Polycrisis age: Are Nigerian firms strategically vulnerable or resilient?

Professor Franklin Nnaemeka Ngwu and Chinasa Onwe are with the Department of Strategy & Entrepreneurship, Lagos Business School

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 Centre for Creative Leadership calls this new reality a 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 and Lagos Business School, 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 constraint.

This is the execution gap: the point at which ambition fails to translate into performance. Not just Nigeria. According to the McKinsey & Company report on The State of Organisations 2026, whereas 88 per cent of the 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 in their ability to lead technological transformation; that 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 could 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 the business climate is positive, with GDP forecast to grow by over 4.4 per cent. However, assumed resilience should not be mistaken for strategic readiness. Worldwide, 72 per cent of leaders say 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 pilot stages. Globally, heavy tech investment often fails to reshape decisions, workflows, or value creation. Sometimes, enthusiasm outpaces execution.

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Global Adaptability is the third lens that 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. The 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 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, like 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 a strategic capital. According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 68 per cent of people believe business leaders deceive the public, showing that distrust exists worldwide. 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 critical evaluation of Nigerian firms reveals a mixed result of vulnerability and resilience. While some have shown strong entrepreneurial adaptability and resilience in overcoming various economic shocks, they still lack resilience in strategy, organisational change, leadership, and governance. This is the gap that moves the discussion from organisational capabilities to leadership capabilities.

The solution is that the leadership premium will be moving to what only humans can do and can’t be automated. The Harvard Business Impact highlights, above all, emotional intelligence (45 per cent) and resilience (43 per cent), which are identified as leadership skills essential for 2026 to address business needs. The more intelligent machines become, the more valuable human qualities like judgment, empathy, adaptability, and resilience become. But skills are not sufficient without trust. That change requires a new type of leadership, reflective leadership. Moreover, reflective leaders are shown to be more than twice as likely as their not-as-reflective peers to believe their organisations can adapt to change rapidly (30 per cent versus 17 per cent), demonstrating that reflection is a measurable trait of organisational resilience rather than simply another soft skill. In summary, these findings raise questions for the board and senior management not only on how they formulate business strategies, but also on how they exercise leadership in their organisations. Companies that succeed in the global village, the world’s interconnected economies, will not be those that doggedly hold on to control, but those that proactively become gardeners of the future through shared leadership and governance.