Most companies now accept that geopolitical risk belongs in corporate strategy, yet very few have ever stress-tested how they would actually respond. McKinsey’s recent article, The art, science, and technology of geopolitical scenario planning, puts numbers on the gap: fewer than a third of organisations rate their geopolitical risk management as mature, a third do no scenario planning at all, and fewer than 5 per cent run simulations that test leaders under pressure. The authors set out five foresight instruments — horizon scanning, scenario planning, contingency playbooks, simulations and adversarial tabletop exercises — and their central point deserves attention from every IP owner: foresight is not prediction, it is disciplined preparation.
That lesson applies with particular force to intellectual property, because IP positions are slow assets in a fast environment. A patent filing footprint set five years ago determines where you can enforce today; a licensing structure drafted before export controls tightened determines what you can lawfully supply tomorrow. When the shock arrives, your IP options are largely fixed — which means the thinking has to happen now.
The practical translation is to run these same instruments over the IP portfolio before events force the issue. Scenario planning asks: if a key market fragments, do our filings, freedom to operate positions and licence terms still support the business in each plausible future? Contingency playbooks answer the crisis question in advance — the reason we built the IP Playbook around pre-agreed strategic principles rather than step-by-step plans, which rarely survive first contact with adversity. And simulation is where assumptions actually get tested: an IP wargame plays out the moves of competitors, regulators and partners so that gaps surface in a workshop rather than in a dispute — the same “outcomes are built before the fight” pattern that ran through a recent month of court decisions in Built Before the Fight: What May’s IP Decisions Reward. Try McKinsey’s premortem framing on your own portfolio: it’s five years out and your IP failed to protect the business — what were the causes? If the answers come easily, you have a work plan. If they don’t, that’s the strongest argument yet for putting your IP strategy through a wargame while it’s still cheap to change.