The other day I was fortunate to receive a report from Fordham Global Foresight, the independent advisory business founded by geopolitical strategist Tina Fordham.
It begins with a question its authors hear repeatedly from business leaders and senior executives: “When will things go back to normal?”
It’s probably a question I myself am guilty of asking, and I have certainly heard plenty of others state “When things return to normal.” But, what is ‘normal’? What does ‘normal’ look like in 2026?
So, before asking when normal will return, we should probably decide what we think normal was. According to Fordham, for many executives and investors in the West, it was the period in which global trade expanded, supply chains became longer and more efficient, the dollar remained dominant and geopolitical disturbances rarely developed into serious financial shocks. Governments disagreed, wars continued and domestic politics became increasingly fractious, but the broad architecture of the world economy appeared dependable.
That period lasted long enough to stop looking like an historical arrangement and start looking like the natural state of things. However, Fordham Global Foresight argues that it was neither. The report describes the present as a departure from the relative stability and predictability of the American-led post-war order, with many of the assumptions taught in business schools and reinforced through professional experience now being replaced by something “as-yet-undetermined”.
The word “undetermined” is doing a great deal of work here. It is one thing to acknowledge that the future will be difficult. It is another to accept that we do not yet know the form the difficulty will take. The natural response is to prepare, but preparation itself can produce a false sense of confidence because human beings are rarely preparing for the genuinely unknown. We are usually preparing for another version of something we have already seen.
That is not necessarily a failure of imagination. It is difficult to plan around an event for which we have no language, data or experience. Even the scenarios described as unprecedented tend to be enlarged or accelerated versions of familiar risks: a deeper recession, a wider war, a more disruptive cyberattack or a longer interruption to trade. We use the past because it is the only evidence available to us. The trouble begins when we mistake the boundaries of our experience for the boundaries of what is possible.
About the author
