How to Stress-Test Your Firm Against High-Impact Geopolitical Events Before the Headlines Hit

The conflict in Iran was only days old when I was running a working session with a group of CEOs and senior executives on Applied Geopolitics for Midcap Private Firms.

We weren't there to react to the news. We were there to think ahead of it.

Using Applied Geopolitics, we stress-tested their firms against high-impact, low-probability events. The kind that rarely appear in standard risk registers and almost always appear in the news.

What surprised some of the room was the asymmetry. The same conflict, the same trends, presented overlooked opportunities for certain firms and serious overlooked risks for others.

Most leadership teams never see the difference because they are reading these events through the same cognitive filters that kept the risk invisible in the first place.

A significant part of the work was helping executives identify and mitigate those biases in real time, to assess geopolitical trends through what the evidence demands, not through what feels familiar.

On Friday, Bloomberg published some charts that tell the story of how different markets and commodities are reacting.

- US pump prices at their highest since October 2022.

- Singapore jet fuel at levels not seen in nearly two decades.

- European natural gas surging past post-Ukraine peaks.

These are not simply energy charts. They are margin charts. Supply chain charts. Strategy alignment signals.

The executives in that room are not surprised by what they are seeing today. That was the purpose of the work. Not to predict. But to be prepared.

Geopolitics has become a core operating variable. The firms that treat it as such, before the headlines demand it, navigate what comes next with clarity rather than urgency.