Finance Transformation
How to think about volatility when you are the CFO
14 April 2026
The WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala addressed the Ministerial Conference in March with a statement that should sit in every CFO’s planning documents: “The world order and multilateral system we used to know has irrevocably changed. We will not get it back.”
That is not a forecast. It is a description of the environment that finance leaders are operating in now.
I have run finance functions through significant disruption. Brexit destroyed the wholesale model of one of my businesses overnight. Within 12 months I had rebuilt it as a digital-first operation, at higher margins. The experience taught me things about operating in genuine uncertainty that no planning workshop can replicate. The most important: the goal is not to predict what happens next. It is to build an organisation that can respond faster than the disruption moves.
What CFOs are actually dealing with
For the fifth consecutive quarter, tariffs and trade policy are the top concern among CFO survey respondents, according to Richmond Fed data. 39% of firms say their price expectations have been directly affected by tariff implementation or uncertainty.
That is one pressure point. At the same time: geopolitical instability across multiple regions, interest rate unpredictability, and AI disruption to the workforce. All simultaneously, not sequentially. The CFO who is waiting for the picture to clarify before making decisions will still be waiting when the next disruption arrives.
Melanie Robinson, Deputy CEO at the Institute of Leadership and Managing Director of ABE Global, offers a framework worth taking seriously: dedicated business partnership, dynamic planning, team empowerment, and structural resilience. These are not novel concepts. What is different is how urgently they are all needed at once, and how many finance functions are not yet operating this way.
Dynamic planning is no longer optional
“The world is moving so fast,” Robinson says. “We haven’t got time to be stuck in that traditional cycle of running the quarter-end, discussing it with the board a couple of weeks later, putting forward some suggestions and then making decisions. By that point, everything’s already changed.”
I have built planning architectures for businesses operating across multiple currencies and markets. The investment is not in sophisticated modelling software. It is in understanding the relationships between your financial outcomes and the variables that drive them, and making those relationships explicit in a model you can update in real time.
Driver-based planning does this: linking forecasts to operational variables (volume, price, capacity, currency) so that when tariffs shift or a supply chain disruption hits, you know immediately what it does to your margin, working capital, and pricing headroom. Not in three months when the next planning cycle runs.
Robinson is direct about the implication: “When it comes to the speed of decision-making, you really need to be on it every month, or, depending on how volatile the situation is, every week. You need real-time data and strong reporting. If you spot something that’s making a loss, you can stop it in its tracks, rather than waiting for it to lose money for another month before you do anything about it.”
The mechanics of forecasting that holds under pressure matter less than having a model you can update when the underlying assumptions change.
Being a genuine partner, not a reporter
The traditional image of finance as the department that says no is a liability in a volatile environment. CFOs who operate as blockers are the last people to hear about emerging problems and the last to be consulted on solutions.
Robinson frames it practically: “It’s not necessarily about being extrovert but getting out there to other departments and making sure you’re talking and listening to colleagues.” Understand how the business runs end to end. Understand the implications of financial decisions for operations, and the implications of operational decisions for the numbers.
In my experience managing businesses across 25+ countries, the finance leaders who understood the operational reality of their businesses made better financial decisions than the ones who managed from the numbers alone. Supply chain disruption looks different when you understand why the lead times are what they are. Currency exposure looks different when you understand the commercial logic behind the pricing decisions that created it.
This is the same business partnering argument that drives value creation in finance teams. In a volatile environment, it is not an aspiration. It is how the finance function maintains relevance.
Empowering your team
The bigger the organisation, the longer the decision-making chain. In volatile conditions, long chains are liabilities. By the time a decision has escalated through the hierarchy, the situation has moved on.
Robinson’s solution is team empowerment backed by psychological safety: “The way to approach this is, ‘Look, we know the environment is volatile. So, it may not be 100% the right decision. But we understand that you will make it in good faith.’ That’s how you provide a foundation of security that will empower them to be able to do that.”
I have built finance teams in conditions where decisions needed to be made quickly with incomplete information. The teams that performed best were the ones where people understood the decision principles well enough to apply them without escalating every edge case. That understanding does not come from policy documents. It comes from constant conversation about how to think about trade-offs, not just what to do in specific scenarios.
This connects directly to the change management dimension of finance transformation. The investment in developing team judgment is what allows the CFO to operate at a strategic level rather than resolving operational decisions that should not require their input.
Building structural resilience
Robinson makes a point that is easy to agree with in principle and hard to execute in practice: build a resilient business before you need one.
“The only thing we can really predict right now is that some new event is going to happen. So, always assume that something will try to knock you off track, and have a resilient business.”
In practice this means workforce flexibility: knowing which roles need to be full-time permanent and which can be resourced more flexibly. It means contract discipline: resisting the preference of suppliers for longer terms when shorter or more flexible contracts preserve your ability to respond to changing conditions. It means diversification: understanding where your income is concentrated and whether that concentration creates unacceptable risk exposure.
“Ask whether you are tied overwhelmingly into one thing that leaves you highly exposed to risk,” Robinson says. The Brexit experience is directly relevant. The businesses that rebuilt fastest were the ones that had not locked in supply chains, cost structures, and customer arrangements so deeply that they could not be restructured. Flexibility costs something in normal conditions. It is considerably more valuable in disrupted ones.
Volatility does not create problems for finance functions that are already operating well. It exposes the ones that are not. The CFO who has invested in data quality, responsive planning, empowered teams, and structural flexibility before the disruption arrives is ready for it. The one who starts building those capabilities after the disruption arrives is already behind.