Every few months, a client calls me with the same request, dressed up in different language: "Tell us what's going to happen so we can plan for it." They want the endpoint. The new normal. The stable state we're all supposedly heading toward, once the current chaos resolves into whatever comes next.
I've stopped trying to give them that answer, because I don't think it exists anymore, and pretending otherwise is now the most expensive mistake I see business leaders make.
For most of my career, in government, on the ground in disaster response, in West Wing meetings, at the table when a company's reputation was on fire, I built my judgment around a simple idea: crises end. They're loud and chaotic while they're happening, but eventually the smoke clears and something resembling order reasserts itself. You brace for the storm, then you rebuild.
That idea still holds some truth, just less of it than it used to. What I’m watching now, across the election cycle, the reordering of global trade, and a security landscape that seems to reinvent its own rules every eighteen months, is a storm that never fully passes — layered on top of the last one, with the next already visible on the horizon before the current cleanup crew has finished. Waiting to plan around what comes next has quietly become a way of never planning at all.
Business
The New World Order Isn't Coming. That's the Problem
Predictions are an illusion in this era of permanent disruption with constant readiness being the only viable survival strategy
Key Points
- Guessing correctly about where this settle is a losing strategy for the next decade.
- Building something that survives being wrong is the actual skill.
- What I do know is this: the people, companies, and countries who treat that uncertainty as the actual condition to plan around, rather than a temporary inconvenience standing between us and the next stable order, are going to be the ones still standing when the rest of us find out we guessed wrong.
