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Published on
May 7, 2026
The extreme of 2008–2009 is now roughly average. That's not a prediction. That's what the NY Fed Global Supply Chain Pressure Index has been showing for the past six years. Continuous disruption isn't the exception anymore — it's the baseline.
The organizations capturing market share right now aren't the ones with better forecasts. They're the ones that modeled their response before the disruption hit the news.
You know the pattern. Something breaks — a port closes, a tariff lands, a supplier goes dark — and the fire drill begins.
"It starts with fact gathering. Phone calls and emails. Then it becomes a data exercise. Then it's the analysis and trying to figure out what happened. This is usually an Excel analysis, back of the napkin type of exercise." says Greg Mueller, VP of Customer Strategy at Optilogic, who spent 23 years at Best Buy and Cargill before joining the company. "
Sound familiar? Mueller describes what happens next: "All of that time that's taken up by trying to pull the analysis together is time that's spent that's not talking about how you actually go solve this."
Every hour spent building the spreadsheet is an hour not spent deciding what to do about the problem. And by the time the analysis lands, the window to act has often closed.
Here's what the organizations winning right now understand: when supply chain capacity tightens, the advantage goes to whoever moves first.
"If you can move decisively faster, you're going to have that competitive advantage. If transportation becomes tight in the marketplace or if there's impacts to a certain port, there's going to be pressure put on other transportation modes or other transportation lanes and other ports. If you can move decisively faster, you take up that capacity." Mueller explains.
This isn't about having better information. Everyone sees the same headlines. The difference is having already run the scenarios. When the disruption hits, you're not building a model — you're executing a playbook.
The organizations that modeled their response to a Southeast Asian port closure before it happened don't need three weeks to figure out their alternatives. They know their alternatives. They've quantified the tradeoffs. When the news breaks, they're already on the phone with their backup carriers while competitors are still pulling data.
Gartner's most recent CSCO survey reveals something striking: 88% of supply chain leaders say scenario planning positively impacts geopolitical risk management. The value isn't theoretical. The practitioners closest to the work overwhelmingly agree that modeling disruption before it hits creates real competitive advantage.
Here's the other number: only 19% have fully integrated scenario planning into their operations.
Source: Gartner CSCO Survey
That's not a small gap. That's a chasm. Nearly nine out of ten executives acknowledge the capability matters. Fewer than two out of ten have actually built it.
Ken Chadwick, an analyst at Gartner, frames the opportunity: "Advanced visibility and the foresight gained from scenario planning can equip the supply chain function to be a driving force to navigate risk and uncertainty."
The organizations in that 19% aren't just managing risk better. They're playing a different game entirely. When disruption creates scarcity — of capacity, of suppliers, of inventory — they've already identified the alternatives. They capture position while competitors are still defining the problem.
The traditional approach to supply chain disruption was built for a world where crises were episodic. Something major would happen every few years. You'd run the fire drill, stabilize, and return to normal operations.
That world is gone. The NY Fed data doesn't lie. What used to be a once-a-decade shock is now the ambient operating environment.
Mueller is blunt about what this means for the old playbook: "We're in just a period of massive disruption. And the extreme of 2008 and 2009 is really about average for the past six years."
When disruption is continuous, the scramble approach breaks down. You can't spend three weeks in Excel every time something shifts. You can't treat every scenario as a custom analytical project. The math simply doesn't work. By the time you've finished analyzing the first disruption, two more have arrived.
The organizations still running the old playbook aren't just slower. They're perpetually behind. They're always analyzing the last crisis while the next one is already unfolding.
The shift isn't about working harder or faster at the old approach. It's about fundamentally changing when the work happens.
Vik Srinivasan, VP of Solution Architecture at Optilogic, describes what leading organizations are building: customers are creating "playbooks" so that "when things are going in certain directions, they're able to activate strategies very quickly because they have well-informed playbooks that they've built in a digital stress-free environment."
A digital stress-free environment. That's the key.
When you model scenarios during a crisis, you're under pressure. Stakes are high. Time is short. Decisions get made with incomplete analysis because the clock is running.
When you model scenarios before the crisis, you have the space to think clearly. You can run more alternatives. You can quantify the second-order effects. You can pressure-test assumptions. The playbook you build in that environment is simply better than the analysis you'd run under fire.
Mueller describes how this changes the cadence of decision-making: "It's not this big, long model and heavy process. It becomes, you can run scenarios within a meeting itself to be able to get rapid decisions made."
Within a meeting. Not within a quarter. Not within a sprint. Within the conversation where the decision needs to happen.
Neeru Bhopal, Head of Product at Cosmic Frog, frames the distinction precisely: "Supply chains that navigate disruption best aren't the ones that react the fastest. They're the ones that have already modeled the scenarios before the news breaks."
