Series: Age of Instability | Article 1 of 4
If you have been in a leadership role for the past three or four years, you may have noticed something that is difficult to put precisely into words.
The planning conversations have not changed in structure — you still set targets, review assumptions, stress-test scenarios — but there is a quality of unease underneath them that was not there before. A sense that the ground has shifted slightly and has not quite settled.
You are probably not imagining it.
Not one war. One era.
The instinct many leaders have had — that this is an unusually turbulent stretch that will eventually normalise — is understandable, and it has not been entirely wrong.
Disruptions do ease. Supply chains do adapt. But you may have also noticed that the recovery from one disruption no longer completes before the next one begins.
The pandemic reshaped sourcing assumptions, and before those adjustments had fully bedded in, freight markets became volatile, then inflation returned, then the technology decoupling between major powers started to affect vendor decisions and software access, and now a conflict in the Middle East.
This latest episode of events is producing what the International Energy Agency has called the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market — with flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which carries around 20% of global oil and gas, falling from 20 million barrels per day to a trickle.
That sequence feels less like a series of episodes and more like a new operating condition.
Regional institutions are framing it that way too, in language that is unusually direct for their register.
ISEAS convened its 2026 Regional Outlook Forumexplicitly around “global disruption, uncertainty and conflict.”
The Asian Development Bank‘s integration report describes geopolitical tensions and trade policy uncertainty not as cyclical headwinds but as persistent structural challenges to Asia’s development model.
When these organisations reach for that kind of language, the signal is worth taking seriously.
How disruption travels — and why it keeps arriving.
You may have also observed something counterintuitive about recent disruptions:
the businesses hit hardest were often not the ones closest to the source.
A conflict in a distant geography becomes an energy cost problem, which becomes a freight cost problem, which becomes an inventory timing problem, which becomes a customer commitment problem — all within weeks, and sometimes in industries with no obvious connection to the original event.
That is because disruption now travels through shared systems rather than along direct lines of exposure.
- Energy shocks flow into freight economics.
- Freight volatility compresses inventory buffers.
- Geopolitical fractures create cyber exposure at supply chain seams.
- Currency pressure from imported energy inflation tightens financing conditions in sectors that have nothing to do with oil.
The systems are connected, and disruptions compound across them before any single one has resolved.
For businesses that have been managing risk by proximity — asking “do we have operations there?” or “do we source directly from that region?” — this represents a meaningful gap in the mental model.
The better question is becoming:
which systems do we depend on, and how exposed are those systems right now?
The interpretive lag that compounds the risk.
Here is something you may recognise from your own organisation.
The information is usually not the problem. Leadership teams are reading, tracking, discussing. Most people notice what’s changing—but don’t go back and rethink their plans based on it.
The real gap is between knowing something has shifted and actually adjusting your assumptions and decisions accordingly.
Here’s a pretty understandable reason for this. Moving too early, when the picture is still incomplete, can feel rash. Waiting for more certainty feels wiser.
But in a world where one disruption stacks on top of another, waiting has a price. By the time things feel clear enough to act on, your options are often already more limited.
What felt like patience in October can look a lot like delay by January.
The organisations that have handled recent disruptions better usually aren’t the ones that predicted everything perfectly. They’re the ones that quietly asked themselves…
which parts of the business were assuming things would stay stable — and made sure they had enough flexibility to adjust when they didn’t.
The shift leadership teams need to make
Adjusting to an age of instability does not begin with a new strategy. It begins with a shift in how leadership teams interpret what they are seeing.
Three orientations worth developing now:
Move from monitoring to sense-making.
Most leadership teams are already flooded with updates on what is happening in the world. The problem usually is not lack of information. It is the lack of a regular habit of asking:
what does this actually mean for our business, our assumptions, and our next decisions?
A simple standing review that links external signals to real business exposure is far more useful than a risk register that gets dusted off once a quarter and ignored the rest of the time.
Name the assumptions that rely on stability.
Every business is operating on assumptions — about costs, supply timelines, customer demand, hiring, and access to capital.
Most of these assumptions are never written down. They just sit quietly in the background, shaping decisions.
The more useful exercise is to surface them and ask which ones only work when conditions are calm. Not “are we exposed to geopolitical risk?” but “what breaks first if shipping costs double for the next three months?”
Stop treating instability as a side note in planning.
In most planning cycles, uncertainty gets acknowledged and then politely pushed aside so the team can produce a clean plan.
Fair enough. But that also means the plan is quietly built on the hope that things will stay mostly normal.
A better approach is to plan against two or three plausible operating conditions. Nothing overly elaborate. Just enough scenario thinking to test decisions, pressure-check priorities, and know where the weak spots are before they get punched in the face by reality.
Where this series goes.
In the articles ahead, I’ll unpack what this instability means for Asia, where business exposure runs deeper than geography alone suggests. I’ll look at what is already shifting across sectors, and what a serious move toward readiness actually requires from leadership teams.
But the starting point is this: if the past few years have felt different in kind — not just more turbulent, but structurally less stable — that reading is worth taking seriously.
Instability is now part of the landscape. And for businesses that have not adjusted to that yet, the adjustment is now the work.
Next: Why Asia Is Not Sheltered — Distance No Longer Protects Business.
(Last published – March 2026, by Christina Lim)
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