War-Gaming & Simulation

You are about to make a significant decision. A new location. An acquisition. A major pricing change. A market entry. You have a model for the upside. It shows the revenue if things go reasonably well. What it almost certainly does not show is the full range of ways things could go, how sensitive the outcome is to the assumptions underneath it, and which of those assumptions actually drives the result versus which ones are noise.

McKinsey and BCG have run structured war-gaming engagements — modelling multiple competitive and market scenarios against a range of assumptions — as part of major strategy work for decades. A typical engagement costs six figures and takes six weeks. The computational infrastructure that runs scenario simulation across thousands of variable combinations is now accessible without either the budget or the timeline.

For any major decision you are facing, we build a simulation model that runs your decision across a range of scenarios — varying the assumptions that matter most: competitor responses, demand ramp-up pace, cost overruns, supplier disruptions, market conditions.

We run hundreds or thousands of scenario combinations, identify which variables actually drive the outcome, and give you a distribution of possible results rather than a single base case projection. You see where the decision is robust and where it is fragile — before you commit.