A McKinsey survey published this month found something I see in nearly every engagement: organizations will happily study the future, but they will not put their leaders inside it.
The numbers are blunt. Fewer than a third of the executives McKinsey surveyed call their geopolitical risk management “mature.” A majority, 53 percent, say scenario planning and real-time foresight would strengthen their resilience. Fewer than 30 percent actually use those tools. And the method most likely to build real capability, simulation, is used by fewer than 5 percent. It was the least-used instrument on the entire list (per McKinsey).
Read that again. The tool most likely to expose how your leadership team actually performs under pressure is the one almost nobody runs.
This is not a foresight problem. It is an execution problem. And it is the same gap we find in business continuity, crisis management, and IT disaster recovery.
Foresight has a comfortable end and an uncomfortable end
McKinsey lays out five instruments of strategic foresight: horizon scanning, scenario planning, contingency planning, simulations, and tabletop exercises. They are not interchangeable. They sit on a spectrum.
At one end are the analytical tools. Horizon scanning and scenario planning produce documents, dashboards, and decks. They are intellectually satisfying. A capable team can build them, brief the board, and feel prepared. No one is tested.
At the other end are the exercises. Simulations and tabletop exercises put named executives in a room, hand them incomplete information, and make them decide in real time while a facilitator injects new pressure. This is where the comfortable narrative falls apart. It is also where capability gets built.
The survey shows which end organizations prefer. They invest in analysis. They skip the test.
I understand why. Analysis is safe. An exercise can embarrass your leadership team. That discomfort is the point. As Chevron’s CEO put it in the same research, you never fully anticipate the black swan, but you “start to build muscle memory for asking the right questions.” You do not build muscle memory by reading a scenario report. You build it by running the play.
The old view and the new view
| Old view | New view |
| Foresight is an analytical product | Foresight is a leadership capability |
| Scenario planning prepares the organization | Scenario planning prepares the document. Exercises prepare the people. |
| Run an exercise once a year to check the box | Run exercises on a cadence, each one producing a work plan |
| Geopolitical risk lives with strategy or risk | Geopolitical risk arrives as an operational crisis on a Tuesday |
The shift in the right column is the whole game. Michèle Flournoy, who runs these exercises for major companies, said the best clients do this iteratively. “Every time you do it, you come away with a to-do list, and then these takeaways become a work plan.” A one-and-done tabletop is theater. A cadence is a program.
What this means for your 2026 plan
McKinsey’s framing is geopolitical and aimed at the board. The Taiwan Strait, sanctions, and energy shocks. That framing is correct, but it can let operational leaders off the hook, as if this is someone else’s risk. It is not. A conflict in the Taiwan Strait is a supplier-failure problem, a logistics problem, a cyber problem, and a communications problem before it is ever a geopolitics problem. It lands on your operation as a Tuesday, not a headline.
Here is what I would do in the next 90 days if you read the McKinsey piece and felt the gap.
First, find out which end of the spectrum you live on. If your last preparedness activity produced a slide deck and no decisions, you are doing analysis, not exercising.
Second, run one exercise that tests a decision, not a plan. Pick a converging scenario: a cyber incident during a geopolitical shock, a third-party failure during a regulatory inquiry. Put your executive team in it. Do not let them read ahead. Watch where the decision-making stalls.
Third, treat the output as a work plan. The value of an exercise is not the day. It is the list of gaps you leave with, and the discipline to close them before the next one.
Fourth, build a cadence. Capability decays. Leaders rotate. An exercise you ran in 2024 does not protect the team you have in 2026.
The McKinsey authors close with Eisenhower: “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” I would sharpen it. Planning is indispensable, but planning without exercising is just forecasting. You can have the best scenario library in your industry and still freeze in the first hour, because no one in the room has ever had to decide under that kind of pressure.
The 5 percent who run simulations understand this. They are not smarter about the future. They are willing to be tested by it.
That willingness is the capability. Everything else is a document.
Keep Going
A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.
- Read more. Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management.
- Run a real exercise. Our Exercise in a Day™ puts your leadership team inside a converging scenario and pressure-tests the decisions they will actually have to make.
- Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
- Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your program with us.
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