The world can sometimes change too fast for perceptions to keep up. When the final Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476, there hadn’t been a functioning Roman state in the West for decades, but those writing in its lands continued to refer to themselves and their civilisation as Roman well into the next century. It was as though they couldn’t quite fathom what had happened.
Are we living in such a time, looking at radical change with alarm or wonder, yet too fixed in outdated assumptions to see what the world is changing into?
There wasn’t a Visigoth in sight at the 2026 Board Intelligence Governance Summit, and the mood was rather more optimistic than in the late fifth century. Yet a consistent theme was that organisations, and the boards that govern them, need to face up to — and change with — the times.
One of the most interesting discussions was with former UK government minister Rory Stewart, who neatly summarised the new geopolitical context: “We are looking at a world that is radically different in almost every way from the kind of world people anticipated as recently as four years ago.”
Stewart singled out two major kinds of geopolitical risk that weren’t on many people’s horizons in 2022: the threat to economic chokepoints, such as the Strait of Hormuz, and the Suez and Panama Canals, and the UK and EU’s current lack of AI sovereignty.
Events in the Gulf this year have shown how vulnerable global supply chains are, and how control of a single chokepoint can be used as a weapon. The AI risk comes from a different source, with organisations and economies increasingly dependent on American technology, the supply of which Stewart believes could be interrupted at short notice.
We should not assume these will be the only threats to emerge, Stewart said. These are unpredictable times. Responding to them requires adaptability, without losing sight of long-term goals.
Stewart gave the example of defence procurement in the West. “If we had been having this conversation after 9/11, we would think that the biggest security threats facing us were terrorists and failed states. Had we been having this conversation from 2014 onwards it would be about conflict with big states like Russia. Fast forward to February of this year and suddenly the problem turns out to be happening in the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.
“Imagine you're writing a defence policy, or you're procuring defence equipment. One moment you're trying to buy armoured Land Rovers to crash round Afghanistan, chasing people who have Kalashnikovs. The next moment you're trying to think how to deal with Russian tanks rolling across the Central European Plain.”
For European nations, Stewart said, the only way to protect against such sudden changes was to share the risk of taking lots of big bets. Similarly, to reduce dependency on the US, Stewart called for the UK and Europe to pool resources to build strength along the AI value chain, from rare earth minerals and chips to data centres and models.
“Europe is better off trying to target a number of different bits [of the ecosystem], rather than betting on itself to get ahead of Anthropic at the frontier,” Stewart said.
No shortage of questions for Rory Stewart at our fireside chat.
How boards can build resilience
Stewart had two pieces of advice for boards. The first was that organisations, too, could pool resources in certain cases. He recommended European organisations join forces to improve their bargaining power with the West Coast AI majors, for example.
“If you’re general counsels, try collectively to think what would it mean… to negotiate contracts with the American companies, which would prevent them in the future from being able to switch off your access,” Stewart said.
The second thing he recommended was for boards to adopt a more effective and nimble approach to scenario planning.
“Everybody saw the US fleet off the coast preparing to take on Iran from about November of last year. More and more ships. More and more Marines. Reports in the New York Times. Reports in the FT. Why the hell did none of us on the board think seriously about what that would mean?
“How are we going to improve our systems so that in the future, when we can see some crisis four months in advance, we're actually doing scenario planning and have everything in place to deal with it?”
Stewart added that businesses should not assume they have no power to influence events, or indeed influence governments, particularly if they do so as a group: “Never fall into the trap of believing government has the strategy. In my experience [in government]… it rarely does. We're too busy to think.”
This creates a real opportunity for organisations to come up with ideas and present a collective vision to government, Stewart said.
Clearly there’s a limit to what corporate affairs can achieve when faced with disruptions to global trade or AI upending the balance of power.
Yet if all that seems daunting to boards, remember that life went on even as the Roman Empire collapsed, just as it had in China when the Han dynasty fell more than two centuries earlier. Each was as much a story of transformation as ruin, and opportunity as well as danger. Now, as then, adaptation is the essence of survival.
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