Take your mind back to November 2019. You were probably in the thick of strategic-planning season. Your team was presenting projections for 2020–2025 with impeccable curves. The decks showed “base,” “optimistic,” and “pessimistic” scenarios. The board approved, satisfied with the rigor of the analysis.
None of those scenarios included a global pandemic, a war in Europe, the eruption of generative artificial intelligence, or the re-election of Donald Trump. None.
Why do we keep planning as if we could predict the future?
The mirage of traditional planning
Between November 2019 and November 2025, the world experienced disruptions that redefined entire industries. COVID-19 triggered a synchronized global recession of -3.1% of world GDP. The Russian invasion of Ukraine unleashed an energy crisis that ended decades of dependence on Russian gas in Europe. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in just two months, a record for technology adoption.
The results speak for themselves: while Nvidia grew 136% on an annualized basis over that period, the airline sector fell -2%. Those who bet on technology multiplied their investment; those who depended on tourism have still not recovered pre-pandemic levels.
The paradox is evident: we have never had more data, more models, more analytical tools. And we have never failed so badly at anticipating what truly mattered.
The six blind spots of the board
- Normalcy bias: we assume the future will be like the past, only “better.” 2019 did not contemplate that three consecutive years (2023–2025) would be the hottest on record.
- Extreme optimization: efficiency became the enemy of resilience. “Just-in-time” supply chains collapsed when the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal for six days, costing US$10 billion a day.
- Action–risk disconnect: “we knew, but we did nothing.” Boards discuss geopolitical risks but rarely take concrete mitigation actions.
- Inability to see cascades: we fail to anticipate second- and third-order effects. The pandemic did not only affect health; it reshaped remote work, collapsed commercial real estate, accelerated ESG.
- Prisoners of metrics: “what gets measured gets managed” left us blind to critical qualitative signals that did not fit on a dashboard.
- Organizational blindness: “we don’t want to know what we don’t want to know.” Corporate culture systematically filters out uncomfortable voices.
The particular challenge of family ownership
In regions where family ownership is dominant, these blind spots are amplified by structural characteristics we rarely discuss openly. High ownership concentration — in many markets, more than 60% of companies are controlled by family groups — generates dynamics in which questioning the founder’s strategy is tantamount to questioning the family itself.
Political disruptions can be as unpredictable as any global black swan. And the energy transition cuts both ways: it places resource-rich regions in a privileged position, but also exposes them to extreme volatility — the price of lithium went from US$6,000/ton in 2020 to US$80,000 in 2022 and fell to US$15,000 in 2024.
Toward planning that works
The answer is not to abandon planning, but to transform it radically. Instead of predicting a probable future and optimizing toward it, the most effective boards are adopting an approach of strategic optionality: building capabilities that generate value under multiple possible scenarios.
This means reserving capital for opportunities (and risks) we cannot imagine today, developing intelligence networks that capture weak signals before they become trends, and creating spaces where dissenting voices can be heard. It also means accepting an uncomfortable truth: traditional strategic planning can give us the illusion of control, and that illusion can be more dangerous than uncertainty itself.
For reflection in your boardroom
How many of the events that transformed the world between 2020 and 2025 were in your risk matrix? What mechanisms does your organization have to capture signals that contradict the official narrative? And perhaps most important: who on your board has the explicit mandate to question the fundamental assumptions of your strategy?
If the answer is “no one,” you have just identified your greatest blind spot.
The true value of the board lies not in approving perfect plans, but in building organizations that thrive in the imperfection of the real world.
P.S. As I write this, I wonder: what event of the next six years will make us look back at 2025 with the same disbelief with which we now look at our 2019 plans? The difference will lie in how prepared we are for what we cannot imagine.