Strategic Decision Making Under Conditions of Complex Demand and Market Risks

Strategic management decisions are increasingly affected by high-impact external factors such as new technologies, regulatory changes, and market shifts. It is often difficult to assess likely impacts of such significant changes on an organisation and even harder to find an acceptable course of action in response to different possible futures. Decision makers need to adopt a whole system approach that incorporates the uncertainty associated with dominant factors and permits an assessment of the likelihood of outcomes to plan effective responses. In this paper, we discuss a Monte Carlo simulation model that supports the whole system approach in the context of a healthcare resource capacity decision for a large urban hospital.