Irregular: 5 steps for managing geopolitical risk
A guide for business leaders
Hello from Melbourne,
In today’s Irregular, I am sharing below my remarks to the Global Mobility Forum that took place in Melbourne earlier this week.
While the audience was chiefly human resources executives, I used it as an opportunity to set out a vision for how corporate leaders — whatever their role —can tackle what has become one of the thorniest management problems today: how to deal with a world that not only has become more volatile, unpredictable and dangerous but also more challenging for businesses.
I set out the five-step framework we use with boards and executive teams to manage geopolitical risk and the specific challenges corporate leaders face.
How to understand some of the fundamental changes in the international system and build a coherent worldview.
How to move from vague abstractions to precise understandings of where politically-driven events could specifically hit the firm to get an accurate picture of your exposures to geopolitics.
How to take geopolitically-driven threats and use some basic rules-of-thumb to turn them into measurable risks - after all, “what gets measured gets managed”.
How to focus event monitoring on what truly matters and avoid what doesn't, and prevent overwhelm in the face of apparent chaos.
And how, ultimately, to manage geopolitical risks with the tools at a firm’s disposal.
I am also sharing, somewhat reluctantly, a video of the address for anyone, unlike myself, who might enjoy watching the replay. If our approach piques your interest or you would like to learn more, feel free to reach out.
Best wishes,
Damien
How to prepare for the next inevitable geopolitical disruption
As delivered, 7 May 2026
When Katie asked me to speak at this event six months ago, my first thought was: fantastic. I’d spoken at the Global Mobility Forum in Sydney last June — same audience, same sort of room, different people — and my second thought was equally encouraging: I can recycle that speech. Say roughly what I said last year, avoid having to think too hard, and get away with it.
Then Donald Trump intervened.
The man who first frustrated Kamala Harris’s presidential ambitions, then Elon Musk’s technocratic ambitions, then NATO’s hopes for a stable relationship with the United States, then Zelensky’s hopes for dependable American support against Vladimir Putin — has now frustrated my speechwriting ambitions as well, by launching a war against Iran.
That may not be the most important impact of the war, but it is a good reminder of Trotsky’s adage that “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”.
Last year, I made the case that geopolitics matters — not only to foreign ministries and defence departments, but to companies, to corporate leaders, to the broader economy and, yes, to global mobility professionals like yourselves.
I warned that if President Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran might respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz. That could send oil prices soaring, push insurance costs through the roof, disrupt travel across the Middle East, and trigger cascading supply chain failures. If it persisted, the consequences would not just be an economic shock of a kind we have not seen in decades. It could become a food crisis — given the Gulf’s critical role in global fertiliser supply.
That was last year. Not even twelve months later, we are living inside that scenario.
Trump — the greatest disruptor of the international order in a generation — has forced me to rethink what I want to say today.
No one in this room needs to be persuaded that geopolitics matters. That case has been made by events. It is now beyond reasonable doubt that disruptions in faraway places can reach even a country like Australia: a continent unto itself, protected by the world’s largest moat, allied to the most powerful nation on earth, with a relatively stable economy and political system.
John Donne once wrote that “no man is an island entire of itself”. Today, Jean-Paul Sartre’s darker line seems more fitting: “hell is other people”. Both capture the essence of geopolitical risk in the modern economy.
The context today
What I will not do is run through the news. You are saturated by it. You read it every morning and watch it every evening. There is no shortage of punditry, prediction, and prevarication. Nor will I attempt to prove a point you already accept.
Instead, I want to ask the harder question. It is the question that CEOs, board members and executives are putting to me — in Australia, in Europe, and in the United States — every week at the moment. The question is not: what is happening? Nor even what will happen? The question is: what can you, as business people, actually do about it?
Over the past six weeks, I have spoken with chief executives across fertiliser, transport and logistics, groceries, agribusiness, construction and software. Every situation is different. But almost every firm is confronting, in essence, the same problem. They were unprepared for precisely the kind of scenario I described in Sydney last year — and they are now struggling to work out what to do.
The impacts are arriving in different ways. Building companies are running short of PVC piping — PVC has become, in some respects, the PPE of this crisis, if you can cast your mind back to COVID. If you do not have plumbing, you cannot finish the job. Supermarkets in this country, despite Australia growing much of its own food, are looking at significant price rises driven by the inflationary effects of the war. Fertiliser companies do not know when the ships carrying their goods — currently stuck in or near the Persian Gulf — will emerge and make landfall.
