Doing Nothing Isn't a Strategy

Everyone needs a hobby, and lately I’ve been designing games, partly out of interest in decision-making in uncertainty, and partly to get back to something I enjoyed as a teen, writing adventure games on early PCs to entertain friends. It helps me think about how to simulate situations that bring out a mix of executive and emotional decision-making. Probably no accident I ended up in this line of work.

One recent weekend project is a social decision-making game centered around a sentient fog that surrounds a village, threatening its inhabitants. Teams representing different factions must assess the situation in turns and make one of four decisions—probe the fog to understand it (and perhaps activate it), strengthen defenses, evacuate villagers, or choose paralysis—doing nothing.

This morning, before making some tweaks, browsing the FT brought me to a piece reporting how Accenture says consulting demand has dropped off notably as uncertainty has increased this year—around tariffs, war(s), mass deportation, threat of recession, etc. This isn’t just loss of big government contracts, but bread-and-butter strategic consulting to CEOs precisely around these uncertainties.

Now, nobody’s going to cry for Accenture (except senior partners), and perhaps a little of that work has been thrown to the LLMs—though they really aren’t fit for these kinds of contexts—but the observation resonated. In nearly 30 years of working in some form of decision support, sensemaking, or foresight role, I’ve seen this pattern repeat. The more uncertain the landscape, the more organizations close their strategic hatches, cut back on anticipation or any kind of prospective intelligence, dump costs, and focus on the next six weeks or six months. I hear this from colleagues near and far as well, again and again. Like the villagers in the fog, the departments or teams we sometimes work with choose paralysis—doing nothing as a strategy, under mandate from the top. Meanwhile, the actual drivers of uncertainty intensify.

As Susan Cox-Smith and I wrote about in our book “Future Cultures,” even though the number of new foresight roles inside organizations grew in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, just as quickly some disappeared or got folded into other functions (nothing kills focus like folding in, but that’s another essay, after a rant about ghosting contractors). The moment the immediate pain seemed to subside, time horizons shrank back to the near term.

And this happens every damn cycle. Organizations’ leaders and managers pull themselves back into their shells for the most part, either in overconfidence or abject surrender to uncertainty. It’s so consistent I’m beginning to believe it’s a foundational part of business school curriculum: Self-harm for Leaders.

There are always shades. In recent years, the closer an organization is to the impacts of uncertainty on their constituents (some international NGOs or foundations, for example), the more they have tended to stick it out, with some making the argument to funders that money spent preventing a catastrophe is put to more efficient use than a lot more money spent on cleaning up the aftermath. Anticipation is worth the human and capital investment. Some governments are learning to stick it out as well, notionally supporting foresight capabilities, especially those that live in strategically challenging neighborhoods.

Commercial organizations? Nah. Despite the heroic efforts of a few small voices inside trying to show the value of situational awareness beyond the balance sheet, many would rather distract (hello, AI), pivot (hello again, AI), or seek an acquisition or spin-out to temporarily shine up the topline. Buy a competitor, or mess with delivery models. Making snow cones from icebergs.

Is this just another sanctimonious “You Need Foresight” plea? I feel like we’ve made that argument enough over the years. Younger, more idealistic, or telegenic folks can take that up. Personally, I don’t believe it any less, but I don’t see much of a dent made where it matters. Will I give it up? No, I’m enjoying working in more specialized areas of anticipation, and frankly, you don’t just turn this feature off in your brain once it takes root. We’re as busy working on ways to get the patterns to the people who need them as ever.

I’d like to think it’s not too late for decision-making cultures to change, but the time and space to do so is closing down fast. Time to respond or maneuver is eroding as we watch. The space for foresight is collapsing into the present, making needed bets bigger, and the requirement to operate on two horizons simultaneously, or at least engage in critical awareness, the difference between mission success or failure.

For the current powers that be, chaos is the strategy—it draws attention, sucks in resources, and hardens support. Risk-maxxing is replacing risk management as the strategic model of the near future (stand by for another essay on that, I’ve got pages of ‘em). We’re already past protecting ROI, and it’s increasingly about protecting people and leaving them a half-decent place to live. The stakes are getting higher, just as the investment is disappearing. Sound familiar?

And what happens to the villagers? Spoiler alert: in at least a third of simulations, the village collapses from panic and abandonment. That may seem low, but any more frequently, and the game wouldn’t be worth playing. Too much like reality. Probing may have risks, but paralysis has far more. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a fog to attend to.