In 2019, few could have predicted that a virus would disrupt our lives and halt industries worldwide. By 2021, a war in Eastern Europe sent energy and food prices spiraling. Now, in 2025, businesses face an even more volatile reality: escalating geopolitical tensions, fragile supply chains, and the race to harness artificial intelligence (AI), with both risks and rewards.
The speed and scale of disruption have outpaced traditional strategic planning. In the past, businesses could rely on historical data and incremental adjustments to navigate change. Today, that approach is proving insufficient. Wars, trade disputes, climate shocks, and technological leaps are reshaping the global economy faster than businesses can adjust, forcing leaders to rethink how they prepare for the future.
India is no exception. The country’s rapid digitisation and push for self-reliance in key industries, from semiconductors to electric vehicles, are unfolding in a complex global context. The government’s push for critical mineral security, for example, reflects the urgent need to anticipate future supply risks. As India builds domestic chip manufacturing capabilities and transitions towards clean energy, businesses must recognise that dependencies on foreign supply chains expose them to unforeseen disruptions. How can they mitigate these risks? How can Indian industries navigate when uncertainty is the norm?
After the financial crisis of 2008, the term VUCA became popular when describing our world: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Management consultants everywhere responded with copious, often well-researched slides detailing trends that businesses and sectors needed to navigate, ever bigger and more complex market and financial forecasting and modelling software, and inspirational speakers that ensured the word “agile” joined the business lexicon.
And then Covid-19 hit and renowned Futurist and writer Jamais Cascio pushed it up a notch to BANI: Brittle (there could be a catastrophe at any moment), Anxious (it feels tense, urgent, like we’re living on a knife edge in our personal and professional lives), Non-linear (things aren’t happening in a stable or predictable progression of events anymore) and Incomprehensible (it’s increasingly clear no one person can understand or control everything). It became obvious that the lists of siloed trends were detached from our interconnected reality. The forecasting models needed so many variables that they required a PhD to interpret. And the inspirational speakers collected ever more examples of business or industry suffering the consequences of not being “agile”.
So how do Indian businesses respond to this BANI reality? Using foresight or Futures techniques is still one of the answers, but it needs to go beyond what it has become in business as usual. In our experience, for business to really thrive into the long term, Futures needs to be applied in a way that:
Considers a wider range of trends more seriously: Twenty, even ten years ago, it was easy to understand why the typical business leaders often paid more attention to economic, political and legal trends than they did to the social or environmental. Now, as wildfires rage, droughts persist, global pandemics are lived experience, and migration and integration are top of political agendas, no C-Suite can do business well without paying due attention to the impact of environmental and social trends on their supply chains, sales and business continuity. The 2019 water crisis in Chennai shutting down manufacturing units, and the 2022 heatwave’s impact on wheat production and subsequent ripple effects on domestic food price inflation, supply chain disruption and trade relations are two of many clear examples where environmental and social trends are core to business. Yet, all too often it is still left to sustainability or CSR teams or, where they are considered, they’re still second tier in terms of importance. This is folly and can mean businesses are blind-sided – and things feel non-linear and brittle – often meaning unplanned responses and resources have to be mobilised, directly hitting the bottom line.
Moves beyond siloed trend analysis to interconnected thinking: Trends are often viewed in siloes, rather than recognising the complex interplays between them. Trends and forecasts in household spending patterns for instance are often analysed at a different desk to trends in geopolitics, likewise energy targets and pastorialist community heritage. It would be hard for someone at the consumer insight team desk in a Canadian FMCG company, for instance, to have foreseen the effects Mr. Trump’s tariffs might have. Or take how land acquisition challenges and community concerns are stalling utility scale renewable energy projects in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. How many renewable energy companies had planned for the management of social and political dynamics when competing at auction for the projects?
Considers beyond the direct ripple out effects: Considering the direct implication of a trend for the business or sector is normal practice. Considering the indirect implications is surprisingly rare however. For instance, when we share the dramatic trends in loss of biodiversity, a food company can usually see a direct impact: no biodiversity means no bees, no bees mean no natural (and cost free) pollination. Non-food or raw material-based companies however often struggle to see the relevance of biodiversity trends because they don’t go beyond first or second order consequences. But no natural pollination means manual pollination, pushing up prices of staple goods, putting pressure on household expenditure, potentially leading to the kind of cost-of-living crises we’re witnessing across the world. Name one company that won’t be affected by demands for higher salaries as these crises perpetuate and will therefore need to look at workforce planning. More people in business need to be able to make those connections from low biodiversity to hiring freezes and redundancies.
Moves from responding to symptoms to understanding and addressing the cause: A great deal of corporate or sector use of foresight and forecasting tends to be about thinking through what might happen and protecting themselves. For instance, one apparel manufacturer might see regional droughts as a risk to cotton supply and protect themselves by having suppliers in multiple regions. A more forward-thinking manufacturer would understand how resilience in the original region might be built so crops can withstand the droughts and be part of a landscape level effort to ensure production over the next decade. Whilst being ready to respond is a smart use of foresight, it can be an ever-constant drain on resources if the event you are responding to doesn’t get rectified.
Is clear what you’re being agile towards: Being able to ride the waves does not mean pivoting like a headless chicken. A business’s deeper purpose can serve as a lighthouse in these moments. Businesses need to hold a vision of where they want the world to go and what they stand for within it. Hold this tight in both business objectives and how they are acted upon. A headless chicken is not a model that drives customer or staff loyalty or builds lasting brand legacy.
Using Futures in this way will lead to genuinely future-ready strategies, ones that can help address the challenges and opportunities offered by this BANI world. For Indian businesses to thrive in an era of escalating uncertainty, traditional foresight methods must evolve. Done well, Futures thinking enables companies to move beyond reactive strategies and build resilience through interconnected, long-term planning. Whether it is securing resources for India’s energy transition, strengthening domestic supply chains, or increasing food security in the face of climate disruptions, the ability to anticipate and adapt will define the leaders of tomorrow.
(The author is Managing Director India, Forum for the Future)
Published – March 27, 2025 07:00 am IST
