READING GEOPOLITICS: A FRAMEWORK FOR WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS

READING GEOPOLITICS: A FRAMEWORK FOR WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS

I have been using a three-layer geopolitical framework for years. I have been using a three-layer geopolitical framework for years. I recently realised I was teaching the less useful version of it.

The framework organises global dynamics into three interconnected levels: the skeleton (global architecture — the rules, institutions, and deep assumptions about how power and trade are organised); the systems layer (the functional forces running through that architecture — economics, energy, demographics, technology); and the organs and limbs (the events and crises that make the news). The body metaphor is deliberate. The skeleton gives it shape. The systems keep it alive. The organs and limbs are where you feel it.

In its original form, this was a scanning tool. Look at all three levels, not just the most visible one. Distinguish the strategic from the operational from the noise. That discipline still holds.

But the more powerful application is different. The framework can be used bidirectionally — and when it is, it becomes revelatory rather than descriptive.

The cascade as a lens

You can take a skeletal shift and trace downward through its systemic consequences to the events it produces. Or – and this is the move most leaders haven't made – you can start with what you are already reacting to at the events level and trace upward, using the visible surface to illuminate what is moving beneath.

The relationship is not causal. An event does not necessarily create systemic or skeletal shifts. What it can do is reveal them, bringing into focus forces that were already moving but that might otherwise remain invisible, and surfacing assumptions that organisations are treating as settled when they are in fact under strain.

Take the war in Iran. Most organisations are responding to the immediate disruptions: energy price volatility, broken shipping lanes, regional instability. These require operational responses. But if you stop there, you are managing symptoms.

Trace upward to the systemic level and the conflict reveals something broader: accelerating energy and trade fragmentation, the continued entrenchment of drone and asymmetric warfare as the dominant mode of conflict, and the hardening logic of self-sufficiency as states conclude that interdependence has become a vulnerability.

Trace upward once more to the skeletal level and what the conflict illuminates – not what it caused, but what it makes harder to ignore – is the deepening erosion of the norms that once made certain actions broadly unthinkable, the consolidation of rival great power blocs, and the accelerating turn by nations toward energy and supply chain autonomy. These shifts predate the Iran conflict significantly. The war didn't create them. It makes them sharper and harder to set aside.

Additional value then comes with taking those structural insights and cascading downwards again to review, if these things are true, what then are the implications on other systems and the possible consequences those might have on events that you haven’t yet noticed.

Turning the framework on your organisation

Having traced a development through the layers, the discipline is to ask a specific sequence of questions. What developments are currently consuming your leadership team's attention? What systemic forces do those developments reveal? What skeletal assumptions do those systems depend on? And — the question that matters most — which of those assumptions is your current strategy treating as fixed when it may not be?

[An aside: Two gaps appear with remarkable consistency in the conversations I’ve had with senior leaders. Demographic shift — not as an abstract trend but as a skeletal force already reshaping the fiscal capacity of states and the workforce assumptions of organisations. And the erosion of institutional trust — not a soft concern, but a structural variable that changes how coalitions form and how organisations earn the right to operate in contested environments. Both move too slowly to generate a headline. And, both are already undermining assumptions that most organisations haven't examined.]

What the action requires

Knowing at which level a geopolitical force is operating at changes the nature of the response it requires. Skeletal-level shifts sit in genuinely complex territory — cause and effect are only visible in retrospect, no single right answer exists, and reaching for expert analysis tends to produce false confidence rather than clarity. The tools appropriate for a complicated problem are the wrong tools here. What complex challenges require is different people in the room, different questions being asked, and the willingness to act in ways that are safe to fail rather than waiting for certainty that won't arrive.

The question worth sitting with

Signal is not what is important globally. Signal is what changes how you have to make decisions. Noise is what changes headlines but not your strategic choices.

Which parts of your current strategy depend on skeletal assumptions that have not been explicitly examined? Not the obvious ones but the ones baked silently into your decisions about which markets will remain accessible, which partners will remain reliable, which rules will still apply. In 2026, with multiple skeletal-level shifts occurring simultaneously, those assumptions deserve scrutiny they are not getting.

I work with leadership teams to run this process — helping organisations identify where geopolitical forces are creating unexamined exposure and where agency still exists. If this is relevant to your context, I would be glad to talk.

Best regards,

Xenia

Wickett Advisory

Sign up to my monthly newsletter here