So in this episode, we run through such an exercise: what if Russia tests NATO resolve by firing on Poland and amassing troops near the region? We explore this hypothetical but increasingly plausible scenario in this episode.
Host
Philippa Lamb
Guests
- Luke Blake, Founding Director, Business advisors Oakwood Risk Group
- Charles Hecker, Geopolitical Risk Expert, Author of Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business In Russia
Producer
Natalie Chisholm
Series Lead
Mark Rowland
Transcript:
Philippa Lamb: Welcome back. In a clear test of NATO resolve, Russia is massing troops on its eastern flank. It's a move that could throw Europe into chaos, whether it will depends on what happens next. That is the hypothetical but not implausible scenario that we are going to explore today. This being a business podcast, we're going to specifically focus on what the impact might be for business if it ever happens in the current volatile geopolitical environment. It is the sort of scenario planning exercise that all businesses might usefully think about. If that sounds extreme, think about the ongoing economic fallout from Ukraine and the global uncertainty still emanating from near Iran. Conflict for business: far-away wars feel way closer than they used to.
[Teaser audio] Charles Hecker: Russia is a major state actor that also uses non-state actors to attack Europe, and so the conflict essentially is already engaged.
[Teaser audio] Luke Blake: One of the first steps in that process is looking at business impact and what is acceptable. It's going to be different for every business and that could be linked to the financial impact. It could be linked to the customer impact. It could be linked to the impact on employees, but there should be, I say for most organisations, a defined point.
PL: Joining me to talk through the potential impacts of a Russian incursion from energy to supply chain. I'm delighted to welcome Luke Blake, a former police officer, founding director of business advisors, Oakwood Risk Group, self-described Russia geek and geopolitical risk expert, Charles Hecker, is with us too. He's the author of Zero Sum, the Arc of International Business in Russia. He's back for his second appearance on the podcast. Welcome both.
CH: Thank you.
LB: Thank you.
PL: Charles, who knew we'd be talking about Russia again so soon?
CH: Very happy to be in my comfort zone.
PL: For the purpose of this exercise, we're going to start this story, I think about six months before the incident occurs, where intelligence reports suddenly reveal Russian troops massing along the Polish border. Charles, the truth is we're not a million miles away from that scenario right now, are we?
CH: No. As horrible as it is to think about it, the scenario of a Russian invasion of an EU or NATO member country is realistic, and it's being discussed actively in defence circles and political circles throughout the European Union, across nato and on both sides of the Atlantic. That scenario that you described reminded me of the scenario that we saw five years ago when Russian troops were massing on the Ukrainian border and the world was saying "nothing to see here. Don't worry about it. Nothing's going to happen and it is highly unlikely that Russia would invade Ukraine." We all know now how flawed were the assumptions that we were making about that buildup and about President Putin's intentions? But you're absolutely right, Philippapa, to say that one of the versions of the future that we have to be aware of is Russian troop movements against the NATO country.
PL: It's an impossible question, but how likely do you think it is?
CH: Philippapa, I'm going to try as hard as I can to avoid using the word likelihood.
PL: How possible?
CH: It’s next to impossible to say, it's one of those things that we talk about reflexively. But I want to try to minimize the use of the word likelihood because I think it sets a trap for companies. Because when companies label things as likely or possible or unlikely, we tend to ignore or downplay the unlikely scenarios, and what we know is not just from our experience, unfortunately, with the full scale invasion of Ukraine, but with lots of other global crises that we labelled unlikely, is we become unprepared for them. What I can say is that this is a realistic scenario. It is one of a number of eventualities that companies on both sides of the Atlantic and in Europe and beyond should have on their sort of chart of incidents that should have on their radar. While not saying whether I think it's likely or unlikely, it would, among other things, be what we might want to call a worst case scenario.
PL: Luke, you're nodding?
LB: Yeah, I think it's a good point. I think the phrase you mentioned at the start was plausible. I think one of the mistakes that businesses can make with crisis management particularly is trying to give it a likelihood. Like the likelihood of this happening is 10%, it could happen in the next year. Whereas we tend to work on what is plausible. I think if you focus on the plausible scenarios, you tend to have a better chance of preparing for them and hopefully responding to them moving forward.
PL: I guess in this scenario it is worth remembering. We've got incursions already, haven't we in cyber, undersea cables?
