ANTICIPATING GEOSTRATEGIC SHIFTS · STRATEGY FUTURES
Benchmarking is dead
Stop building tomorrow from other people’s yesterday
Somewhere a minister is asking which country has done it before. A board wants three comparable companies. The request sounds rigorous, but precedent can become an elegant way to avoid the original decision in front of us.
The case book can become an alibi
A benchmark describes a visible outcome. It rarely isolates the institutional bargains, timing, luck and capabilities that made it possible. Combining a Singapore agency, a Korean industrial policy and an Estonian digital service into one model may look comprehensive while producing a system that cannot work together.
Operational comparisons still have value: clearance times, cost per procedure and factory throughput can reveal a gap. The dangerous move is promoting an observed practice into proof that another country or company should copy it.
Performance gap
Useful: identify a process worth investigating
Historical mechanism
Conditional: test what caused the observed result
Future prescription
Unsupported: a past winner cannot certify a new choice
Katalyx analytical distinction; illustrative, not a dataset
A good precedent can point in the wrong direction
AI changes the cost of knowledge work, automation changes employment intensity, China changes industrial price and product cycles, and geopolitics changes market access. An investment built to reproduce an admired historical employment outcome may create production without the jobs that justified it.
The test is whether the conditions that made a model successful will still hold when the new investment opens—not whether the model once worked beautifully elsewhere.
See the discontinuities
Map technology, competition, politics and demand
Test several futures
Expose the assumptions on which the strategy depends
Invent from real assets
Combine emerging needs with capabilities genuinely available
Stage the commitment
Use pilots and decision gates before locking in scale
Adapted from the Katalyx thought paper
Let evidence challenge the idea, not supply its permission
Begin with the decision and its causal logic. Ask what must be true, what could break, and what evidence would change the recommendation. Bring outside examples into that inquiry only when they answer a defined question.
The uncomfortable consequence is that someone must go first. Every admired precedent began as a choice without an identical precedent. Strategy should make that choice more intelligent, not conceal it behind a stack of case studies.
Hypothesis
What new position could we own?
Critical assumptions
Which conditions must hold?
Tests and gates
What would make us scale, reshape or stop?
Proposed decision architecture
“A hundred pages of precedent can be a sophisticated way to avoid one original decision.
Back to the Drawing Board
The benchmark library can remain on the shelf. It should lose its seat at the head of the strategy table.
Adapted from the Katalyx thought paper ‘Benchmarking Is Dead’; the full paper is available on requestThe complete paper is available on request
We would be pleased to share the detailed paper and discuss what this idea could mean for your business or country
Request the full paper ↗