When Fences Fail: What Jurassic Park Teaches Leaders About Strategy

Everything was working.

The electric fences were powered. The control room screens glowed with reassuring certainty. Vehicles moved guests through the park exactly as planned. Every contingency appeared to have been considered.

Jurassic Park was designed around a simple assumption: the system was under control.

Then a tropical storm approached. A single employee made a decision no one anticipated.

The fences failed.

Within hours, one of the most sophisticated operations ever imagined was fighting for survival. The dinosaurs may have delivered the drama, but they were not the real lesson.

The real lesson was complexity.

Midway through the film, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm delivers a line that feels remarkably relevant to today's business environment:

"The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here staggers me."

Malcolm was talking about genetic engineering. He could just as easily have been talking about globalization.

For much of the last three decades, businesses operated in an environment shaped by expanding trade, integrated supply chains, relatively stable alliances, and increasingly interconnected markets. Many strategic plans were built on the assumption that those conditions would continue indefinitely.

Today, those assumptions are being tested.

According to Boston Consulting Group's Center for Geopolitics, the global economy is moving toward a more multipolar world where trade, technology, energy, talent, and investment are increasingly shaped by geopolitical competition. For business leaders, this is no longer a political issue. It is a strategic one.

The lesson from Jurassic Park isn't that complex systems fail. It's that leaders often underestimate how interconnected those systems have become. That realization leads to four important lessons for today's strategy leaders.

Lesson 1: Your Biggest Risk May Be Outside Your Industry

One of the central failures in Jurassic Park was that leaders focused on the risks they understood while overlooking the risks emerging from adjacent systems.

Today's organizations often make a similar mistake.

Leadership teams spend significant time analyzing competitors, customer trends, and market share. Far fewer spend time evaluating geopolitical developments that may ultimately have a greater impact on growth than any direct competitor.

BCG identifies six arenas where geopolitical competition is reshaping business outcomes: trade, artificial intelligence, talent, critical industries, climate policy, and regional conflict. What makes these forces particularly important is that they often influence business performance indirectly.

A tariff changes sourcing decisions.

Export controls affect technology access.

Political tensions reshape investment flows.

Suddenly, a decision made thousands of miles away influences customer experience, pricing, profitability, and market access.

The companies that recognize these connections early gain an advantage over those still treating geopolitics as a quarterly risk-management exercise.

Lesson 2: Efficiency and Resilience Are Not the Same Thing

For years, organizations optimized for efficiency.

Supply chains became leaner. Manufacturing concentrated in lower-cost regions. Vendor networks were streamlined to improve margins and reduce complexity.

In stable conditions, these decisions made perfect sense.

The challenge is that efficiency and resilience are not the same thing.

TSMC provides a powerful example. The company has committed approximately $165 billion to expanding semiconductor manufacturing capacity in Arizona. The investment is not driven primarily by lower production costs. Manufacturing chips in Arizona is generally more expensive than producing them in Taiwan.

The investment is about resilience.

It reflects an understanding that concentration risk has become a strategic vulnerability in a world where geopolitical tensions can quickly disrupt global supply chains.

The lesson extends beyond semiconductors.

The most resilient organizations are increasingly designing operating models that can absorb shocks without sacrificing long-term competitiveness.

Resilience is no longer simply a risk-management objective. It is becoming a source of competitive advantage.

Lesson 3: Scenario Planning Beats Prediction

One of the most dangerous assumptions in Jurassic Park was the belief that the future could be controlled through planning alone.

Business leaders face a similar temptation.

Executives often ask whether they should prepare for a trade dispute, a supply chain disruption, new technology regulations, or regional instability.

The reality is that predicting geopolitical outcomes is extraordinarily difficult. Preparing for multiple possibilities is not.

The World Economic Forum describes this capability as building "geopolitical muscle."

Organizations that navigate uncertainty most effectively are not necessarily better forecasters. They are better scenario planners.

Rather than building strategy around a single expected future, they evaluate multiple plausible futures and stress-test critical decisions against each one.

What happens if trade restrictions increase?

What happens if a critical supplier becomes inaccessible?

What happens if technology regulations change dramatically?

The goal is not to predict which scenario will occur. The goal is to ensure the organization can adapt regardless of which scenario emerges.

Lesson 4: Strategy Must Evolve When the Environment Changes

Perhaps the most important lesson from Jurassic Park is that success can create dangerous assumptions.

The park's creators believed the systems that made the park successful would continue to work indefinitely.

Many organizations make the same mistake. They continue optimizing for conditions that no longer exist. The companies pulling ahead today are not necessarily making better forecasts. They are making better strategic adjustments.

Microsoft offers a compelling example. As governments around the world introduce data sovereignty requirements and stricter regulations around digital infrastructure, Microsoft has invested heavily in regional cloud capabilities and sovereign cloud solutions. What began as a technology decision has become a strategic response to changing geopolitical realities and customer expectations.

The company's approach highlights an important truth: when the environment changes, strategy must change with it.

Organizations that fail to adapt often discover that yesterday's strengths can become tomorrow's vulnerabilities.

The Leadership Challenge Ahead

The lesson from Jurassic Park is not that disruption is inevitable.

It is that leaders must respect the complexity of the systems in which they operate.

Today's geopolitical environment is reshaping supply chains, technology ecosystems, customer expectations, and competitive dynamics. The organizations that thrive will not be those that predict every disruption correctly.

They will be the ones that build the resilience, adaptability, and strategic awareness to respond when disruption arrives.

The question is no longer whether geopolitics belongs in the strategy room. The question is whether your competitors have already brought it there.

To explore how market intelligence, competitive insight, and strategic planning can help your organization navigate an increasingly complex business landscape, contact Craft at craftmarketingandbranding.com.