The map belongs in the operating plan

A business can have customers in one country, invoices in another, software running in a third and critical hardware passing through several more. Its organisational chart may look beautifully simple. Its actual dependencies are considerably more adventurous.

This is why I find geopolitics useful as an operating discipline. The aim is to understand which assumptions keep the organisation functioning, and what happens when one of them stops being true.

It is easy to confuse this with having a strong opinion about every international headline. That can consume a great deal of time without improving a single decision. Predicting precisely what a government will do next is difficult. Knowing how exposed you are to a plausible change is usually more achievable.

Start with a mundane question: what has to remain available for us to deliver what we have promised? The answer might include a shipping route, a payment system, a cloud region, a particular component or the ability of a colleague to work across a border. Each dependency has an owner, a location and some rules attached. “Global” is a convenient description until you need to know which rules.

Physical supply chains make the issue particularly visible. The International Energy Agency’s 2025 critical minerals outlook found that refining had become more geographically concentrated across nearly all the critical minerals it examined. It also explained how a market can appear adequately supplied while remaining vulnerable to disruption at its largest supplier. Plenty in aggregate does not guarantee availability where and when it is needed.

The same reasoning can be applied to less tangible dependencies. Two suppliers may look like diversification until you discover they rely on the same upstream service. Two data centres may sit in different buildings while remaining exposed to the same jurisdiction. Counting contracts is easier than understanding failure modes. Unfortunately, the latter is the useful bit.

The response should be proportionate. Complete independence is rarely available, and trying to manufacture it can be ruinously expensive. International exchange exists partly because people and places have different capabilities. Discarding those advantages also carries a cost.

The IMF’s work on geoeconomic fragmentation examines how policy-driven separation can disrupt trade, investment and other channels of integration. The WTO’s 2023 World Trade Report makes the case for wider international cooperation and diversification as sources of resilience. These institutions have perspectives of their own, but both help explain why withdrawal is a complicated answer to vulnerability.

For an operator, the useful goal is optionality at a sensible price. Can a critical workload move? How long would a replacement supplier take to qualify? Could the organisation continue serving customers if a particular route became unavailable? Which contingency has actually been tested?

A backup that exists only in a presentation is largely a publishing achievement. A usable alternative has people who understand it, contracts that permit it, and a realistic transition time. Sometimes paying a modest premium to keep that alternative alive is sensible. Sometimes the exposure is small enough to accept. The important thing is to make the decision consciously.

I would also separate scenarios from forecasts. A scenario asks what we would do if a condition occurred. It does not require claiming that the condition will occur. That distinction allows a team to prepare for several futures without turning every planning meeting into a contest over who has the most alarming worldview.

There is a human responsibility here too. Employees, suppliers and customers live inside these geopolitical changes. They are people with commitments and limited room to manoeuvre. An operating plan should consider how the organisation communicates, supports affected colleagues and avoids transferring every unexpected cost to whoever has the least bargaining power.

Being globally connected offers enormous advantages. It also means accepting that events elsewhere can become our practical responsibility. I would rather understand that connection while the options are still open. The map belongs beside the budget, with enough detail to make decisions and enough humility to remember that it will change.