The phrase seeing “through a glass darkly” has been used in countless literary works since being introduced to the world in 1560 in the Geneva Bible.[1] The phrase emphasizes the fact that we often cannot see the future with any clarity. Don Hicks, founder and chief executive officer of Optilogic, and Mike O’Sullivan, a global macro strategist, assert, that for supply chain planners, the “glass” is getting darker. They write, “For decades, supply chain leaders operated under a stable set of assumptions: globalization was inevitable, efficiency ruled and scale was the winning strategy. That era is over. What replaces it is still taking shape, but what’s clear is that designing supply chains in the 2020s and beyond requires a new mental model attuned to rising geopolitical risk, regulatory divergence, climate disruption and the erosion of global trust.”[2] They add, “Supply chains were once optimized for cost. Today, they must be engineered for uncertainty.”

Planning for Uncertainty and Disruption

Hicks and O’Sullivan understand that planning in today’s chaotic environment — often described as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) — can be complicated. Planning, they explain, must take into consideration numerous variables, like “regulatory divergence, financial market access, IP protection, climate vulnerability and even workforce demographics.” They conclude, “The new design paradigm isn’t about maximizing one dimension; it’s about intelligent compromise. Leaders must learn to design systems that intentionally balance financial performance, service quality and exposure to systemic risk. The best supply chains won’t be the most efficient. They’ll be the most adaptable. Geopolitical instability is no longer background noise. It’s a primary design constraint.”

Journalist Anjli Raval asks the question all business leaders should be asking, “How can companies plan ahead when it feels like tomorrow may look nothing like today?”[3] She adds, “It’s the question hanging over boardrooms as business leaders contend with a barrage of challenges — from AI disruption and geopolitical tensions to tariffs and financial market fluctuations. … The feeling of heightened uncertainty is palpable.”

Like many observers, Brent Hasenkamp, Senior Vice President for Manufacturing, CPG & Industrial Distribution at o9 solutions, sees the world remaining in its current chaotic state for the foreseeable future. To cope with these complex conditions, he predicts companies will turn to artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. He explains, “Companies have turned to AI-enabled platforms to help navigate a business and economic environment marked by volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity.”[4]

Scenario Planning in a Supply Chain Nerve Center

To cope with today’s complex environment, AI is teaming up with another time-tested tool: scenario planning. Hasenkamp explains, “More organizations are using AI technology to inform their short-term, mid-term and long-term supply chain planning capabilities, however, many are still somewhat rudimentary in how they execute their day-to-day tasks. In order to quickly identify and respond proactively to potential supply chain disruptions, companies need to fully optimize their scenario planning capabilities.”

Raval agrees that today’s challenges require this new marriage of planning tools. She explains, “For decades, scenario planning has helped organizations map out a range of futures based on variables including economic shifts, technological leaps and regulatory changes. Pioneered at Shell — which anticipated the 1973 oil shock — scenario planning has been a corporate staple since. But as boxer Mike Tyson famously said: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ Or as one UK board chair told me: ‘The one scenario everyone seems to have forgotten to plan for is the one where all the scenarios are wrong.’ … A new corporate landscape is emerging as the globalization that underpinned growth over the last 40 years comes under threat from more mercantilist forces.”

Faced with uncertainty, some business leaders have hesitated to act — hoping the world will settle down a bit. That’s a losing strategy. Raval explains, “It’s a common refrain among business leaders that they’re in a wait-and-see mode. But wait too long and companies lose momentum, become less innovative and enter into a state of decision paralysis. Act too soon and businesses might make costly choices that require backtracking.” What’s a company to do?

McKinsey & Company analysts suggest that a nerve center (aka war room) can help companies chart a course into the future.[5] They note, “Even as they grapple with immediate challenges, company leaders are unsure about what comes next. With the pandemic crisis still fresh in their minds, they find themselves again facing a highly uncertain environment with few parallels to guide them and no clear sense of when normalcy might return. They hesitate to make strategic moves. … Given the web of interdependencies that govern global trade, business leaders realize that they can’t define and prepare for the path forward using traditional forecasting and planning methods. What they need is a geopolitical nerve center — a central hub that tracks new developments in global trade, plans across several horizons, and guides decision-makers.”

I have touted the advantages of a nerve center or war room for years. To help clients cope with today’s chaotic environment Enterra Solutions® developed Enterra Business WarGaming™. Business WarGaming enables organizations to leverage their data to make strategic decisions by anticipating the moves of their competitors and taking direct action to beat the competition, mitigate risk, navigate uncertainty, and maximize market opportunity. Part of Enterra Business WarGaming is the Enterra Global Insights and Decision Superiority System™ (EGIDS™) — powered by Enterra’s Autonomous Decision Science™ platform — which can help business leaders rapidly explore a multitude of options and scenarios.

McKinsey analysts explain, “A nerve center needs to accomplish three tasks. First, it should comprise cross-functional initiative teams that tackle the full range of potential impacts on different parts of the company. Second, the teams need to cover multiple time horizons to ensure that the organization can address both urgent issues and longer-term challenges. Finally, a planning team, informed by distinctive analytics, should coordinate the initiative teams and enable fast decision-making.”

Concluding Thoughts

Raval notes, “The goal of scenario planning isn’t just to survive one crisis after another. It’s also to become the kind of organization that can adapt and grow no matter what’s around the corner.” Leveraging a system that has a proven track record of predicting what’s next — and allows planners to explore hundreds of “what if” scenarios in a short period of time — is critical for making informed decisions at the speed of today’s business. Hicks and O’Sullivan conclude, “Supply chains of the next decade will be shaped not by where goods are cheapest to produce, but by where companies can build trust, mitigate volatility and execute with precision under uncertainty. This shift isn’t temporary. It marks a fundamental redefinition of how global commerce operates. Executives who cling to the tools and assumptions of globalization will be outmaneuvered. Those who embrace the complexity of a fractured world, and build resilient systems for it, will shape the next generation of global trade.”

Footnotes

[1] 1 Corinthians 13:12

[2] Don Hicks and Mike O’Sullivan, “Designing Supply Chains for a Fractured World,” SupplyChainBrain, 19 November 2025.

[3] Anjli Raval, “Scenario planning is getting a stress test,” Financial Times, 12 May 2025.

[4] Brent Hasenkamp, “3 Ways AI Can Strengthen Supply Chains in 2025,” Supply & Demand Chain Executive, 3 January 2025.

[5] Cindy Levy, Mihir Mysore, Shubham Singhal, and Varun Marya, “Navigating tariffs with a geopolitical nerve center,” McKinsey & Company, 11 April 2025.