Corporate boards run a lot of scenario planning for a wide variety of possible outcomes. We spend time with regulators, with politicians, with employees, with academics … to try to get a sense of their broader expectations around the future investment environment or the community environment in which the businesses operate.
The best businesses focus heavily on making sure the information flow that actually ends up in the boardroom is accurate and as timely as possible, whether they are talking about the impact of interest rate increases and the higher cost of borrowing, or the way the political winds are blowing.
In terms of things like protectionism, there is a lot of data around this. The average trade negotiation takes seven years, so these things don’t happen overnight; there’s a little more of a slow burn. So very often you do have time to embed different scenarios and to engage with public policy makers and politicians to get more visibility on what is happening in the policy environment.