Directors of privately held companies are increasingly singling out geopolitical uncertainty as one of the most unsettling features of today’s business environment, and with good reason. A cascade of disruptions over recent years, from trade wars and sanctions to armed conflict and supply chain fractures, has made it plain that the world does not neatly separate political events from commercial consequences. Yet, awareness and action are proving to be very different matters. And that gap, left unclosed, threatens to become its own form of structural board risk.
The data couldn’t be clearer on where directors stand — or rather, where they say they stand.
The June 2026 WTW “Global Directors and Officers Survey,” now in its 10th year and covering 975 senior decision-makers worldwide, delivers a striking headline: Geopolitical risk has entered the top seven board concerns globally for the first time in the survey’s history, vaulting from 15th place in 2025 to seventh in a single year. Among mid-market companies with revenues of $50 million to $1 billion, 63% of directors rate geopolitical risk as very or extremely important.
For North American respondents, AI-related risks spiked even higher, with 71% citing them as paramount while cyber risks topped concerns, with 83% citing it as extremely important. This is no coincidence. Cyber threats, data loss and AI anxiety aren’t running parallel to geopolitical risk — they are expressions of it. Globally, AI has seen a marked increase in the proportion of respondents that now rank it as an extremely important risk, if not in the top seven, still up from 5% in 2025 to 56% this year.
Angus Duncan, WTW’s global directors and officers (D&O) coverage specialist, put it directly. “Cyber threats, data loss and artificial intelligence have been named as top concerns across various industries and geographies, and, for the first time, so have geopolitical risks. As risks become more interconnected and harder to predict, robust risk management and adequate protection are key to enabling organizations to navigate uncertainty, make informed strategic decisions and sustain growth.”
That phrase — “more interconnected” — is the crux of the matter. Geopolitical risk is not a stand-alone variable. It is a cascading risk, meaning it has a capacity to compound other risks, particularly digital and supply chain vulnerabilities. A geopolitical shock — a tariff and/or sanctions regime, a conflict disrupting a key global shipping lane — doesn’t stay in its lane. It reverberates through supplier networks, drives up cyberattack exposure, creates regulatory compliance complexity and risks eroding the confidence that underpins long-range planning.
Where Geopolitics Meets the Ground
Of all the ways geopolitical risk manifests in business operations, supply chain disruption is where the rubber most visibly meets the road. It is also the most readily understood by directors who may feel distant from the language of geoeconomics or foreign policy.
In the WTW survey, supply chain disruption appears in the top seven risk concerns for North America, Africa and the Middle East. Deloitte’s November 2025 “Board Practices Quarterly” found that the top geopolitical risk for private companies is cyber incidents, followed closely by uneven trade policies and supply chain disruptions. These are not abstractions for a manufacturing company sourcing components in Asia or a logistics firm routing goods through Gulf ports.
The lesson of recent years is that supply chains built for efficiency in a stable, globalized world are brittle in a fragmented one. The disruption to Red Sea shipping lanes, the sanctions impact on commodity flows, and the cascading Trump tariff regimes of 2025 and 2026 each demonstrated how quickly a political event overseas can become an operational crisis at home. Private company boards that treat supply chain risk as a procurement or operations matter rather than a board-level strategic concern with geopolitical roots are working with an incomplete picture.
The Private Company Blind Spot
Public companies face external forcing mechanisms — SEC disclosure requirements, proxy advisors, institutional shareholders — that push geopolitical risk up the governance agenda whether boards are instinctively drawn to it or not. Private companies have none of these pressures. The discipline, if it exists, has to come from within — from owners, from lead directors, from governance-minded CEOs.
The Deloitte survey is sobering on this front. Private company boards rely overwhelmingly on internal management updates as their primary mechanism for geopolitical education. External advisors, dedicated scenario exercises or structured board-level frameworks are the exception rather than the rule. As one governance observer put it, that is the equivalent of asking the captain to also be the navigator in a storm.
But here is a point that often gets lost: Geopolitical risk is not only a concern for companies with international operations or global supply chains. Purely domestic private companies are not immune. Domestic political and economic volatility — tariff regimes that reshape domestic manufacturing costs, regulatory fragmentation, AI-driven disruption to workforce models, and the ever-present traditional risks of inflation and interest rate exposure — all carry geopolitical fingerprints today.
The era of geoeconomics, in which national security drives economic policy rather than the reverse, has collapsed the once-reliable distinction between the foreign and the domestic. National security considerations now filter decisions that were once made purely for commercial growth. Boards that recognize this shift early have a structural advantage. Those that don’t risk being caught being reactive in a landscape that rewards anticipation.