And no one, including Donald Trump, knows exactly what happens next.
What we do know is this: even if the war ends tomorrow, even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow, the economic consequences will persist. They will move through the global economy in the form of higher prices, supply disruptions and, at worst, shortages of fuel and diesel and the serious prospect of global recession. That, sadly, is not my base case. Why? Because, tragically, both sides think they have the upper hand and both think that time is on their side. That may be true, but time is not on the side of businesses affected.
So yes — geopolitics matters. But you know that. And you’re not the only ones.
We recently surveyed more than 300 Australian CEOs. The report will be released next week, and I will happily share it with anyone who would like a copy. There were many striking findings. But the most arresting was this: every single CEO surveyed said they were more concerned about geopolitics than they were six months ago — yet only 7 per cent had done anything meaningful in response.
That gap — between concern and action — is the problem I want to address today.
Step 1 - Modelling a changing world
The first, and most essential, step is updating your model of the world.
Most firms carry an implicit picture of how the world works. Most of us do as individuals. Because of when and where we were born — because of the particular decades in which we came of age professionally — the model in our heads is largely one of a stable, peaceful, and “rules-based” international order that facilitates cross-border commerce and the free movement of goods, capital, services and data. In that model, trade barriers gradually fall. Major powers may compete, but they do not fundamentally rupture the system. International rules are broadly respected. International institutions support the flourishing of global commerce. Supply chains work; even if they bend, they do not typically break. People move. Capital moves. Data moves.
That model is no longer a reliable description of the world.
And this is not simply because of Donald Trump. Over the past decade, frictions between the major powers have intensified. Trade has been weaponised for political ends. Barriers to investment have been erected – and enforced – on national security grounds with increasing frequency. Diplomatic solutions to points of disagreement have become harder to reach. Governments are concluding fewer agreements to open and liberalise trade — and more measures to restrict it. And wars are becoming more frequent, more severe, and more prolonged. How’s Putin’s “three day war” going?
So the first, and most fundamental, step is to update your organisation’s foundational assumptions about how the world operates — and to embed, in your organisation’s thinking, a clearer understanding of the links between geopolitics, government action, national security, the economy, and firm-level impact.
But that is not enough.
Just as knowing how economics works does not make a firm resilient to economic shocks, knowing how geopolitics works does not make a firm resilient to geopolitical shocks. Leaders in this room — whether your responsibility is international mobility, human resources, workforce planning, supply chains or professional services — need to move from understanding the world to understanding how geopolitics affects your world.
Step 2 - Mapping your exposures
That means mapping specific threats. It means identifying the ways in which governments can interrupt the flows we have long taken for granted: the movement of people, goods, services, capital, data and energy. It means asking, systematically and with some rigour, where a political decision made in a distant capital could cut off your people, your supply chains, your customers, your suppliers, your revenues.
For those of you in global mobility, this is particularly direct. Your entire professional domain is built on the assumption that people can move — that borders are crossable, that visas are grantable, that travel corridors remain open. Geopolitics is now in the business of challenging every one of those assumptions.
The Strait of Hormuz is a textbook illustration of the modern global economy’s “weakest-link” problem. The system is extraordinarily efficient — but that efficiency depends, in critical places, on a very small number of chokepoints. When one of those chokepoints is threatened, the consequences move quickly, widely, and in ways that are very difficult to anticipate in the moment.
Think about the disruptions firms are encountering right now: the Strait remains closed, the Middle East harder to access, staff stranded, cargo delayed, insurance repriced. Now ask yourself a different question: what if you had already identified this as a plausible scenario? What decisions would you have made differently? What plans would already be in place? What conversations would already have been had?
And Hormuz – a tiny piece of geography very few people had ever thought about – is far from the world’s only chokepoint. There are other maritime chokepoints, too – the Straits of Malacca, closer to home, as well as in the Red Sea and through the Panama Canal. But there are also data chokepoints, such as clusters of undersea cables. There are capital chokepoints, such as legal tools to cut corporates off from use of the US dollar or the SWIFT banking system. And there are people chokepoints, such as when major aviation hubs go offline.
