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.
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The experience of the UK’s pandemic illustrates the problem. Britain did not enter 2020 without emergency plans, government exercises or officials responsible for public-health preparedness. Yet the first report of the UK Covid Inquiry concluded that the country had prepared for the wrong pandemic. Planning had concentrated heavily on influenza, while insufficient attention was given to the different characteristics of a novel coronavirus and the interventions it might require. The inquiry found that an outdated strategy was effectively abandoned when confronted by Covid-19, leaving policy to be constructed as the emergency developed.
The broad danger had been recognised. Experts had long warned that a pandemic could arrive, while earlier coronavirus outbreaks offered evidence that the next emergency might not resemble influenza. What was missing was not awareness that disease could spread across borders, but an adequate appreciation of how a different pathogen would interact with hospitals, care homes, schools, labour markets, supply chains and public behaviour.
Preparation had turned a large and uncertain category of danger into a more manageable story. The story was coherent, documented and tested, but it was still only one story. Once institutions had invested time and authority in it, challenging the underlying assumptions became harder. Plans designed to reduce vulnerability can also create intellectual dependence on the scenario around which they were built.
The Fukushima nuclear accident offers another example. Japan was hardly unaware of earthquakes or tsunamis, and the Fukushima Daiichi plant had safety systems intended to deal with both. The independent commission established by Japan’s National Diet nevertheless concluded that the disaster could not be attributed solely to an unforeseeable natural event. It found that the risks were foreseeable and that regulators, government and the plant’s operator had failed to implement basic safeguards, including adequate preparation for a complete loss of power.
Here, too, the danger was known in the abstract. The weakness lay in the assumptions used to contain it. Certain events were considered too improbable to justify further action, established beliefs about safety were insufficiently challenged and institutional confidence displaced curiosity. The earthquake and tsunami did not invent the vulnerability, but they did expose it.
There is an understandable comfort in reducing uncertainty to a collection of named risks. You can give each perceived danger a box of its own, you can assign a probability to it, maybe run a stress test. And so what does all this do? It forms a process which results in an organisation looking more prepared. But it seems that eventually the model ceases to be treated as a simplified representation of reality and begins to define reality itself.
This is partly why crises so often look obvious in retrospect. The relevant evidence was frequently available beforehand, but it sat outside the prevailing framework or appeared too gradual to demand attention. Fordham’s report notes that financial markets react more readily to sudden events than to changes in the underlying environment. The erosion of public trust, the weakening of international institutions and the gradual loss of respect for established rules can continue for years without producing a single dramatic moment at which investors agree that the world has altered.
The report describes geopolitical risks as being “hidden in plain sight”, rather than appearing as the Black Swans they are often later claimed to have been. If you look hard at the events which are so-called Black Swans then quite often they’ve been brewing for some time, they are not isolated headlines but parts of a broader pattern.
If every disruption is assumed to be temporary, then waiting is easily mistaken for prudence. Fordham’s report records executives saying that they would prefer to see how the dust settles before making decisions, while warning that an orderly transition to a settled new environment is unlikely. A decision postponed is still a decision, particularly when the assumptions behind the existing strategy remain in force.
The authors also observe that there are fewer sceptics about geopolitical risk in emerging markets, where such risks are “more familiar beasts”. This is relevant to the very different ways in which gold is regarded around the world.
This does not mean that emerging-market investors possess a special ability to predict crises, or that Western investors are uniquely complacent. It suggests that experience influences which forms of protection appear rational. Those who have lived through the failure of institutions are less likely to assume that institutional continuity is guaranteed. Those whose banks, currencies and payment systems have worked reliably for decades can understandably begin to regard that reliability as an inherent feature rather than a contingent achievement.
Gold is useful in this context precisely because it does not require the owner to forecast the source of the next disruption. One need not identify in advance which currency will weaken, which government will impose restrictions, which bank will experience difficulty or which payment network will become unavailable. Physical gold does not remove these risks, nor does it promise immunity from financial loss. It represents an acceptance that not every useful form of preparation must depend upon a precise prediction.
Holding gold can be an expression of intellectual humility, a recognition that our models are incomplete and that the future may arrive through a route we have not included in the base case.
Human beings are not resilient because we are especially good at forecasting, in fact I would argue that history offers ample evidence to the contrary. We are resilient because we adapt after our forecasts fail and we reorganise. We reorganise whether its production, by finding alternative routes, repair damaged systems and construct new institutions when the old ones cease to function. During periods of genuine difficulty, attention often returns to fairly simple requirements: food, shelter, energy, security, community and a dependable means of preserving and exchanging the results of our labour.
The aim of preparation, then, cannot be to anticipate every event. It should be to arrange our affairs so that being wrong is survivable. For a business, that may mean redundancy, flexible supply chains and a willingness to question assumptions that have become embedded in strategy. For a household or investor, it may mean liquidity, manageable debt, diversification and some ownership of assets that do not all rely upon the same institutions continuing to operate in the same way.
There may be no route back to the version of normal that many of us remember. That does not imply there is no route forward. The future has always been undetermined, even during those periods when it felt unusually predictable. Our mistake was not failing to know what would come next. It was allowing a favourable chapter of history to persuade us that uncertainty had been brought under control.
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