Forget the news: for supply chains, the reality is better than many think

View the world through a geopolitical lens right now, and it’s difficult to avoid the gloom. Trump’s unpredictable tariffs and trade frictions, China’s intent with Taiwan, Trump’s intent with Greenland and NATO, the running sore that is the war in Ukraine, what’s happening in Gaza and Venezuela, tensions in the Red Sea and with Iran—the list is seemingly endless and growing.

View the world through a supply chain lens, though, and things seems indisputably—and paradoxically—sunnier. Trade flows continue to flow, goods move from road to rail to sea and safely arrive at their destination, customers keep reordering, and businesses keep delivering.

Is everything smooth, calm and predictable? No, of course not. But the chaos, disorder, fragmentation and risk that we see in the geopolitical arena isn’t being replicated in global supply chains. Businesses right along supply chains have built adaptive systems, reconfigured their sourcing and trade flows, and become infinitely better at dealing with risk. Today’s mantra isn’t one of panic—instead, it’s one of continuity under pressure.

Am I surprised? Yes, to be honest. Not by it happening, I hasten to add: as I wrote here in my valedictory blog post to 2024, in 2025 businesses would need to regard the old world order as dead, throw out many of the precepts that had guided the supply chain management profession for the past 45 years, and plan from a different playbook. It had to happen. Faced with a different world, responding differently was the only rational course of action.

No: what surprises me is the speed with which global supply chains responded. Yes, they had to do things differently: that much was very, very clear. But as we saw with supply chains in the Covid-19 pandemic, the necessity of change was recognized quickly, and executed resolutely. 2025 turned out far better than many of us expected, from the viewpoint of 2024.

But changed thinking hasn’t been implemented everywhere, or evenly. It remains something of a work in progress. Businesses, one feels, have addressed the major pain points, but not all the pain points. It’s a different playbook—that much has been recognized and accepted—but not all the individual tactics have yet been adopted.

A different way of thinking

Which messages have got through? There are several, I think.

First, ‘lowest cost’ is no longer so universally or automatically accepted as the best solution. Sourcing regionally, or locally, may cost a little more—but if it slashes thousands of miles off your supply chains, it may be the smartest solution.

Second, inventory, dual sourcing, and nearshoring are no longer viewed only in the context of insurance policies, to be called upon in need. Instead, they’re hardwired into global supply chains as business-as-usual strategic assets. Slack, in short, is no longer waste: it’s resilience.

And third, there’s been a realisation that continuity is more important than optimisation. Forget tightly-honed supply chains, optimised to a fine degree of precision. Businesses now recognize that they are rewarded for availability, not perfection. When demand comes knocking, it’s fulfilment capability that matters, not some theoretical construct in a supply chain management textbook. Put another way, it’s inventory and supply chains that will reliably deliver to your factories that count. That is what customers want.

Unfinished business

Which messages haven’t yet been fully absorbed? What’s still on the ‘to-do’ list? Where are the gaps?

Here, I think, are the main ones—the things that we as supply chain professionals need to work on in 2026 and beyond.

First, where businesses source from, and who they trade with, sends signals about those businesses. Yes, some of those signals are around ethics and corporate responsibility: that is unavoidable. Yes, those signals can have a political dimension: in the times in which we are living, it can be foolhardy in the extreme to provoke the wrath of governments—even if they’re governments thousands of miles away from corporate HQ.

But mostly, those signals—which are picked up by customers, regulators, and investors—reveal how much those businesses care about continuity, and care about being able to support customers’ operations in bad times as well as good. Never forget: customers have choices—and right now, more and more of them are valuing resilience more than they value cheapness.

Second, the very nature of supply chain leadership has changed. In today’s world, attempting to control entire supply chains—as used to happen—is futile, and doomed to failure. Things change too quickly. When something happens, somewhere in a supply chain, to interrupt the flow of goods—or threatens to interrupt the flow of goods—decisions need to be made quickly, and locally, by those close to the issue. There’s no time for people potentially thousands of miles away, and multiple time zones away, to get involved.

‘Control’, in short, has to become ‘orchestration’. Decision-making must be decentralised, and scenario-based, and set around parameters and contingencies. Supply chain leaders must orchestrate supply chain ecosystems and partners by setting expectations, not laying out rules. Define the outcome, not the means.

Different rules, different game

It is, as I’ve said, a very different world. But a world with which we as supply chain professionals are already adapting, and—for the most part—adapting well. Although there is, as I’ve said, more work to be done.

Yes, it isn’t the world that most of us expected—but it’s the world we’ve been given, and the one to which we must respond.

The winners in 2026, in short, won’t be those who wait for stability to return, but those who embrace disruption, and respond accordingly—agilely, resiliently, and at speed.

For similar articles on resilience visit my website supplychainrisk.io

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