A WEF article by Noa Gafni from last year argues that Porter's Five Forces—competitive rivalry, supplier power, buyer power, threat of substitutes, barriers to entry—are obsolete. Her replacement is five new forces that now shape business more than industry-level competition does: technology, environment, society, economy, and geopolitics.
She's in good company here. Rita McGrath at Columbia has argued since 2013 that sustainable competitive advantage is dead and that we should think in "arenas" rather than "industries." Martin Reeves at BCG showed in 2012 that Porter's framework belongs in one quadrant of a much larger strategic palette—the stable, predictable quadrant—and that applying it elsewhere is actively harmful. Last year, Brandenburger and Nalebuff renewed their 30-year argument that the framework can't even see complements—products that increase the value of yours—making it structurally blind to platform economics. Porter himself reaffirmed the framework in 2008, dismissed all proposed additions, and hasn't published a comparable update since. That was eighteen years ago.
The examples that disprove Porter's strategic validity are vivid. Volkswagen had a textbook-perfect Porter position in 2014, and then Dieselgate erased half the company's market value overnight. So not new entrants or a substitutes, but regulatory and social accountability risk, categories absent from Porter's framework. I wrote at the time that "people can do amazing things together, but they can also perpetrate deeply unnerving evil." A bit bold, maybe, but a 600,000-person organization systematically cheating emissions tests is not really an industry-dynamics story. Huawei was the world's largest telecom equipment maker, well-positioned by every industry metric, until the U.S. government placed it on the Entity List and cut off access to Android and critical semiconductors. Geopolitics ate my homework, I guess.
The OD angle
As with all frameworks, this new one is wrong but useful, and short on the prescription. It names five macro forces but doesn't offer much guidance on what organizations should do about them. The question is whether your organization can sense what's coming and respond in close-to-real-time. I've been skeptical for some time that there are many industries or moments left where stable strategy is desirable or even possible. Average tenure of a company on the S&P 500 was 33 years in 1964, dropped to 24 by 2016, and is forecast to hit 12 years by 2027. If half the S&P 500 will be replaced in a decade, stable positioning within a stable industry is becoming less and less realistic.
In Hidden Patterns' Do the Right Thing I argue that organizations and teams should only worry about doing things right only once absolutely certain they're the right things. For most organizations right now, the right things are shifting faster than any planning cycle can accommodate. I see three systems for staying oriented:
- one person decides (not ideal, but possible in some cases);
- formalized direction (think like guidelines for what's right and what's wrong... "by-right zoning" is an example of this in a city, and "design systems" are an example of this in corporate);
- intentional environmental scanning (now, near, next, maybe via Wardley Mapping?).
That third system explicitly calls for tracking weak signals of change in society, technology, economics, environment, and politics. So, Gafni's new five forces, built into a pattern that tells you what to do with them.
But scanning means nothing if you can't act on what you find, so I'd recommend actually adopting a structure like Network of Teams such that the business can reconfigure itself as conditions change. Teams can form, merge, split, or dissolve based on emerging needs rather than through agonizingly slow top-down reorgs. With strong teams whose explicit job is scanning the environment (as compared to a "strategy department" that produces annual decks, say) signals could be routed immediately to the people who can do something about it.
What to watch
- Whether "new forces" thinking produces action or stays conceptual. We've had macro-environmental scanning frameworks for nearly six decades. For that entire time we've held on to structures that can't quickly respond to the data that come out of them.
- Sensing teams. A January 2026 BCG/WEF/IMD report found fewer than 1 in 5 companies have a dedicated geopolitics function. They identified four OD archetypes for building one: Watchtower, Influence Network, Command Cell, Nerve Center.
- The speed of structural response. When the next macro shock hits, watch whether companies can reconfigure their networks or whether they're still waiting for the annual planning cycle to catch up.