Iran war: Risk forecaster’s warning to NZ firms amid escalating Middle East conflict
Friday, 13 March 2026
A consultant whose work focuses on advising company boards and chief executives on risk forecasting and management says New Zealand organisations are ill-prepared to deal with, and minimise, the impacts from events such as the escalating war in the Middle East.
Roger Dennis, director of Christchurch-based strategic foresight consultancy Dennis & Partners, says US and Israel’s war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz would likely be one of many global events that cause significant disruption for exporters in the near future.
He urged businesses to “think seriously about future scenarios” that could cause similar shocks.
Organisations need to be strategising for more geopolitical volatility as part of business as usual, along with other scenarios such as fast-moving technological events and democracy issues, so they knew what response to take when the next event was to occur.
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Another event that would cause widespread disruption was not a matter of if, but when, he said.
“Organisations should be thinking very hard about second and third order implications, about what is going to happen in six, 12 and 18 months’ time, as well as thinking about an immediate response,” said Dennis, who specialises in an area called foresight.
He helps organisations “get above strategy”, covering a range of topics such as fast-moving technology, including AI; climate change and geopolitics.
He describes his work as a starting point for difficult and challenging conversations around boardroom tables.
“What I'm finding now is that organisations need to be much more aware of second and third order impacts of significant events,” Dennis told The Post.
“Boards in this country need to get used to the idea there are going to be some very uncomfortable discussions they need to have in the very near future.”
Most leaders of governments and large New Zealand companies had earned their leadership experience in a time of stability, but they need to level up their game, now the world was “heading into an era of volatility”, Dennis said.
“From the late 60s to the early 70s, it was a time of massive volatility, but after that, there’s been relative stability. Now we have a whole range of issues which are compounding so they amplify each other and they cascade. Nobody in leadership positions today has experience of dealing with that environment.
“Leaders need to be comfortable with more volatility. They should be thinking about second and third order impacts. They should be using their experience of the pandemic to think about how they'll cope with this crisis. They should not be lulled into a false sense of security if this resolves quickly, because something else will come along, which will be also categorised as a crisis.”
In 2015 Dennis spent four months analysing the impact of a global pandemic, and said he quickly found it was not the pandemic itself that would cause the issues for businesses, but the second order impact like supply chain disruptions.
“For most organisations, those impacts become very clear, but only in hindsight.”
Dennis suggested organisations should think about what processes they have in place to pick what the next crisis might be ahead of time to minimise disruptions.
He said his own research, stemming from a session he ran with 400 CEOs, had found that less than 30% of executives said they had a process in place to respond to the next crisis.
“If you think about increasing levels of volatility, all the shocks that have happened since the pandemic, the new normal is not stability.”
Almost all of New Zealand’s big companies were exporters and the country was a big export nation, and so the need to have multiple strategies to plan ahead for multiple worst case scenarios was critically important, he said.
“Businesses should be thinking about resilience, agility, speed, finding new markets, speed of setting up new supply chains. But also about opportunity, because there's opportunity in volatility.
“We're small, we're agile, we're nimble. We don't have a federal state split, like many other countries do. We have a history of innovation and adaptation, so as a nation, some of our largest companies should be working hand in hand with government to say, ‘this is another example of a shock. How do we start front footing this rather than reacting all the time,’” Dennis said.
There were signs of a war against Iran in January, and so organisations should have had a contingency plan, he said.
The conflict would have major impacts on local businesses, even if they did not believe it to be the case as of now, he said.
“Virtually the whole of New Zealand is exposed to these long, thin, fragile supply chains, because globalisation runs on oil.
“Most organisations should be thinking quite hard about this and using it as an impetus to kickstart their thinking about how they become more resilient to future shocks.”