The Last Word: When disruption multiplies faster than organisations can catalogue it, the advantage shifts from predicting what comes next to being able to move when it arrives.
If 2026 already feels volatile, keep some space on the risk register. The years ahead are unlikely to become more obliging. Geopolitical fragmentation, cyber insecurity, climate volatility, technological disruption and social polarisation no longer arrive neatly, one after another. They overlap, interact and amplify each other. The comfortable idea that organisations can identify the important risks, assign each a probability and then work through them in sensible order is becoming harder to defend.
That is why the World Economic Forum’s report, Risk Management, Reimagined: Outlook to 2035, is worth attention. Its most useful observation is not that the world is risky; every board already knows that. It is that uncertainty is becoming ‘structural rather than episodic’. Only 10 per cent of the chief risk officers surveyed describe their organisations as very prepared to respond to risks that cannot be modelled using historical data. The report’s conclusion is straightforward: preparedness matters more when prediction becomes less reliable.
I had a version of this conversation in Ottawa in May, during a panel at the CX Outsourcers Mindshare event. The discussion was meant to focus on how organisations should mitigate risk and I found myself reframing the question. There is nothing wrong with mitigation. Sensible organisations should identify exposures, reduce vulnerabilities and prepare for what they can foresee. The difficulty is arithmetic. Mitigate one risk and another appears; deal with that and several more have already changed shape.
This is where traditional thinking can run into a practical ceiling. A company can spend months strengthening a supply chain only to find that regulation, geopolitics or a cyber incident has moved the problem elsewhere. It can prepare meticulously for one technological shift while another changes the economics of its industry. The issue is not that risk management has failed. It is that the volume, speed and interconnectedness of risk increasingly exceed our ability to treat every threat as a separate item awaiting mitigation.
So the more useful leadership question is not simply, ‘How do we stop this risk from affecting us?’ It is, ‘What have we built that allows us to keep moving when it does?’ That is a tougher standard for resilience. Resilience is often described as the ability to absorb a shock and bounce back. But bouncing back assumes that yesterday is still a sensible destination. In periods of structural uncertainty, resilience has to include the ability to interpret change quickly, make decisions with incomplete information and adapt without losing strategic direction.
A different kind of confidence
That capability is not created during the emergency meeting. It is built beforehand, through habits that rarely make the annual report sing: scanning beyond the obvious sources, noticing weak signals, involving people across functions, testing ideas before certainty arrives, learning quickly and changing course without treating every adjustment as failure. It also requires enough flexibility in budgets, technology, operations and decision-making to act while the evidence is imperfect. Efficiency still matters, but an organisation optimised so tightly that it cannot manoeuvre has confused neatness with strength.
This does not mean abandoning forecasts, scenarios or risk registers. They remain useful tools, just not crystal balls. The danger begins when the apparatus of prediction creates the illusion that uncertainty has been domesticated because it has been colour-coded. The WEF report makes a similar point: future risk management will depend less on predicting specific crises and more on building the governance, capabilities and decision processes needed to respond when assumptions fail.
The next decade may therefore reward a different kind of confidence. Not confidence that leaders know what is coming, but confidence that their organisations have practised responding when reality refuses to follow the plan. That means sensing change continuously, testing assumptions, rehearsing alternatives and making sure decision-making can accelerate rather than seize up under pressure.
Risk management will remain essential. Prediction will remain useful. But neither can eliminate surprise. The deeper task is to build an organisation with the internal capacity to reinvent as conditions change.
The most future-ready organisation is not the one that knows what happens next. It is the one that can move whatever happens next.
Photo: Dreamstime.