CH: That's right. We're having a lot of difficulty these days defining what conflict really is. Russia is already attacking the west millions of times a day on the cyber front, but also look at what it's doing with attacks on infrastructure. Look at what it's doing with dragging undersea cables in a sort of grey zone or hybrid type of conflict. Russia is a major state actor, also uses non-state actors to attack Europe, and so the conflict essentially is already engaged.
PL: So Luke, we're going to talk about scenario planning, we're going to talk about crisis response, but it does seem to me business could spend a lot of money running worldwide scenarios, couldn't they? How do you narrow down the most likely threat to your clients?
LB: I think initially it's about having a good understanding of your business. So understanding what your supply chains are. A lot of organisations put a lot of effort and time into examining their tier one suppliers, so those suppliers that supply you as a business and that's pretty much where they stop. That's one of the mistakes that people can make. So I think one of the things I encourage businesses to do early on from this point of view is understanding where your supply chain stops and starts. Ideally then looking at your tier two, tier three suppliers, and then trying to identify sort of pinch points and then mapping those suppliers in your supply chains or your single points of failure to a geographical region. So if you have got a critical supplier in Poland or in a country which is impacted by some sort of geopolitical tension or incident, hopefully what the impact is going to be on losing that or the impact of losing that. So that's generally a good starting point. It's just understanding your business, which is as simple as it sounds, is not always quite as easy is it?
PL: Yeah, particularly when it comes to the supply chain. Should we take a look at the rational early steps? If we flesh out this scenario a bit, say we are running a medium-sized manufacturer, maybe a retailer, maybe not fully aware of quite how long that supply chain is, which is not unusual, trying to get to grips with these wider risks. When you understand your vulnerabilities in a way that you've just been talking about, you need to create a basic plan, don't you? You start building resilience, but I'm wondering who creates this plan? Because you're going to need a team?
LB: Yeah. I think one of the mistakes, again, people can make is trying to create plans for every specific scenario. So obviously we're talking about a very specific scenario here, but there wouldn't be a set plan for dealing with that. You're dealing with the impact. So when you come to creating plans, whether crisis response plans or business continuity plans, they are based around impacts as opposed to scenarios. So the scenarios will help you model what's going to happen, but actually your plans will help you respond to the impacts of something happening. In terms of how that's done and who does it really depends on, obviously the type and resources of the businesses that they have. So ultimately, as an organisation, we go in and support teams, internal teams with building crisis response plans or business continuity plans or resilience plans. But ultimately it's their plan to own. It has to be a business owned thing there. So, it can't be a consultant like us coming in and trying to write everything for a business. It has to be something that a business owns because they have a better understanding of the business than an outside party.
PL: Charles, you spent a lot of years with controlled risks. You must have helped organisations build these resilience teams internally on many occasions. Who sits in the team? Who should sit in the team?
CH: The more, the better. Not to make a crisis management team unwieldy. But I think it's about buy-in. Inevitably somebody will lead the process, and that may be the chief security officer, for example. But you really want to have a broad group of stakeholders who are engaged in the crisis management formulation, and then the execution of crisis management plans because companies are complex organisms. If you leave people out of the process, they'll feel that they've become part of the crisis rather than part of the solution. So buy-in internally, even from parts of the company that may feel that this has nothing to do with them is really important.
PL: So how much of this do you communicate then to your people? I mean your wider people, all your people?
CH: I was about to say as much as possible. But what I would say is that people want to work at a company. Where they know that they will be looked after and the business will be looked after in the event of some sort of unfortunate incident. This was particularly the case during the pandemic because a global pandemic was deemed a low likelihood event. A lot of companies were caught off guard, and we saw companies using natural disaster crisis management plans to cope with the pandemic.
PL: Which presumably were completely inappropriate?
CH: It was not a one size fits all sort of situation. What happened there, not only for the operations of the business, but because this was a public health crisis, the employees of the company didn't really know what to do and how to interact with their employer and what provisions had been made because crises are both external and internal. So I think the company wants to cover its messaging to its customers, to its supply chain, to its analysts, to the markets, but it wants to message internally as well.
PL: What about clients? Do you talk to clients about these plans?
LB: I think, yes. My view is always, yes, being open and transparent about your preparedness is a good thing. I think the level of detail you go into is obviously down to what you've got in your plans, how you're preparing for it, that is a business decision. But for me, if I was a client and we are a client to certain businesses, I would feel much more reassured if I know the organisation I'm dealing with is preparing for this and they're going through scenario plans and they're developing frameworks around how to respond to this kind of thing. So I think it's a positive thing to share this information or share the fact that you're doing something around this. But again, the level of detail is down to how sensitive that information could be.
