Imagine a car factory suddenly switching to producing military vehicles, a home appliances company beginning to manufacture missile components, and civilian production lines accustomed to meeting consumer needs becoming part of the national security apparatus. It may seem a strange scenario, but it has recurred repeatedly throughout history whenever crises have imposed new priorities on nations and companies.
This, in brief, is what the United States may witness following President Donald Trump's decision to activate the Defence Production Act to accelerate the manufacture of weapons and ammunition and address bottlenecks in military supply chains. The law grants the government broad powers to direct industrial production and to give government contracts priority over others when necessary.
I have always heard about the professionalism of the National Guard and its members' exceptional technical capabilities outside the military sphere — that its personnel are qualified to operate factories, power and water generation stations, large bakeries, and more during advanced stages of crises. And here we are witnessing a picture that precedes even that scene.
What is happening in the United States may unsettle some factories and their workers, but it highlights an important truth that is often lost on institutions and individuals alike: the value of flexibility in planning. Rigid plans may succeed in stable conditions, but they become a burden when circumstances change suddenly. Flexible plans, by contrast, assume from the outset that surprises are part of reality, not an exception to it.
History has proven that the institutions most capable of adaptation are those that survive and thrive. During the Second World War, many civilian factories in the United States and Britain switched to producing military equipment within a short period, contributing to the war effort and generating enormous economic returns for some companies.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, factories around the world redirected their production lines to manufacture masks, ventilators, and sanitisers, having previously produced entirely different goods.
One of the most common mistakes in planning is the belief that the quality of a plan is measured by how literally we adhere to it. In reality, adjusting a plan at the right moment may be an indicator of its success, not its failure.
This is why advanced institutions resort to what is known as scenario planning, where they do not settle for mapping a single path for the future but instead develop multiple alternatives to address different possibilities. Instead of asking, "What will we do if things go as expected?" the question becomes: "What will we do if circumstances change radically?"
Several global crises have revealed that the greatest losses did not arise from ill intent or weak resources, but from reliance on assumptions that later proved to be incorrect.
A company that depends on a single supplier, an institution that ties its success to a single market, or a leader who bases decisions on stable data — all of them become more vulnerable to shocks when sudden changes occur.
For this reason, I believe flexibility is no longer a managerial luxury; it has become an integral part of risk management itself.
The greater an institution's capacity to redistribute its resources, adjust its priorities, and move swiftly, the greater its chances of turning crises from threats into opportunities that competitors will struggle to seize.
Nor is this limited to nations and large corporations. Flexibility is equally required in individuals' lives.
An employee with diverse skills is better equipped to handle changes in the labour market, and an entrepreneur who continuously reviews their assumptions is more capable of weathering crises than a competitor who clings to a plan drawn up for circumstances that no longer exist. The crisis of the war with Iran is the most telling proof of that.
The importance of planning, therefore, does not lie in the accuracy of predicting the future — that is often impossible — but in building the capacity to adjust course quickly when reality imposes a new direction. Success in times of crisis does not always go to the strongest or the largest, but most often to those who are most flexible and most ready to adapt.