This is worth sitting with. Reaction speed isn't the differentiator. Everyone will eventually see the same disruption. The news will reach every competitor within hours.
The organizations winning right now aren't winning because they react faster. They're winning because by the time the reaction phase begins, they've already done the analytical work. Their response isn't reactive at all. It's the execution of a strategy they developed weeks or months earlier, waiting for exactly this trigger.
That's the capability gap the Gartner numbers expose. The 88% who acknowledge the value of scenario planning see the disruptions coming. The 19% who've built the capability have already decided what to do about them.
Most conversations about supply chain resilience frame scenario planning as risk mitigation. A defensive capability. Insurance against the unexpected.
That framing misses the bigger opportunity. The same capability that protects you from disruption also positions you to exploit it.
When a competitor's primary supplier fails and yours is already diversified, that's defense. When you've modeled your acquisition targets' networks and move on a distressed asset before the competition understands the opportunity, that's offense.
When transportation capacity tightens and you've already locked in alternatives, that's defense. When you capture that capacity before competitors even understand it's scarce, that's offense.
The organizations with always-on scenario capability don't just survive disruption better. They use disruption as a competitive weapon. Every shock that destabilizes a competitor is an opportunity to take market position — if you've done the analytical work in advance.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: the capability to model disruption before it hits isn't new. The mathematics have existed for decades. The computing power is cheap. The data is available.
The 81% who haven't built this capability haven't been blocked by technology. They've been blocked by the assumption that episodic fire drills were good enough.
That assumption was reasonable in a world where major disruptions were rare. It's not reasonable anymore.
The question isn't whether scenario planning creates competitive advantage. The Gartner data says practitioners overwhelmingly believe it does. The question is whether you're going to build the capability before your competitors do — or after they've already used it to take your market share.
The organizations winning right now made their choice. They stopped treating supply chain design as a periodic project and started treating it as a continuous capability. When disruption hit, they weren't starting from scratch. They were executing prepared playbooks.
You can't plan your way out of a bad structure. But you can design your way into a better one — if you do the work before you need the answer.
Optilogic helps supply chain leaders move from reactive fire drills to always-on scenario capability. Model the disruptions before they hit. Build the playbooks in a stress-free environment. Run the what-ifs within the meeting where the decision needs to happen.
The organizations capturing advantage right now aren't working harder. They're working earlier.
The extreme of 2008–2009 is now roughly average. That's not a prediction. That's what the NY Fed Global Supply Chain Pressure Index has been showing for the past six years. Continuous disruption isn't the exception anymore — it's the baseline.
The organizations capturing market share right now aren't the ones with better forecasts. They're the ones that modeled their response before the disruption hit the news.
You know the pattern. Something breaks — a port closes, a tariff lands, a supplier goes dark — and the fire drill begins.
"It starts with fact gathering. Phone calls and emails. Then it becomes a data exercise. Then it's the analysis and trying to figure out what happened. This is usually an Excel analysis, back of the napkin type of exercise." says Greg Mueller, VP of Customer Strategy at Optilogic, who spent 23 years at Best Buy and Cargill before joining the company. "
Sound familiar? Mueller describes what happens next: "All of that time that's taken up by trying to pull the analysis together is time that's spent that's not talking about how you actually go solve this."
Every hour spent building the spreadsheet is an hour not spent deciding what to do about the problem. And by the time the analysis lands, the window to act has often closed.
Here's what the organizations winning right now understand: when supply chain capacity tightens, the advantage goes to whoever moves first.
"If you can move decisively faster, you're going to have that competitive advantage. If transportation becomes tight in the marketplace or if there's impacts to a certain port, there's going to be pressure put on other transportation modes or other transportation lanes and other ports. If you can move decisively faster, you take up that capacity." Mueller explains.
This isn't about having better information. Everyone sees the same headlines. The difference is having already run the scenarios. When the disruption hits, you're not building a model — you're executing a playbook.
The organizations that modeled their response to a Southeast Asian port closure before it happened don't need three weeks to figure out their alternatives. They know their alternatives. They've quantified the tradeoffs. When the news breaks, they're already on the phone with their backup carriers while competitors are still pulling data.
Gartner's most recent CSCO survey reveals something striking: 88% of supply chain leaders say scenario planning positively impacts geopolitical risk management. The value isn't theoretical. The practitioners closest to the work overwhelmingly agree that modeling disruption before it hits creates real competitive advantage.
Here's the other number: only 19% have fully integrated scenario planning into their operations.
Source: Gartner CSCO Survey
That's not a small gap. That's a chasm. Nearly nine out of ten executives acknowledge the capability matters. Fewer than two out of ten have actually built it.
