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For many businesses, strategy planning is coming up after the vacations, and one of the most dangerous sentences that we hope will not be said is this: once things settle down, we'll get back to planning properly.
It's an understandable instinct. Boards like stable assumptions. Product roadmaps like predictable input costs. Sales teams like currencies that behave. For decades, that instinct was also correct: economies overheat, then correct, then recover, and a management team just has to hold its nerve through the trough.
We think that instinct is now the single most dangerous piece of planning logic a mid-sized product company can carry into 2026. Not because the economy is unusually bad. Because the mechanism that used to produce "normal" has changed.
A crisis resolves. This doesn't.
Economists have started reaching for two related terms to describe what's happening: polycrisis and permacrisis. A polycrisis is several crises interacting at once, so the combined effect is worse than any one of them alone. Permacrisis goes a step further. It's not a run of bad luck that eventually clears. It's a standing condition, where one rupture bleeds into the next before the last one has resolved.
That framing has moved well past academic conferences. It's now the working assumption behind the 2026 outlooks from PIMCO, the IMF, McKinsey, Rabobank, Coface and others: different institutions, arriving independently at the same observation. The cycle isn't behaving the way it used to, and the reason isn't primarily interest rates or fiscal policy. It's geopolitics.
Politics is now upstream of economics
For most of the last thirty years, economics drove politics: growth, trade and capital flows set the terms, and politics adjusted around them. That relationship has flipped. Protectionism, sanctions and industrial policy now shape growth and trade rather than reacting to them. The relevant strategic question for a company in 2026 isn't which country is growing fastest. It's which country holds the stronger hand, and how willing it is to use it.
Layer onto that a fact that would have sounded alarmist three years ago and now reads as a planning input: active military conflict is a standing variable in mainstream growth forecasts, not a tail risk footnoted at the back of the report. Energy shocks, strait closures and supply route disruption are being priced into 2026 growth projections in the same breath as inflation and consumer demand.
And it isn't only disruptive. European rearmament, for instance, has quietly become a genuine demand driver: ammunition production capacity up roughly sixfold since 2022, industrial metals demand pulled upward, defence orders in some markets doubling year on year. That's not background noise for a manufacturer with exposure to metals, electronics or precision components. That's a new customer segment with its own volatility.
Why "wait it out" stops working
The old playbook assumed a few things quietly in the background: globalisation as a one-way trend, supply chains as fixed infrastructure, policy as a stabiliser of last resort. Those assumptions are the part that's broken, not the growth rate in any single quarter. Several serious voices, INSEAD among them, describe this less as a rough patch and more as an inflection point that could take years, possibly decades, to settle into a new equilibrium. Operating in that world costs more by design: more currencies to manage, more redundancy in supply chains, less efficiency squeezed out by scale. That's a permanent addition to the cost of doing business, not a temporary tax that gets refunded once things calm down.
What this means for how we think about strategy
We've built our approach around outside-in thinking: starting from what customers actually value, not from internal capability or legacy assumptions. That principle hasn't changed. What's changed is what "outside" now includes.
A few years ago, outside-in meant reading customer needs and competitive signals. In 2026, it has to mean reading customer needs and the geopolitical conditions determining which supply chains, currencies and trade routes are even viable, because those conditions are now moving faster, in many sectors, than customer preferences are.
Practically, that shows up in decisions we help clients make every day:
- A "sweet spot" that looks attractive on margin alone but depends on a single-source geography or a contested shipping route may be a concentrated risk with good unit economics.
- "Where to play" can no longer treat trade relationships as fixed. Tariff exposure, defence-adjacent demand and reshoring dynamics need to sit in the decision alongside market size and competitive intensity, not as a footnote after the fact.
- A company's readiness to run sophisticated, experiment-led strategy work is itself hostage to this volatility. A capable team whose supply chain just got repriced by an energy shock has less real bandwidth for insight-driven growth than its maturity would suggest. That means exposure to this kind of shock now must be part of the evaluation criteria, not just capability.
Being honest about what we don't know
We won't overstate this. There's a real difference between saying geopolitics is now a bigger swing factor in growth and inflation than it's been in twenty years (that case is well supported) and saying the business cycle is dead outright. The second claim is bigger, and serious institutions still disagree on it. Some forecasters still talk in cyclical terms, with recovery pencilled in for 2027-28. Others argue this is a genuine regime change with no clean recovery date at all.
We don't think that debate needs to be settled for the practical conclusion to hold. Volatility now has a new, structural source. Whether or not the old cycle technically still exists somewhere underneath it, no management team should be building its 2026 plan on the assumption that it's about to reassert itself.
The companies that will do well from here aren't the ones with the best forecast. They're the ones who've stopped needing one, because they've built the focus and the flexibility to compete well regardless of which way the geopolitical weather turns next.
This is the new normal. And in this new normal the outside in perspective and building business around the customer is even more important now.
