For many supply chain leaders, planning failure doesn’t look like failure.

Service levels are acceptable. Costs are broadly under control. Inventory turns aren’t great, but they’re not catastrophic. On paper, the system is working well enough to keep the lights on and keep the board comfortable.

And yet, underneath that surface stability, something feels off.

Forecasts are constantly being overridden. Safety stock debates never end. Every disruption — a supplier delay, a demand spike, a transport issue — triggers manual intervention. Teams spend more time explaining outcomes than shaping them. Planning cycles get longer, not shorter, even as the world becomes more volatile.

The problem is not poor execution. It is that organisations are trying to plan a volatile world using assumptions and logic designed for a stable one.

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The hidden comfort of averages

Traditional supply chain planning rests on a reassuring assumption: that the future will broadly resemble the past.

Forecasts are built from historical demand. Lead times are averaged. Variability is smoothed out. Risk is treated as noise rather than something to be modelled explicitly.

This approach works only when volatility is low and deviations are mild.

Modern supply chains no longer operate in that environment.

• Demand volatility is asymmetric
• Supplier performance fluctuates by lane and context
• Transport costs move with fuel prices and capacity
• Disruptions arrive continuously rather than occasionally

When organisations plan for the average in a world that rarely behaves like one, failure becomes structural rather than accidental.

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Why leaders don’t experience a planning crisis

Most leaders do not believe they have a planning problem.

They believe they have:

• A data quality issue
• A forecasting accuracy issue
• A resourcing issue
• A systems integration issue

All of these may be true, but they are secondary.

The deeper issue is that uncertainty is stripped out of decisions before they are made. When reality deviates from plan, teams are forced to absorb the impact through buffers, overrides and expedites.

From the inside, this feels like constant trade-off management. In reality, it is a planning system that cannot reason about variability.

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The illusion of stability

Because failures appear intermittently and in different parts of the network, they rarely trigger a clear burning platform.

Instead, organisations normalise the symptoms:

• Manual overrides become routine
• Inventory grows “just in case”
• Firefighting becomes part of the job

Planning still looks structured. Numbers still reconcile. Governance still exists. But confidence quietly erodes.

The system appears stable while becoming increasingly fragile.

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Why better execution doesn’t fix the problem

When planning frustration builds, many organisations double down on execution:

• Tighter governance
• More process discipline
• Additional KPIs
• More frequent review cycles

These interventions improve control, but they do not change how decisions are framed.

If a plan assumes a single future, better execution simply helps the organisation fail more consistently when that future does not occur.

This is why large transformation programmes often improve visibility without improving resilience.

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What this means for leaders at this stage

At the Orient stage, the most important shift is not technological. It is conceptual.

The key question is not which tool to buy, but what it means to plan well when variability is structural rather than exceptional.

Until that question is confronted directly, planning will continue to look sophisticated on the surface while remaining fragile underneath.

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What this does not answer yet

This article does not address:

• How uncertainty should be modelled
• Which planning approaches perform better
• How to evaluate tools or vendors

Those questions belong in later decision stages.

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Sources
SoftwareVerdict, The “Goldiilocks” Zone
Uzair Bawany & JP Doggett — discussion transcripts (April 2026 & November 2025)

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