Ken Chadwick, an analyst at Gartner, frames the opportunity: "Advanced visibility and the foresight gained from scenario planning can equip the supply chain function to be a driving force to navigate risk and uncertainty."
The organizations in that 19% aren't just managing risk better. They're playing a different game entirely. When disruption creates scarcity — of capacity, of suppliers, of inventory — they've already identified the alternatives. They capture position while competitors are still defining the problem.
The traditional approach to supply chain disruption was built for a world where crises were episodic. Something major would happen every few years. You'd run the fire drill, stabilize, and return to normal operations.
That world is gone. The NY Fed data doesn't lie. What used to be a once-a-decade shock is now the ambient operating environment.
Mueller is blunt about what this means for the old playbook: "We're in just a period of massive disruption. And the extreme of 2008 and 2009 is really about average for the past six years."
When disruption is continuous, the scramble approach breaks down. You can't spend three weeks in Excel every time something shifts. You can't treat every scenario as a custom analytical project. The math simply doesn't work. By the time you've finished analyzing the first disruption, two more have arrived.
The organizations still running the old playbook aren't just slower. They're perpetually behind. They're always analyzing the last crisis while the next one is already unfolding.
The shift isn't about working harder or faster at the old approach. It's about fundamentally changing when the work happens.
Vik Srinivasan, VP of Solution Architecture at Optilogic, describes what leading organizations are building: customers are creating "playbooks" so that "when things are going in certain directions, they're able to activate strategies very quickly because they have well-informed playbooks that they've built in a digital stress-free environment."
A digital stress-free environment. That's the key.
When you model scenarios during a crisis, you're under pressure. Stakes are high. Time is short. Decisions get made with incomplete analysis because the clock is running.
When you model scenarios before the crisis, you have the space to think clearly. You can run more alternatives. You can quantify the second-order effects. You can pressure-test assumptions. The playbook you build in that environment is simply better than the analysis you'd run under fire.
Mueller describes how this changes the cadence of decision-making: "It's not this big, long model and heavy process. It becomes, you can run scenarios within a meeting itself to be able to get rapid decisions made."
Within a meeting. Not within a quarter. Not within a sprint. Within the conversation where the decision needs to happen.
Neeru Bhopal, Head of Product at Cosmic Frog, frames the distinction precisely: "Supply chains that navigate disruption best aren't the ones that react the fastest. They're the ones that have already modeled the scenarios before the news breaks."
This is worth sitting with. Reaction speed isn't the differentiator. Everyone will eventually see the same disruption. The news will reach every competitor within hours.
The organizations winning right now aren't winning because they react faster. They're winning because by the time the reaction phase begins, they've already done the analytical work. Their response isn't reactive at all. It's the execution of a strategy they developed weeks or months earlier, waiting for exactly this trigger.
That's the capability gap the Gartner numbers expose. The 88% who acknowledge the value of scenario planning see the disruptions coming. The 19% who've built the capability have already decided what to do about them.
Most conversations about supply chain resilience frame scenario planning as risk mitigation. A defensive capability. Insurance against the unexpected.
That framing misses the bigger opportunity. The same capability that protects you from disruption also positions you to exploit it.
When a competitor's primary supplier fails and yours is already diversified, that's defense. When you've modeled your acquisition targets' networks and move on a distressed asset before the competition understands the opportunity, that's offense.
When transportation capacity tightens and you've already locked in alternatives, that's defense. When you capture that capacity before competitors even understand it's scarce, that's offense.
The organizations with always-on scenario capability don't just survive disruption better. They use disruption as a competitive weapon. Every shock that destabilizes a competitor is an opportunity to take market position — if you've done the analytical work in advance.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: the capability to model disruption before it hits isn't new. The mathematics have existed for decades. The computing power is cheap. The data is available.
The 81% who haven't built this capability haven't been blocked by technology. They've been blocked by the assumption that episodic fire drills were good enough.
That assumption was reasonable in a world where major disruptions were rare. It's not reasonable anymore.
The question isn't whether scenario planning creates competitive advantage. The Gartner data says practitioners overwhelmingly believe it does. The question is whether you're going to build the capability before your competitors do — or after they've already used it to take your market share.
The organizations winning right now made their choice. They stopped treating supply chain design as a periodic project and started treating it as a continuous capability. When disruption hit, they weren't starting from scratch. They were executing prepared playbooks.
You can't plan your way out of a bad structure. But you can design your way into a better one — if you do the work before you need the answer.
Optilogic helps supply chain leaders move from reactive fire drills to always-on scenario capability. Model the disruptions before they hit. Build the playbooks in a stress-free environment. Run the what-ifs within the meeting where the decision needs to happen.
The organizations capturing advantage right now aren't working harder. They're working earlier.
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