The Perception-Action Gap
Research by Heidrick & Struggles, BCG and INSEAD’s Corporate Governance Center finds that fewer than 40% of directors believe their organizations have an adequate strategy for managing geopolitical risk, even as it continues to rank as a top concern for the third consecutive year. This is the central paradox: Awareness has never been higher and adequate response has never been further behind.
A number of structural factors explain the gap. Board agendas are typically crowded. Cyber, AI, succession, regulatory compliance and climate risk all compete for finite meeting time. Many boards lack directors with direct experience in public policy, international operations or national security — the very domains where geopolitical risk is most legible. And perhaps most fundamentally, the orientation of many directors was formed in a different era, one of expanding globalization, harmonizing regulation and stable geopolitics. Those assumptions are no longer reliable guides.
The Deloitte data sharpens the picture for private companies specifically. Among private company respondents, board composition and relevant competencies are not a significant consideration for the majority. Geopolitical risk tends to be integrated into other agenda items rather than standing on its own, and it earns a stand-alone slot only when an actual incident has occurred. That is reactive governance by design.
A cyber analogy is instructive. A decade ago, cybersecurity was acknowledged as important but was rarely a standing board agenda item. Incidents forced the issue. Today, cyber sits in the top three concerns in every major director survey, with its own reporting cadences and committee structures. Geopolitics is on the same trajectory. The question is whether private company boards will wait for their own equivalent of a crisis before making it a standing item or get ahead of it.
What Good Looks Like
One institution that has not waited is CPP Investments (CPP), Canada’s $570 billion public pension fund. At a Fiduciary Investors Symposium at Harvard University in June 2026, chief risk officer Priti Singh outlined a four-scenario geopolitical risk framework — the “deglobalization radar” — built in partnership with Oxford University and drawing on more than 70 macroeconomic and geopolitical indicators. The four scenarios — deglobalization, re-Americanization, de-Americanization and complete fragmentation — are not background analysis. They inform every top-down and bottom-up investment decision the fund makes.
Singh’s own description of how the framework came to be is worth noting. “When initially the tariffs came in and all of the announcements, and every day you didn’t know which way you were going, you quickly realized that you needed a framework for how to tackle this, ” said Singh. The CPP model is admittedly an institutional investor operating at a scale most private companies will never approach. But the underlying discipline — building a standing analytical framework before the crisis, rather than improvising after it — is directly translatable.
A Prescription for Private Company Boards
The governance literature — from IMD’s Global Board Center to EY’s Center for Board Matters to the Harvard Law Corporate Governance Forum — converges on a consistent set of best practices. Adapted for the private company context, they reduce to four:
Make geopolitical risk a standing agenda item. Not a crisis-triggered conversation and not something folded into a broader risk update, but a standing item, reviewed with the same rhythm as financial and operational risk. The Deloitte survey found that only about one-third of companies include geopolitical risk as a frequent board agenda item. For private companies, the figure is almost certainly lower.
Run scenario exercises, not just briefings. The difference between being told about a risk and gaming out its consequences is the difference between awareness and preparedness. Scenario planning need not be as elaborate as CPP’s Oxford-build radar. A focused tabletop exercise — What happens to our supply chain if tariffs double? What does a prolonged Middle East conflict do to our energy costs? — is within reach of any board that chooses to prioritize it.
Review board composition with geopolitical fluency in mind. This does not necessarily mean recruiting a dedicated geopolitical expert to the board, though for companies with significant international exposure, that may well be warranted. It may mean asking whether current directors collectively have meaningful experience in regulated industries, government or international operations, and whether external advisors should be brought in to supplement where gaps exist.
Embed geopolitical considerations in strategic planning. The Russell Reynolds question is worth putting to every private company board: “Have we meaningfully stress-tested our supply chains, market exposures and operating model against adverse geopolitical scenarios?” If the honest answer is no, that is the starting point.
The Competitive Case
There is a final argument that deserves emphasis because it reframes the whole enterprise. Geopolitical risk governance is not only a defensive exercise. For private companies that get ahead of it, it is a source of competitive advantage.
The WTW survey’s most striking, forward-looking finding is that, when directors were asked which risks they anticipate facing in the years ahead, geopolitical instability, trade disruption and supply chain risk ranked as their foremost concerns, surpassing even cyber and data risks, which have dominated for five straight years. The boards that build the analytical muscle to navigate that landscape now will be better positioned to seize the opportunities that disruption creates, such as re-shored supply relationships, new market positions and M&A opportunities that emerge when competitors are caught flat-footed.
The defining feature of the current geopolitical landscape, as WTW’s survey makes plain, is uncertainty. And uncertainty, properly managed, is not only a threat. For the board that is prepared, it is a door.