8 Shifts Reshaping Strategic Decision-Making in 2026

On a dark December morning we sat down with Kimmo Havu (Valona CEO) and Jeroen Lustig (A-INSIGHTS CEO) in Valona’s Helsinki office, the plan was simple: record an end-of-year story about the Valona and A-INSIGHTS merger, wrap it up neatly, and move on. But 2025 didn’t cooperate with neat endings. 

Instead, the conversation kept circling one theme: what happens when “unprecedented times” stop being a crisis and become business-as-usual. 

If you’re a decision-maker, you feel it as pressure to decide more, faster, with less certainty. If you’re part of the competitive and market intelligence (CMI) function, you feel it as a shift from answering requests to building decision infrastructure. Either way, the old cadence is gone. 

We thought we’d get sound bites. We got something more useful: eight shifts that keep coming up when you talk to people whose job is to see what’s coming next. 

1. How to succeed with 70% certainty in strategic planning

Jeroen’s been asking executives three questions in boardrooms this year: 

“Do you need to make more or fewer decisions than you did 10 years ago?” 

More. 

“With more or less certainty?” 

Less. 

“Faster or slower?” 

Faster. 

Jeroen: “You need to make more high-stake decisions at a faster pace in a more uncertain environment. You have to get rid of the old way where you need perfect information, complete information. You need to get comfortable with 70%—really solid, really fast. That 70% needs to be solid and fast so they can fill in the rest with vision and intuition and open their window of opportunity.” 

The takeaway: Don’t think of it as lowering standards; think of it as a reality check: the teams winning in 2026 are the ones who can get comfortable moving on 70% certainty, while the opportunity window is still open.  

Which brings us to our next point… 

2. Successful strategic planning requires investing in opportunity windows

Once you accept that certainty won’t arrive on schedule, time becomes the scarce resource. The advantage goes to the organization that sees a move earlier, prepares faster, and chooses when to act instead of reacting under pressure. 

“The window of opportunity means if you notice something ahead of time compared to competitors, you have more time to prepare. You can decide when to act instead of react. The famous gray rhino—you see it coming from a distance. The misconception is this can happen with existing setup. Most organizations aren’t capable. You need to look at intelligence as a core function—like finance, like marketing—with people, expertise, process, structure, and tooling.” — Jeroen 

The takeaway: Intelligence can’t be a support function anymore. It has to be designed as infrastructure that continuously widens the opportunity window for decision-makers. It needs the same investment, structure, and executive attention as finance or marketing. Without that, you’re always reacting to gray rhinos instead of preparing for them. 

3. How to succeed in strategic planning when five-year plans fail

When opportunity windows shrink, the idea of a single, stable “most likely future” collapses with it. In 2026, strategy is less about committing to one path and more about staying coherent across multiple plausible paths. 

“What I used to see is a clear picture of what the future probably looks like with some variables around it. As of this year, that’s gone. Companies have become more uncertain—thinking in terms of multiple ways it can go. They’re asking for scenario planning because they can’t fixate on the most likely future anymore.” 

Jeroen lustig, A-Insights

One executive told him: “We do these five-year plans, but I think it doesn’t work anymore. We need to be so much more agile. The ink isn’t dry—we need to make a new one.” 

The takeaway: Five-year plans with single-path assumptions don’t survive first contact with reality anymore. Intelligence teams need to support scenario thinking, not just linear forecasting. 

Scenario planning sounds great in theory. So why aren’t more CMI teams doing it? We’ll tell you why… 

4. Solving competitive and market intelligence’s 80/20 problem

Most competitive and market intelligence teams spend 80% of their time gathering information and 20% analyzing it. Valona has tracked intelligence operations globally for the last 20 years, and our 2026 Global Market and Competitive Intelligence Report confirmed the trend we’ve been seeing anecdotally: 63% of teams are stuck at intermediate maturity. Urgent requests consume capacity. Quarterly reporting gets squeezed. Forward-looking work that might prevent fires never happens. 