PL: So you've got a team, you've got a basic plan. I'm interested to know at what point you put your plan into action. How do you know when the moment is?
CH: I think Luke and I will probably both have answers to this question, but I think we're talking about different scenarios here and we're talking about, in this case, a military scenario. Presumably in Eastern Europe or in the Baltics or somewhere in that sort of neck of the woods. What you do when you construct a scenario is that you build into it a series of triggers and you're monitoring them.
PL: So if something happens, you do X?
CH: That's right, and you're to a certain degree, ticking boxes and as you get closer and closer to the execution of a certain scenario, the manifestation of a certain scenario, the idea is not to be taken by surprise because you've seen the triggers flip.
LB: Yeah, that's a great point. I think what you said at the start is that, Charles, potentially some of the warning signs for Russia going into Ukraine were missed. If they're the sorts of triggers that we need to be looking at, if you've got forces mobilising on a border, it's a fairly good trigger that something might be happening. Just on the flip side of that as well is try not to get caught in terms of plan activation into too much of a rigid structure where actually you're just focused on these specific triggers or this specific threshold. But actually you've got some flexibility built into it. That's one of my key points around crisis planning is flexibility and adaptability of plans. So not trying to get too bogged down in what is step A, B and C is having some decision making flexibility so those in charge can flex with the situation.
PL: What's your experience been of how clients have actually responded to this at the moment? Have they wanted to rush their plan into action or have they been holding back so it "may resolve, it's going to be fine, we don't need to do anything"?
CH: That's a very good question, Philippapa. Let's put it this way, when two companies engage with each other, especially if there's a transfer of let's say intellectual property or there's the transfer of data, companies want to know that their partners are well prepared. We encountered situations where two companies wouldn't do business with each other unless they had cyber crisis management planning in place.
PL: Which seems rational, right?
CH: You want to work with and for companies that are on top of this and who are not necessarily trigger happy and afraid of what the future brings, but you want companies that will know how to respond proportionately as Luke points out, but how to do it promptly.
PL: It slightly depends on your appetite for risk, doesn't it? It's a bit like investing because it presumably depends on what business you are in?
LB: Yeah, absolutely. I think there are going to be some organisations that do pull that trigger, on a far more regular basis than others, depending on what the risk appetite is. There are some that, depending on the type of the organisation or the type of sector they work in, that actually incidents and issues happen on a more regular basis, so they're less likely to pull that trigger. I think, from my point of view I'd rather people escalate something, activate a plan or something similar when it's not needed then postponing the activation of it if it is needed.
PL: We move our scenario on a bit. If we go maybe three months later in, we've got Russia launching drones from missiles into Poland. We've got it targeting critical infrastructure. We still have troops along the border still at that moment. The world knows this is happening, business knows this is happening. What sort of outcomes would you expect at that moment?
CH: We can make a few, I think, accurate assumptions about what might happen. And that is that Poland is already in real time and in the real world is signalling that if it is attacked, it is ready to counter attack. Poland is not messing around when it comes to Russian aggression, so I think it would be likely. We're not quite sure that NATO or the United States is going to trade Chicago for Warsaw.
PL: Particularly now.
CH: Particularly now. I know exactly what you're hinting at and I agree with you. But Poland is letting everyone know that there, it has red lines and that if those red lines are crossed, it will respond. So we can expect engagement and then we can expect the impact that will have politically, economically, militarily in terms of human resources, in terms of what happens to consumer behaviour and how a country mobilises itself. Poland is ready to do that even now.
PL: So this is crisis management now, right? We are well beyond any sort of scenario planning, thinking about the immediate steps that a business which has either supply chain or their own people in the country or at risk in territories that are at risk. It seems to me, tell me if I'm wrong, the first question for them is, what's happening with our people? And that's not just the people you brought in, right? That's the people, that's the local people too?
LB: Yeah, and I think that often gets forgotten. I think if we, again, thinking back to Ukraine, when that first started to happen, we were working with some organisations that their first thought was obviously their expats in the country and how to get them out. Then it wasn't always, "what about the locals and what's the impact on the locals?" I think trying to bring those two things together is obviously vitally important because it's easy to extract to a certain extent. It's easy to extract people out of the country. Those that are living there— how do you make them safe? That needs to be part of the planning process when you go into it. How are we going to keep our locals safe? Do we need to offer them alternative accommodation? Do we need to move the office location? Those kinds of things. But it has to be the people's side of things, obviously for most organisations is going to be number one priority and keeping those people safe and then followed hopefully closely by this whatever critical services or critical activities you carry out in that region.
