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It starts with a graph.
One of those neat, segmented bars, color coded and percentage labeled. A visual summary of the March 2025 CBS survey:
13% of Dutch companies have already adjusted their business strategy due to foreign market tensions. Another 8% plan to. 47% aren’t thinking about it. The rest don’t think it applies.
You read it once. Then again.
At first glance, it looks like a cautious sign of adaptation. But if you sit with it, if you let the numbers breathe, they whisper something else.
Not transformation.
Not vision.
Just... reaction.
And there’s a world of difference.
Reflex ≠ Foresight
Let’s begin with the obvious: the world is shaking. Trade lines blur. Supply chains kink. Words like friendshoring and geopolitical exposure now appear in board minutes that once talked only of margin and logistics.
So, yes, strategy needs to move. But changing a supplier in Vietnam or a trade partner in Spain doesn’t make a strategy.
It makes a detour.
And too many companies are calling their detours a plan.
The Detour Dilemma
Among the companies that reported “adjusting” their business strategy, 30% said they simply changed their import or export markets.
Just changed the country. Nothing deeper.
No redesign. No core reflection.
In manufacturing, almost half of these companies said that was their main response. Transport equipment (46%). Electrical and machinery (45%). Metal (36%).
It’s like a captain steering around a storm without asking how weather patterns changed.
Or worse, why they never installed a barometer in the first place.
Inventory Isn’t Insight
Another fifth decided to increase stock—more materials, more parts, more everything.
It’s an understandable move.
But it’s the oldest move in the book.
When the world feels unreliable, companies do what households do before winter: they hoard.
And yet, stacking boxes isn’t a strategy. It’s a symptom. A symptom of uncertainty that wasn’t priced in early enough.
It’s planning with a nervous twitch, not with discipline.
Friendshoring & Reshoring: New Words, Same Blind Spots
Some companies are moving production either abroad (8%) or back to the Netherlands (2%). Retailers are especially active here.
But here’s the quiet problem: most are still choosing partners and destinations based on cost and convenience.
Not on legal resilience. Not on institutional quality. Not on cultural reliability.
We forget that “friends” in geopolitics don’t always stay friends.
And that bringing production “home” only works if your local system is ready legally, operationally, and fiscally to absorb it.
What We Don’t Know We’re Ignoring
Now here’s the detail that stopped me:
54% of companies adjusting their strategy picked “other” as their reason.
Meaning: the most common answer didn’t fit any predefined box.
That’s telling. And troubling.
It suggests that either:
-
We’re missing the vocabulary to describe the strategic shifts truly underway,
or - We’re disguising improvisation as intention.
And if it’s the second, which I fear it is, we’re walking into a future blindfolded, comforted by the idea that ticking a box equals transformation.
Domestic ≠ Disconnected
32.6% of surveyed companies said:
"This doesn’t apply to us. We’re fully domestic."
I understand the sentiment. But I don’t accept the logic.
A domestic business today is still connected through prices, regulation, digital networks, client sentiment.
The border isn’t a wall. It’s a membrane.
What happens elsewhere affects your here. Always.
Saying “not applicable” is, often, saying “not yet affected.”
And that’s not a shield. It’s a delay.
The Deeper Question
When I look at these numbers, I don’t ask “How many adjusted?”
I ask:
What were they trusting in before the adjustment and why?
Because the true cost of tension isn't in the reaction. It’s in the revelation.
It shows us what we never thought to question.
- We trusted in low-cost trade routes that were never ethically stable.
- We trusted in partners without checking their long-term institutional capacity.
- We trusted that yesterday’s assumptions had tomorrow built in.
They didn’t.
Strategy Means Rewriting the Question
I often tell clients:
"Strategy isn’t about what you change first. It’s about what you dare to see differently."
And that requires friction. Not fire drills.
Strategy is uncomfortable because it forces you to admit how much of your success was context and how little of it was structure.
It makes you look in the mirror and ask: What part of this company exists because the world was easy?
That’s not a boardroom discussion.
That’s a reckoning.
Final Thought
In 2025, too many companies are still treating risk as interruption.
Not as invitation.
And the first step isn’t to change suppliers or build a bigger warehouse.
It’s to change the questions you bring into the room.
Until then, we’re not adjusting strategy.
We’re just rehearsing for the next disruption.
And next time, it may not knock.
It may break the door.
Co-Founder of Xtroverso | Head of Global GRC
Paolo Maria Pavan is the structural mind behind Xtroverso, blending compliance acumen with entrepreneurial foresight. He observes markets not as a trader, but as a reader of patterns—tracking behaviors, risks, and distortions to guide ethical transformation. His work challenges conventions and reframes governance as a force for clarity, trust, and evolution.