Step 2 - Measuring geopolitical risk
The next step is to turn possibilities into risks.
A possibility is not yet a risk. A risk is a threat with a probability and an impact. And rather than simply acknowledging that the world is more dangerous — or identifying, in the abstract, that there are threats to your organisation — you need a way of asking two very specific questions.
As I go through these, I want you to imagine one specific geopolitically driven threat to your organisation that is relevant to your work. Maybe a country sanctioning a counterparty. Maybe a government introducing politically driven visa restrictions. Maybe a regional office being cut off by a state-sanctioned cyber attack. Maybe staff getting stranded in a warzone. Ideally, imagine something novel but realistic and plausible based on where the world is headed.
The first question you need to ask is: how likely is this to happen?
Many people’s instinct is to say “I don’t know” or “You can’t put a figure on that” or “It’s impossible to predict the future”. The way around this – the way that intelligence agencies think about these issues – is not to forecast the future, but to look backwards. How often has something like this happened before? If something like this occurs once a decade, treat it as roughly a 10 per cent annual probability. If it occurs once every hundred years, it is closer to 1 per cent. If it happens every couple of years, it is closer to 50 per cent. You use that historical base rate as your anchor, and then you adjust it — up or down — based on what you observe in the current environment. It is not a perfect method. But it is an honest and disciplined one, and it is far superior to either ignoring the question or pretending that precision is possible when it is not. So – take your imagined threat and give it a percentage chance of occurring over the next year.
The second question – to turn a threat into a risk – is to ask: how much would it cost us?
If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for three months, what is the cost to your firm? If staff are stranded in a conflict zone, what are the direct and indirect costs? If the United States sanctions a key counterparty, if a major transit hub becomes inaccessible, if a government decides overnight to restrict the visa category on which your international assignment programme depends — what is the order of magnitude? Is this a hundred-thousand-dollar problem? A million-dollar problem? A ten-million-dollar problem?
Once you have a probability and an impact, you suddenly have something far more useful than anxiety or a vague sense that “geopolitical risk is rising”. You have – probably for the first time – a basis for decision-making. You can multiply those two numbers together and produce a risk figure. You can compare it with your other risks. You can ask whether it is material. You can total up several imagined threats and work out your total annualised expected loss from geopolitics. And you can begin to ask what you are willing to spend — in time, money and management attention — to reduce it.
Companies do this already, routinely, for operational risk, legal risk, security risk and cyber risk. Very few do it properly for geopolitical risk — particularly in Australia, a country blessed by distance, good fortune and a history of “Stephen Bradbury-ing” our way to victory while the rest of the world falls over at the finish line.
But as the Iran war is showing us in real time, that approach is no longer sufficient. And if you need any answer to why measuring geopolitical risk is important, all you need to do is recall the old adage that “what gets measured gets managed” – and its corollary, what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed.
Step 4 - Managing the risks you’ve identified
All those preceding steps are in service of action.
The essential task of geopolitical strategy is to reduce the probability of the event affecting your organisation, to reduce the impact if it materialises, and to increase your capacity to respond quickly and effectively.
Often that means diversification. Building redundancy into critical processes and relationships. Developing second suppliers, alternative routes, different jurisdictions, different staffing models. Having crisis protocols that are written down and rehearsed — not assembled in the middle of the crisis itself.
It is also to ask what “no regret” moves you can take now to make sure that no matter how the world of geopolitics evolves, you will be as prepared as you can be. And it is to ask what plans should we have in place – ready to go – if any of our imagined threats come to pass.
For mobility professionals specifically, this is where your function has an opportunity to reposition itself within the firm. Geopolitical risk almost always surfaces, first and most visibly, as a people problem. Where are our people? Can they get out? Can they get in? What do we owe them? What does our duty of care require? What happens to the assignment programme if that country becomes inaccessible? What happens to our talent pipeline if the visa environment shifts?
Some of you will have been dealing with geopolitics a lot over the past few years. And in very different ways. Dealing with staff whose views on Israel and Gaza are creating real tensions in the workplace — and the question of how to manage a divided workforce across different jurisdictions is itself a geopolitical problem. Some of you will be dealing with the politicisation of visa categories that were, until recently, entirely routine. Some of you will be grappling with evacuation planning for assignments in regions that have become rapidly more volatile. Some of you will be watching the competition for mobile international talent intensify as certain corridors close and others open. And some of you will be wondering whether it would be wise to give your staff burner phones when they travel to the United States, just as you might if they were visiting Russia or China.