PL: I seem to remember you had operation experience in Africa, Charles, is that right? I'm just wondering whether you've seen this with organisations, do they remember about their local employees?
CH: Organisations have very short memories. But employees don't. So what I can tell, I can only emphasise what Luke said in that, when it came to Ukraine, companies should try to minimise as much as possible any kind of differentiation in the way that they treat local and expat employees. Sending expats to the airport while not having a plan to cover what happens locally would be a huge strike against the company, reputationally and just in terms of its own security and operations. I'll push this one point further and that is that a lot of companies should be concerned about whether their employees, their local employees will be drafted or will be mobilised or will be called up if they're reservists for example. That is a realistic problem for companies that are entering into military preparedness or military action.
PL: This must be playing out and has been playing out in Ukraine in real time?
CH: It was a massive problem in Ukraine and that was one of the reasons why. Ukraine essentially declared martial law. Literally declared martial law shut its borders and it shut its borders to men of draft age. So men were not allowed to leave the country. Then, there were companies concerned about what's going to happen to our workforce. How many of our employees are going to be called to the front?
PL: Because the draft age got older and older, didn't it?
CH: They expanded the range of draftable age. They did that in Ukraine and they did that in Russia as well.
PL: So it's not necessarily just your young, young men— not the others?
LB: People with particular skills as well. Is being concerned about that, especially depending on the type of activity you carry out in that region. If you're pro, if you're providing something which is linked to critical national infrastructure, for example, those types of people, those types of employees are, again, more likely to be drafted into some sort of war effort against its understanding of what the demographic of your employee base is in that region. It's hugely important.
PL: So assuming you're trying to keep your business rolling and you haven't actually pulled it out of the territory, these are difficult questions, aren't they about, you might have outright loss of suppliers, presumably you've planned for fallback options there in your scenario planning?
CH: I'm going to mix my metaphors a little bit on this, but I'm going to assume that most companies should understand or do already understand that every company's going to have its own individual Strait of Hormuz, and probably many of them. That will be one, or many particular choke points as Luke pointed out when he was talking about supply chain management and supply chain prioritisation. Each company is going to have its own sort of suite of Straits of Homuz. What you need to do is you need to understand what happens to a country's economy in conflict. How resources are reallocated and reprioritized, how people, as we've just discussed, are reallocated and reprioritized. What happens to consumer behaviour in countries that are mobilised? And all of the different ways that a country's infrastructure changes and weighing and hopefully anticipating— because that's the point of this podcast— anticipating those sorts of changes and building that into your company.
PL: It's a whole array of business impacts, isn't it? From commodities as you say, to energy prices to people. As you said, there'll be a tipping point, won't there? At which point, continuing is unsustainable, but an interesting question isn't what level of disruption, what level of cost increase is acceptable for a business if it sees its long-term future in that territory? So do you talk to clients about that sort of thing?
LB: That's done very early on in the process, and it is often looked at from a business continuity point of view. One of the first steps in that process is looking at business impact and what is acceptable, and it's going to be different for every business. That could be linked to the financial impact. It could be linked to the customer impact. It could be linked to the impact on employees. There should be, I say for most organisations, a defined point whether that be a financial figure or a time figure, if what's unacceptable and that , could simply be " it's unacceptable to put people at risk of harm", or it could be, "it's unacceptable for us to risk more than a million pounds worth of income." But there should be a predefined set moment in time or metric there somewhere which says, "all right, if we hit the stepping point and this is where we can pull out, or this is when we can't sustain that model." But I think importantly with that, not everything's critical. These are some of the traps that the organisations fall into thinking they've got to produce everything all of the time. Whereas understanding actually, what is your critical activity? What is your critical service you provide and can we scale down other things to support that? Again, should be part of that pre-planning and scenario planning.
PL: So adaptation?
