As volatile trade policies and new tariffs disrupt global operations, corporate leaders are ditching forecasting for systemic resilience and rigorous scenario planning.Â
In May 2026, when U.S. President Donald Trump made a state visit to China, it was reported that along with his entourage of government officials and diplomats, CEOs of some of the biggest American companies accompanied him. Trump’s retinue of business leaders included Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, among others.
This came on the heels of numerous businesspeople, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, making a beeline to attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January of last year. They were even prominently seated together on the platform alongside other dignitaries, including cabinet nominees and elected officials.
Tariffs as a Permanent Variable
While business and politics have always had a symbiotic relationship, over the past year, a leader’s ability to ingratiate themselves with politicians and lobby them has been put to the test. The clearest test case has been Trump’s trade policy. After the US imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminium imports and a 10% blanket tariff on imports from the UK in early 2025, executives lost the one thing strategic planning depended on: a stable set of assumptions about how global trade worked.
The effect is palpable. 68% of trade professionals now prioritise supply chain management, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 Global Trade Report. This has nearly doubled from 35% as reported by trade professionals last year, reflecting an urgent need for systemic resilience over day-to-day optimisation.
The CEOs who have been able to navigate this better than others have not resorted to soothsaying and have outpredicted policy developments. According to a whitepaper by executive coaching firm Schneider Downs, the value of scenario planning does not lie in predicting the future but in the leadership disciplining itself to think in the present, forcing assumptions into the open, and testing whether they still hold. The shift in emphasis matters right from prediction to a small number of durable decision rules, which are triggers for when to shift sourcing and thresholds for when to revise pricing that the organisation can execute without waiting for the next headline.
The whitepaper advised CFOs to attach explicit triggers to every modelled scenario, defining at what margin pressure pricing gets revised and how quickly vendor terms can be renegotiated, rather than leaving plans theoretical. That is adaptive leadership in practice: not omniscience, but a system simple enough to act on at speed.
The Cost of Unresolved Friction Within Companies
The second pressure on leaders has been from within the organisation. Political and social polarisation has moved from dinner-table conversations to the corporate bullpens. Nearly three-quarters of employees have reported experiencing polarising conflicts at workplaces, with 39% facing them every week, and most see their managers as failing to manage the tension adequately. The financial translation of that failure is direct: incivility and discord are now estimated to cost businesses more than $2.6 billion a day in lost productivity, according to 2025 figures from the Society for Human Resource Management.
What makes this more of a leadership problem than an HR problem is where the skill gap actually sits. According to an assessment by global leadership firm DDI, of more than 70,000 manager candidates worldwide, 49% lack effective conflict management skills, and only 12% demonstrate high proficiency. Only 30% of leaders expressed confidence in their own ability to manage conflict.Â
As DDI’s Stephanie Neal puts it, rising political tension and growing employee distrust are making workplaces more polarised, and conflict left unmanaged ripples outward into productivity, creativity, and turnover. This is the softer half of soft power: the capacity to let disagreement surface without letting it metastasise and to do so consistently enough that employees stop bracing for the next flashpoint.
Simplicity as a Competitive Skill
Both the trade- and workforce-related scenarios are, at their heart, about leaders operating with incomplete information under time pressure, and both punish leaders who try to compensate with more analysis rather than clearer rules. Columbia’s Peter Coleman, writing in the Harvard Business Review’s July 2025 issue, argues that today’s executives need something closer to conflict intelligence than to pure technical expertise: a blend of empathy, self-regulation, situational awareness, and an understanding of the systemic forces driving disputes. Trust, in other words, has become a measurable input to enterprise value, not a soft, adjacent concern.
However, evolving scenarios do not warrant abandoning rigour in leadership. Instead, it argues for where rigour is applied. Fewer resources are spent trying to forecast an unforecastable trade environment or political climate while more is spent building decision frameworks robust enough to survive being wrong about the specifics. The CEOs who project stability in 2026 are not the ones with the best models of what comes next. They are the ones who have made peace with not knowing and built an organisation that can move regardless.