The specifics will vary by organisation. But there is no credible version of corporate life, in the world as it currently exists, in which geopolitics does not reach the mobility function.
Step 5 - Monitoring what matters - and ignoring what doesn’t
The final piece of the puzzle is to address the noise issue itself. Geopolitics is extraordinarily noisy. Things seem to change by the day. Or by the tweet. It can feel distracting, disorienting and discombobulating. And it’s often all those things.
It’s easy to say “just focus on signal, not noise”. But that is literally impossible if you have not done the work that I have outlined. If you haven’t worked out where your own vulnerabilities are, where state actions could create threats to the firm, if you haven’t worked out what types of threats really matter to you and which ones are actually not that significant, then you will have no way of working out “what matters” and “what doesn’t”.
But – if you have done those exercises, then it becomes quite simple.
Very practically, for each of your key risks, you identify the two or three events that would materially increase its probability or its impact. Suddenly you have gone from having a vague notion that everything in geopolitics matters; that everything is consequential; to a much narrower and more manageable list of ten, twenty or thirty things to really watch out for. And that allows you to narrow your aperture, to focus on only those things that matter not to the world but to you, and to ignore – blissfully – all those tweets that don’t.
Serenity now
Let me close with this.
It is easy to despair about geopolitics. The news is relentless, the complexity is genuine, and the feeling that events are moving faster than our ability to understand them — let alone respond to them — is entirely rational.
It’s just as easy to throw your hands up and say there’s nothing we can do about it. After all, you cannot change American, Chinese, Russian or even Australian foreign policy. The rise and fall of nations, war and peace, is beyond your control.
But my counsel today is not despair. And it is not trying to control things that you cannot control. It is, in fact, a version of the Serenity Prayer, which any good Christian or member of Alcoholics Anonymous will know well – “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”.
You cannot change geopolitics. You cannot predict the future. But you can understand the world. You can understand your organisation’s relation to geopolitics. You can map your risks. You can measure them. And you can take actions to reduce them.
My hope today is simple. I had two aims. First, to help you see that geopolitical risk is not just something “out there”, that it is relevant to your work and that it is, in fact, manageable. And, second, to not have to re-write this speech for next year – I am looking at you, President Trump.
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The fact that you called this scenario on stage twelve months before it happened and then returned to the same forum while it was playing out live is the most powerful credibility signal a geopolitical analyst can have. That alone earns the audience's attention for whatever framework follows.
Step 3 is where most corporate geopolitical risk frameworks break down in practice and I think its worth pushing further. Boards hear about geopolitical risks constantly. Hormuz, Taiwan, trade fragmentation, sanctions cascades. The problem is that without a mechanism for quantifying and comparing risks, every risk feels equally urgent and none of them gets resourced adequatley because the leadership team cant prioritise across them.
The gap between "we know this risk exists" and "we know how much to hedge against it" is a probability gap. Until a geopolitical threat has a number attached to it, even a rough one, it sits in the category of things people worry about but dont act on. The moment you assign a probability, even imperfectly, you create a decision framework: a 15% risk gets monitored, a 35% risk gets hedged, a 60% risk gets restructured around. The number forces the conversation from "should we worry about this" to "how much should we allocate to managing it."
The monitoring framework in step 4 is where I think your five-step model has the most practical value for the audience in the room. Most executives experience geopolitical information as noise because they consume it through news rather than through a structured filter. Your distinction between signal and noise at the monitoring level is the one that determines wether the framework actually gets used or just becomes another slide in the board pack that everyone nods at and ignores.
Your Trotsky quote deserves a practical extension for the corporate audience: war may be interested in you but your exposure to it depends entirely on choices your firm made years ago about supplier concentration, geographic footprint, and currency denomination. The firms that are most exposed to Hormuz right now are the ones that optimised thier supply chains for cost and speed without stress-testing against a chokepoint closure. The framework you describe would have caught that exposure before the crisis arrived, which is the entire value proposition of proactive geopolitical risk management.
Excellent piece and an even better call twelve months early.