During the recent escalation across the region, I found myself having a series of conversations with CEOs, investors, and board directors facing the same uncomfortable reality. Despite having more information than ever before, many still felt uncertain about what to do next.
What struck me was that the challenge was not a lack of intelligence. The intelligence was everywhere. The challenge was leadership.
As pressure mounted across energy markets, shipping routes, and investment decisions, the organizations that responded best were not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated risk functions. They were the ones led by executives capable of making consequential decisions before the picture became clear.
In my conversations with CEOs and board members across the Gulf over the past several weeks, I have yet to encounter a leader who lacked information. What separated those who moved decisively from those who hesitated was not access to intelligence, but the ability to act without certainty.
Geopolitical disruption unfolds in three distinct layers
What I have observed, across every significant disruption in the region, is that crisis does not arrive all at once. It moves in layers — each with a different timeline, a different demand on leadership, and a narrower window for response.
| Layer | Timeframe | What Happens |
| Layer 1 — Immediate disruption | Hours | Markets react. Airspace closes. Supply chains stall. Liquidity tightens. Most organisations have protocols for this. Most crisis frameworks stop here. |
| Layer 2 — Regional repricing | Days | Energy, shipping, and insurance markets reprice risk far beyond the immediate conflict zone. The Strait of Hormuz carries approximately one fifth of global oil supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration — and its disruption reaches markets with no direct presence in the region at all. |
| Layer 3 — Structural repositioning | Months | Investor confidence shifts. Capital moves toward lower-volatility jurisdictions. Infrastructure pipelines slow or stall entirely. The long-term positioning of entire markets is reshaped — often without a single event that would register in a standard risk review. |
This is the layer with the most durable consequences. It is also the one that fewest leadership teams are built to anticipate. The signals are weaker. The timeline is longer. And the moment that calls for a decision is rarely obvious until it has already passed.
The leadership gap opens at layers 2 and 3. This is where I have seen leadership teams begin to struggle. The immediate crisis is usually manageable. The harder challenge is deciding what today’s events mean six months from now—and having the conviction to act before everyone else reaches the same conclusion.
Information was not the constraint
Geopolitical crises do not create a shortage of information. They create a surplus of it. Market data, expert commentary, internal reports, and media coverage arrive simultaneously. At a certain point, the volume stops being useful. It starts substituting for judgment.
The leaders who performed best knew what they were looking for. They stayed close to trusted networks outside their own organisations, kept talking to clients and counterparts on the ground, and resisted the pull toward internal meetings. They distinguished between what had actually changed and what had simply become louder.
Among the organisations that struggled, two patterns repeated.
The first: a belief that more data would eventually produce clarity, and that action should wait. In fast-moving environments, that clarity does not arrive on a useful timeline.
The second: intensive internal coordination that created the impression of control — while reducing proximity to clients, operations, and the people who needed decisions made.
Across Zavala Civitas’ work in the region, the profiles that have most consistently underperformed in crisis conditions are those assessed primarily on track record in stable markets — without any evaluation of how they make decisions when the environment itself becomes the variable. That gap is now a governance risk boards can no longer afford to ignore.
Courage as an executive competency and a governance obligation
The executives who impressed me most during this period were not necessarily the smartest people in the room. They were the people willing to make difficult decisions before the facts were complete, while accepting that some of those decisions could later prove unpopular.
This is not the same as confidence. It is not the same as risk tolerance. It is the ability to distinguish between a temporary disruption and a permanent shift — and to make consequential decisions about people, capital, and strategy before that distinction has become obvious to everyone else.
For boards, this matters. Courage in executive leadership has historically been treated as a character trait — something you recognise in retrospect, but cannot assess in advance. That framing is no longer adequate.
What I have seen, in practice, is that executive courage in a geopolitical context has specific, observable characteristics:
- Decision under structural uncertainty — Acting on a clear thesis before conditions clarify. In fast-moving environments, they often do not.
- Early challenge — Raising concerns and adjusting exposure before risk reaches consensus, and before the options for response have narrowed.
- Protection of dissent — Keeping the space open for contrarian views, particularly when internal pressure favours speed and alignment.
- Operational presence under pressure — Staying close to clients, operations, and people during periods of acute stress, rather than retreating inward at the moment when external judgment matters most.
Each of these can be assessed before appointment. Each can be developed. Each can be held to account at board level. Executive courage belongs in the governance conversation — not in the biographical footnote of a reference check.
Implications for executive assessment in complex markets
Over the last decade of assessing executives across the Middle East, I have noticed that boards tend to focus heavily on experience, sector expertise, and track record. Those factors remain important. What recent events have highlighted, however, is that they tell us surprisingly little about how a leader behaves when certainty disappears.
The executives who performed well in this period combined two capabilities that are rarely assessed together: a genuine understanding of regional dynamics, and the behavioural resilience to act under uncertainty. Neither is sufficient on its own.
They are not interchangeable. I have seen leaders with deep regional knowledge default to internal meetings when their clients needed them present. And I have seen operationally strong executives miss second- and third-order consequences they simply did not have the context to anticipate.
In Zavala Civitas’ work across C-suite and board mandates in the region, the most consequential gap is not competence — it is the absence of any structured method for evaluating how a candidate performs when the environment itself becomes the risk. The organisations that close that gap before a crisis are in a fundamentally different position from those that attempt to close it during one.
Assessment processes built around stable-market track record will underweight both. The question is not only what a candidate has achieved. It is how they have made decisions when the ground was moving — and whether the people around them were better or worse positioned because of it.
At board level, the obligation extends further. Competent, informed, procedurally sound oversight is not enough when geopolitical exposure is material. The boards equipped for this environment challenge assumptions before events validate them. They insist on scenario planning when the outlook appears stable. And they create the conditions under which executive teams can move with speed and conviction when it matters.
A shift in the governance standard
Recent events have not altered the long-term strategic significance of the Middle East as a region of investment, infrastructure development, and growth. What they have changed is our understanding of what preparedness requires.
For years, boards have spoken about resilience as an organizational capability. Recent events have reminded us that resilience is ultimately human. It resides in the judgment of leaders, the quality of decisions they make when certainty is unavailable, and the courage to act before events force their hand.
The map does not disappear during a geopolitical crisis. It simply becomes less reliable. The leaders who succeed are the ones capable of navigating anyway.
If you need support assessing leadership or governance under crisis conditions, contact us here.
If you’d like to know more about our services, click here.
By Carla Geday, Senior Advisor – Middle East | Zavala Civitas Executive Search
Carla Geday
Carla Geday is a seasoned executive with over two decades of leadership experience across the Middle East, where she has led high-impact initiatives in corporate strategy, business development, and large-scale operations.
