In the Autumn of 2023, the leaders of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network delivered a warning to business:
You may not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you.
Geopolitical fundamentals have changed. The world is becoming less secure and predictable and many organisations across the economy are struggling to adapt. More than in recent history, geopolitics has a significant impact on business, tariffs being the prime but not only example. Thankfully, practices exist to better prepare your business and build resilience. Combined with the right mindset, they can help you avoid groupthink and keep ahead of the zeitgeist.
What’s needed is geopolitical fluency. For example, in January 2022, then UK Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, identified that Russia was on the verge of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He did not cite secret intelligence assessments, but rather Putin’s public proclamations. The lesson: you don’t need access to troves of hidden information; you need someone fluent in geopolitics.
And you need to know how to apply this geopolitical fluency.
Five questions for better navigating geopolitics
The key to successfully navigating geopolitical uncertainty lies in asking better questions. This starts by recognising an inherent level of unpredictability about the world and building up a picture to the point at which quality decisions can be made, and actions taken.
So, here are five critical questions you can ask yourself to create a strong basis upon which to begin making those types of decisions.
One - What matters for us?
‘Herding bias’ is particularly common with geopolitics. Faced with high levels of uncertainty, you may find yourself taking cues from competitors, industry peers, or non-executive directors.
However, not everything that matters, matters. For instance, headlines over a regional conflict may dominate, even though you may have no business presence in the impacted region, and there may be little or no second or third order impact. This diverts attention from more impactful issues.
There are ways to get past this, which include using a combination of geopolitical and organisational expertise to:
Map your organisation’s critical business services - people, critical suppliers, and assets - and revenue generation against geopolitical fault lines (e.g. regional geopolitical rivalries) and key geographies.
Understand the potential geopolitical dimensions of future key decisions. For example, how could geopolitical developments impact a product launch, or new joint venture partnership?
Two – What don’t we know, and how could we be wrong?
Views of the present can be influenced by the recent past (i.e. ‘recency bias’) or by events that are easy to recall (‘the availability heuristic’). When you are assessing, for example, the prospect of major conflict, it can be tempting to focus on recent reference points for cues on plausible outcomes.
The problem is that we can pick the wrong reference points or assess them poorly.
A way through this can be to:
- Identify a key set of assumptions associated with key activities or major decisions, for example, regulation;
- Identify the confidence level around those assumptions being true (i.e. “how could those assumptions be wrong?”);
- Engage geopolitical experts to identify the geopolitical angles to those assumptions and assign their own confidence levels. The two views can then be compared.
Three – How could things change?
Views about the future are shaped by the present (‘status quo bias’) and it is often difficult to imagine how things might change.
Of course, things will change, but it isn’t known exactly how. Rather than trying to make decisions based on faulty predictions, you can:
- Scenario plan how the future could unfold, not how it will unfold. Scenario planning is a time-tested technique that seeks to create a range of plausible futures.
- In thinking about the future, it’s important to be curious, imaginative and involve a broad range of internal and external stakeholders to get broad perspectives.
Four - Are we prepared?
The mere existence of plans and controls can drive a false sense of comfort (sometimes referred to as ‘control delusion’). Conversely, ‘Cartesian anxiety’ - the need for a fixed and stable foundation for understanding – may tempt you, like so many others, to build more plans and more controls in response.
However, resilience to geopolitical events is a practice, not an intellectual exercise. Consequently, practicing decision-making under pressure is key to resilience. To do that, you can:
- Conduct scenario exercises, exploring your team’s execution of plans under pressure and familiarising your organisation with the flexibility required and practicing decision-making to respond to real-life events.
- Apply ‘red team thinking’ to see how plans, controls, and key failure points withstand severe but plausible events. This, and scenario exercises train your organisation’s decision-making ‘muscles’, in addition to identifying potential weak points in your plans.
- Integrate geopolitical considerations into the design of key controls. This might mean, for instance, changing the way your organisation manages the procurement of critical supplies to account for geopolitical factors, and therefore re-designing controls related to third parties.
Five - Are we all on the same page?
Faced with the ambiguity of geopolitical circumstances, individuals often don’t see the same thing in a complex situation. However, groups often fall prey to the ‘false consensus effect’ - assuming others share the same beliefs, values, and opinions. Compounding this, differing opinions can often be deliberately suppressed through ‘groupthink’.i
Fortunately, there are ways in which you can harness the power of cognitive diversity and overcome these traps. These include:
- Using debiasing techniques such as the premortem, ‘think-write-share’ or ‘weighted anonymous feedback’ to obtain important views.
- Include representation from across the business when making decisions where geopolitics is a factor.
- Define the organisational ‘red lines’ or ‘guard rails’ so that decision-makers understand the internal constraints unambiguously, through for instance, risk appetite frameworks.
When you recognise how psychology and geopolitics interplay, you pave the way for more nuanced and effective strategies. This creates the foundation for confidence and success in an unreliable world. It breaks down societal and systemic groupthink and helps you better grip the plausibility of increasingly extreme outcomes, where the zeitgeist may not yet have caught up. Nobody is pretending this is easy. But there’s still time to implement the necessary processes. So long as you are prepared to drive a mindset shift across the entirety of your business, you can set your organisation up for success.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/the-psychology-of-conformity/251371/