.

So what they did is they basically built a simulation game of the oil industry, and they had the Shell Oil executives sit there in the game and put in their assumptions and play it out sort of like SimCity or something like that, of what oil prices would do, according to their assumptions. So they all played little roles, like one of them was an oil sheik, and another one was OPEC, another their competitive refineries, things like that, and they played out the consequences of various games. And one of the things that happened is in every one of their scenarios, the price of oil would crash. And everyone started laughing and they thought this was really silly, because of course everybody knew this wouldn't happen. But after they played this game a while, they started realizing that there were patterns that would happen. They were able to learn in the safety of a game what they really couldn't ever think in the danger of a real spreadsheet they were running the business with.

And in fact, that's what play lets people do. It lets them learn in safe situations things that are actually going to be useful in life. And in fact, in that particular example, Shell Oil realized from their playing that it was actually plausible that the price of oil would collapse, they took some steps to scale back some of their refineries and things like that, and they were the only major oil company that was actually in good shape when that happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_oil_glut

[2] http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014862/2000-GDC-Keynote-Dr-Dan... (requires Flash. The whole talk is pretty good, and immediately preceding this bit is are funny anecdotes about Richard Feynman and Marvin Minsky)