Finding the signal in the noise – navigating tariff volatility with integrated planning
06 May 2025
Blog
By Kirsty Braines and Les Brookes, Partners at Oliver Wight and Rich Wagner, Field CTO at Board
This blog covers:
- Why knee-jerk reactions to tariff changes create more business volatility, not less
- How to distinguish meaningful signals from market noise when making strategic decisions
- Why integrated planning coupled with advanced analytics delivers superior outcomes in uncertain times
The recent announcement of US tariff increases has triggered market tremors. Supply chains are being hastily reconfigured, procurement strategies upended, and investment plans frozen, often based more on panic than perspective.
In this moment of heightened uncertainty, business leaders face a critical question: Are they responding to genuine economic signals or merely reacting to political noise? The difference will determine which organisations merely weather the storm and which capitalize on the underlying opportunities.
The challenge isn't simply related to tariffs. It's about finding meaningful patterns within the surrounding chaos. As Nate Silver demonstrates in his influential 2012 book The Signal and the Noise, humans consistently struggle to separate genuine patterns (signals) from meaningless fluctuations (noise). This challenge grows exponentially during periods of political and economic transition.
From Method to Meaning: beyond reactive decision-making
When faced with disruption, the natural instinct is to act quickly. Since the tariff announcements, we've observed this pattern across multiple industries – businesses hastily switching suppliers, redirecting shipments mid-route, or abandoning market segments without comprehensive analysis.
One manufacturing client described their leadership's approach as "creating a war room" to manage tariff impacts. Yet this siloed, reactive approach generated more problems than solutions. One executive told us: "We're switching suppliers without properly modelling the implications." They were reacting to immediate pressures rather than understanding the full picture.
Another organisation found itself making contradictory decisions. Leadership declared they would cease shipments from China to America due to tariff impacts, yet procurement continued to approve purchases that would ultimately travel that exact route. Without an integrated approach to decision-making, their actions increased volatility rather than mitigating it.
Distinguishing signal from noise
Effective navigation through market disruption requires distinguishing meaningful patterns from temporary fluctuations. The immediate noise following tariff announcements – market speculation, competitor announcements, analyst predictions – can easily drown out the true signals that should guide strategic decisions.
Organisations with robust Integrated Business Planning (IBP) processes have a distinct advantage in this environment. Rather than reacting to each piece of news in isolation, they evaluate implications across their entire enterprise – from demand patterns to supply networks, from product portfolios to financial outcomes.
The difference is dramatic. While some organisations make isolated decisions that create further instability, integrated businesses systematically evaluate scenarios that consider:
- Demand impacts across different market segments
- Supply chain reconfiguration options and timelines
- Product portfolio adjustments to maintain profitability
- Financial implications for both short and long-term performance
This comprehensive view allows them to identify the true signals – the fundamental shifts that require strategic response – while filtering out the noise of day-to-day market reactions.
Technology as a bridge from Method to Meaning
Advanced analytics platforms now offer powerful capabilities to enhance this signal detection process. Board's Foresight platform represents a significant advancement in this area, providing access to over 5 million global datasets across 168 industries and eight macro sectors, continuously updated from thousands of global data sources.
Rather than relying on human intuition alone – which Silver's research shows is notoriously prone to bias – Foresight's AI-powered intelligent correlation engine objectively identifies which external factors genuinely influence business performance. Most importantly, its hypothesis testing and validation capabilities help organisations understand the relationships between external events and business outcomes with unprecedented clarity.
Leading brands like Kraft-Heinz and Whataburger are already leveraging this approach to gain competitive advantage. By automatically identifying the most relevant industry indicators and correlating them with internal data, these organisations can develop scenario-based forecasts grounded in actual macroeconomic indicators rather than guesswork.
From reactive to meaningful planning
The power of this approach becomes particularly evident when addressing tariff challenges. Foresight enables organisations to build baseline, optimistic, and pessimistic forecasts grounded in real-time tariff assumptions. Companies can adjust key assumptions – including employee wages, interest rates, unemployment, industrial production, producer prices, and consumer spending – to reflect potential downstream effects of tariffs.
The power of advanced analytics, however, only manifests when coupled with robust enterprise planning processes. This integration challenge represents the critical gap between Method and Meaning that many organisations struggle to bridge. They've invested heavily in transactional systems that execute business processes effectively, but lack the integrated planning layer needed to transform data into insight and insight into business decision making.
The solution combines process experience with technological capability. Integrated Business Planning provides the methodological framework – connecting strategy to execution through structured planning processes that span functions and time horizons. Meanwhile, platforms that combine planning capabilities with advanced analytics provide the technological foundation to transform data into meaning.
In such a volatile environment, business success increasingly depends on extracting meaning from complexity – seeing the signal through the noise.
Organisations that combine Integrated Business Planning processes with advanced analytics capabilities gain a decisive advantage. They respond to meaningful patterns rather than market noise, make decisions based on enterprise-wide implications rather than functional perspectives, and maintain strategic direction while adapting tactically to changing conditions.
As tariff impacts continue to unfold, the contrast between reactive and integrated approaches will become increasingly apparent. Some organisations will exhaust resources chasing noise, while others will focus energy on the signals that truly matter, creating stability amid volatility and opportunity amid disruption.
Connect with us today to explore how our integrated planning expertise and Board’s Foresight platform can help your business turn disruption into lasting advantage.
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