By FRANKLIN NGWU & CHINASA ONWE Is the five-year strategic plan over—not fading, not evolving, but dead? Once a backbone of corporate strategy, its usefulness is becoming questionable in a business environment where certainty is increasingly elusive. The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) refers to this new reality as polycrisis: the simultaneous, rather than sequential, confluence of climate disruption, geopolitical instability, macroeconomic volatility, and technological disruption. This is not an abstract theory confined to global boardrooms; it is the daily operating environment, particularly in emerging markets like Nigeria. According to the Nigeria Executive Outlook 2025, published by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Lagos Business School (LBS), nearly 45 per cent of Nigerian executives identified foreign exchange and macroeconomic volatility as the most significant external threats to their organisations. Moreover, optimism continues to outpace capability. While 83 per cent of Nigerian firms expect to integrate Generative AI within two years, 63 per cent remain in the early stages of exploration and piloting, with leadership capability and talent shortages, not technology or capital, emerging as the principal constraints. This is the execution gap: the point at which ambition fails to translate into performance. Not just in Nigeria. According to the McKinsey & Company report, The State of Organizations 2026, whereas 88 per cent of organisations have embraced the use of AI, 81 per cent of them have not felt any benefit at the bottom line because they have simply digitised their tools while failing to transform the process of how things are done. Similarly, the 2026 Global Leadership Study by Harvard Business Impact reveals that 44 per cent of leaders feel confident about their ability to lead the process of technological transformation; the figure was 64 per cent just four years ago. To understand whether Nigerian firms are strategically vulnerable or resilient, boards need a more robust framework than financial performance alone. Five strategic lenses provide that perspective: Core Strategic Soundness, Technology Mastery, Global Adaptability, Talent Agility, and Ethical Impact. The first lens, Core Strategic Soundness, considers whether the organisation has a cohesive strategy that can even change when it needs to. With the world currently suffering from polycrisis, traditional strategic plans are becoming vulnerable, and learning, adaptation, and agility are perceived as more important than prediction. Over the years, some Nigerian firms have developed a high level of tactical resilience in the face of fluctuating exchange rates, inflation, and uncertainties in policymaking. In fact, 74 per cent of Nigerian executives believe there is a positive business climate, with GDP forecast to grow by over 4.4 per cent. However, assumed resilience should not be mistaken for strategic readiness. Around the world, 72 per cent of leaders claim geopolitics has disrupted their businesses, while only 26 per cent engage in scenario planning. The second lens, Technology Mastery, is less about buying tools than redesigning organisations to extract value from them. AI creates value only through “double transformation”: technology plus operating-model change. Nigerian firms show ambition, but some remain in the pilot stages. Globally, heavy tech investment often fails to reshape decisions, workflows, or value creation. Sometimes, enthusiasm runs ahead of execution. Global Adaptability, the third lens, assesses the ability of companies to react to shocks such as foreign exchange volatility, geopolitical changes, and disrupted supply chains. Resilience involves adapting, not merely surviving shocks. Nigerian CEOs indicated that FX and macroeconomic volatility are their biggest worries. While companies have proved resilient to domestic disturbances, many of them have not managed to develop the organisational skills to leverage continent-wide integration or changes in global value chains. The fourth lens, Talent Agility, highlights the fact that people, not technology, create a competitive edge. This is because, in Nigeria, as in other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, there is still a significant shortage of competent talent and leaders, which reflects a worldwide readiness deficit. With increasing technological development, including AI, success will depend on how well they nurture talent and leaders for sustainable growth. Ethical Impact entails trust as strategic capital. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 68 per cent of people believe that business leaders deceive the public, which shows that the issue of lack of trust exists all over the world. Even though there have been improvements in corporate governance in Nigeria, many business leaders rank awareness at 50 per cent, while practice is disturbingly at about 30 per cent. Applying these five lenses in a critic
Don't miss out on breaking stories and in-depth articles.