Meanwhile, decision-makers keep getting backward-looking reports that explain what happened, after it happened. The result is an expensive loop: high effort, late output, limited strategic leverage. Breaking the loop means automating the “baseline” so humans can focus on what changes decisions: implications, options, trade-offs, and timing. 

The takeaway: The only way to break this cycle is automation that doesn’t sacrifice quality. AI that gets you to 80% instantly, with analyst expertise bringing it to strategic relevance. That’s how you reclaim time for the work that actually matters—anticipating what’s next. 

5. Why market context beats financial targets for strategic decisions

Most companies measure success with financial targets. Hit your number, you succeeded. But financial targets don’t reveal whether you’re winning or losing relative to the market. 

“Financial targets don’t tell you how you’re doing compared to the market. You might hit your goal, but if everyone else is doing better, you’re not on par. Or the market’s difficult—how do you determine if you’re above or below average? That clarity will enable organizations to see so much more clearly.” — Jeroen 

The takeaway: This is why the baseline matters—understanding your relative position, not just absolute performance. Are you winning because you’re good, or because the market lifted all boats? Is it just you who’s behind or is the market really this crap? That context changes everything. 

6. Strategic decision-making in hours, not weeks

The timeline for strategic analysis has compressed dramatically. 

“In the past, you were given a week. Past couple years, maybe a few days. These days? Analysis is required now or by tomorrow morning. The transparency and trustworthiness of AI gets you to an 80% answer almost instantly. But it’s the final touch of our analysts and the customer analyst putting it in context—best case within the same day.” — Kimmo 

The takeaway: This isn’t about analysts working faster, it’s about infrastructure that enables speed without sacrificing rigor. The organizations that can deliver same-day deep dives are the ones that win the window of opportunity. 

7. Making strategic foresight tactical for competitive advantage

Foresight has traditionally meant mega-trends 3-5 years out. Kimmo argues for something different. 

“Foresight has typically been looking 3-5 years out at mega trends. What’s enticing is bringing foresight to the competitive intelligence level—scan the market and anticipate competitors’ future product innovations. That makes it tactical, something you can act on instantly. Not speculating where the world is going, but what are competitors likely to do, and how do I prepare my response to win 12 months from today.” — Kimmo 

The takeaway: This reframes foresight from philosophical to actionable. It’s not about predicting the future of humanity—it’s about anticipating your competitor’s next move with enough confidence to prepare your countermove. 

8. How complete competitive and market intelligence transforms strategic advantage

The merger between Valona and A-INSIGHTS wasn’t about scale, it was about solving a fundamental gap in the world of Competitive and Market Intelligence:  

“A-INSIGHTS has always been focused on structured data—financials, quantitative. That’s inherently looking back, often after the fact with time lag. We’ve always been aware there’s a lack of context. The real-time insights, looking ahead with foresight—that’s the gap we had.” — Jeroen 

“The ability to have deeply verticalized quantitative data that is truly unique helps us complement the full view from facts of today all the way to foresight of the future.”  

Kimmo havu, Valona intelligence

The takeway: Structured data tells you what happened. Unstructured context tells you why and what’s coming. Together, they give you the complete picture—not just backward-looking analysis or forward speculation, but the full continuum from facts to foresight. 

Strategic planning excellence for next year and beyond 

There’s no reset coming to save us. The pace, the uncertainty, the compression of decision windows—this “unprecedented” new normal is here to stay. 

Intelligence infrastructure that meets the moment means systems built for this reality, not the slower, simpler world we left behind. That requires real investment treating intelligence as core function. Automation that handles collection so analysts can analyze, contextualize, influence. And organizational comfort moving on a validated 70% instead of waiting for perfect certainty. 

The window of opportunity is real. Whether you’re positioned to make the most of it? — Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?   

See how intelligence infrastructure built to meet the moment works

Ps. In case you’re wondering, the strategically placed joulutorttu (Finnish Christmas pastry) was eaten off camera.