CH: That's right. So not only is not everything critical, I would also add that, not everything is always black and white. I think that there are opportunities here for companies to engage with their host countries and, look, there will be certain things that governments will not be able to compromise on in a moment of conflict, but governments should be, and I think genuinely we saw this in Ukraine, are interested in keeping industry open and running. So that, number one, the economy doesn't collapse. So that number two, people who are not mobilised have employment, and so that, there's an advantage to governments as well to having companies that can offer shelter or that can look after young children or that can look after the spouses of employees and employ the spouses of employees. I'm thinking particularly of a client that we had that was in far western Ukraine, that engaged with the government and said, "look, we want to stay open, we want to keep manufacturing. We know that you're going to take some of our employees into the army, but where can we work together on actually finding a sweet spot that allows you to respond militarily to Russia, but us to also stay open economically?"
PL: So reserved occupations, all that sort of thing, and holding onto some of your people?
CH: Yeah.
PL: So that flexibility. That's an interesting point. I'm also wondering about other threats like cyber. Cyber has become such a big part of all conflicts now, and I'm guessing, tell me that cyber, for instance, they must ramp up at moments like this.
CH: So back to this concept of 'what's conflict?' And how much of this sort of conflict is already ongoing. One of the things that it would be wise to anticipate in the scenario that we're describing is an uptick in cyber attacks. We've seen this in Poland. We've seen cyber attacks, we've seen physical attacks on Polish infrastructure, on the railroads. So I think that any sort of crisis management, any sort of crisis response, and I don't want to talk over Luke, has to have a deep and thorough cyber component.
PL: Presumably your risk profile in that area depends on who you're doing business with in the country—If it's government, if it's infrastructure, you must be at an elevated risk?
LB: Yeah and I think you're right, and I think there's good points there. I think it's not just focused on the cyber defence side of things as well. It is that cyber resilience piece. Like we do, most organisations do a huge amount of work when it comes to cyber defence and preventing the cyber attacks happening. But what we're seeing is we need to have a bit more of a shift towards cyber resilience. So what if something has happened, we haven't been able to stop it, and actually we can't access our critical systems. How do we respond to an organisation? We've seen countless examples of organisations over the last 12 months being subject to those types of cyber attacks and not being able to continue to operate. So this is what organisations need to get their head around assuming a breach has happened and you have been attacked and something's happened. How do you now respond to that without your critical infrastructure in place? Which isn't easy.
PL: Easy to say!
LB: Again, comes down to scenario planning and exercising, testing and training stuff.
PL: Or at least looking the possibility in the eye? In advance, presumably, almost psychologically?
LB: Yeah.
PL: Just so that it's not a huge surprise at the moment. That's a brief, administratively brief look at immediate response. I'm wondering about the longer term impacts, because obviously conflicts roll on now, and we see this in Ukraine, we're seeing it in Iran and others. So we see these cyber attacks rolling, we see energy prices rising and falling. There's a lot of uncertainty. We've got governments introducing emergency measures like tariffs and prohibitions and legislation. We've seen all this in Ukraine, haven't we? Then you can end up with travel restrictions, wider anxiety. So this is a kind of embedded period of long term disruption, and that's a different phase for business, isn't it? So what happens then?
CH: What happens then, I think, involves a real change in outlook and framework. That is that the comfort zone that we all lived in geopolitically for six or seven decades after World War II is over. For a while we were asking ourselves, then what comes next? Is there going to be some sort of new global framework? Is it going to be a world that is multipolar or bipolar, presumably between the United States and China, or is it just going to be prolonged chaos and disruption as you're pointing out? I think that it's too early to say that there is some sort of new global framework being born. I think the wiser outlook is to assume that we are in for a prolonged period of disruption and uncertainty, and the scenario that we're discussing today is one of a number of scenarios that companies should have on their radar going forward, because we're dealing with two major regional conflicts now, but we know that there are others out there.
PL: Just sitting on the edge of possible as these? So Luke, what would you say about this? We're still in the territory. We're going to operate in this new normal. How do you do it?
LB: That term new normal came out a lot in COVID, didn't it? We went through that period of a year or two of this new normal of lots of people working from home. The way we operated businesses just changed overnight and eventually we've gone back hopefully to what was normal previously.
PL: The change has sustained, isn't it?
LB: Yeah, I think some of the changes have stuck, some have gone back for good or bad, but I think it again comes down to that pre-planning and it, crisis management isn't just a case of dealing with the initial impact of the initial incident or situation. It is about how we then recover from that and how we continue to operate. So it could be as simple as making sure that your communication strategy after, during that long term, that prolonged period— when I talk about communications with both internal and external— how you communicate with your clients is important. Being open and transparent and telling them what the changes are, how it's impacting them internally, I think it's just as if not more important. I think the long term crisis is hugely impactful on employees and staff, both from sort of morale, a welfare and a financial point of view in these situations. So having a strategy to deal with those three things is vital to make sure that they are on board and they are brought into the crisis response as well. But a lot of that just comes down to being open with people and communicating on a regular consistent basis.
CH: Philippa, it may sound like we're making a huge laundry list of headaches for CEOs and for chief security officers, chief operating officers and the C-Suite. We should just take two seconds to say that companies that can grip scenario planning and that can grip crisis management, planning and execution acquire enormous competitive advantage. Companies that do what we're talking about well and do it better than other companies— and the field is wide open, I think we should say— will perform better. They will perform better in periods of prolonged uncertainty and suffer less than they might have otherwise and suffer less than their competitors.
PL: You've seen this play out in real time in Russia, despite the sanctions of the rest, there are western business interests operating inside Russia. Legitimately having found a way to do that, business adapts, right?
CH: Business adapts. You're absolutely right. Companies, as big and as cumbersome as they sometimes are, companies are learning slowly but surely. Thanks to listening to podcasts like this, they're learning how to be agile and they're learning how to roll with the punches. For some companies that have stayed in Russia under crushing legal and financial and operational difficulties there are reports coming out that's that some companies, not all of them, are doing pretty well at it.
PL: What sort of sectors are they in? Who stays in Russia now?
CH: So what's not under sanctions? Russia is the world's most sanctioned company. But you'll find that there are certain types of consumer products. You'll find that there are some of these sorts of companies that travel under the radar, mid-size companies that aren't huge public global brands. The McDonald's left, the Starbucks of the world all left. But beneath that level of mega brand, there are other companies that stayed. Then there was also significant market entry from companies from Turkey, from the Emirates, from China.
PL: So they filled the void?
CH: Yeah, exactly right.
PL: Isn't that interesting? Have you come across this too?
LB: Yeah, and I think it goes back to one of the points you were making previously around looking at— this isn't all negative. Obviously this situation is very negative. But there are always going to be organisations that see the upside of risk. We saw it in COVID. Some companies did extremely well during that period, and some flourished because they were able to look at it and predict and be agile and put a positive spin on what was happening and did very well. It's exactly the same with this. Some companies will scenario plan and go, "these are the negative impacts". Some will go, "these are negative impacts, but actually if we do this the right way, there's some positivity we can get out this, there's some different ways we can operate to improve ourselves as a business."
PL: So that is the further stage of the planning then? The whole kind of, how do we, I hesitate to say turn this to our advantage, but how do we adapt in such a way that we can exploit the competitive opportunities that Charles are just describing?
CH: It's a full circle moment for companies and that is you plan for something, it happens, you survive. Then you go on.
PL: We brought this very out neatly to a close. I'm interested to ask you both, and I know it's a slightly impossible question. People listening to this, if they haven't really thought about it before in this particular context, what would be the first steps for them?
LB: The organisations that come out of these situations well are the ones that have just put a lot of effort into pre-planning, and that is a very simple thing to say because there is a lot of resources, time and effort that goes into that. But the first step for me is always doing something like this. It's sitting down, talking through scenarios, coming up with plausible scenarios, and talking about how they might impact us an organisation, because you open up a whole can of worms in your supply chain, in your employee base, a whole host of things actually, that gives you something to focus on straight away. So that is a continuous process, but it's often the easiest place to start and the one that probably is less costly.
PL: Yeah. Aware of vulnerabilities?
CH: Yeah, I would call that critical uncertainties. A holistic company-wide, multi-stakeholder conversation that's controlled, not messy and not unwieldy, but a controlled conversation about company's critical uncertainties. What are the assumptions that we're making that may or may not prove to hold when things change? And then just taking it forward from that very basic first step.
PL: That is extremely helpful. Thank you both very much. Really fascinating conversation.
LB: Thank you.
CH: It's a pleasure.
PL: If you are an ICAEW member, remember to click through from the show notes attached to this episode to the ICAEW site. You can log your list to the podcast as CPD before it slips your mind next month with a new PM and a new chancellor. Now in post, we'll be looking ahead to the second half of the year with our regular team of economic experts and asking them for their first stab of what the autumn statement might hold. They always have interesting takes on what's going on. Do not miss it. Thanks for being with us.
