The survey closed March 13. The decisions taken inside the gap are now operating baseline.

The problem was never awareness. It was translation, and not just from signal to cost line, but from cost line to customer behaviour to revenue impact. The CFO whose automotive customers are deferring capital-expenditure approvals does not see that in her own order book yet, because the signal is in her customers' planning cycles rather than in her own pipeline, and that is the transmission path most internal models miss.

Long-horizon planners are twice as likely to run geopolitical scenarios as short-horizon planners (27 percent against 12 percent). They accepted that the environment is part of the forecast. The 73 percent who have not run geopolitical scenarios are carrying the same exposure with less visibility into it.

The board is not waiting to be briefed. Sixty-one percent of CEOs report boards more engaged on strategy than a year ago. The CFO who pre-empts the board question with a signal-adjusted scenario owns the narrative; the one who waits explains the miss. Fifty percent of planning time now runs on sub-one-year horizons, up from 43 percent in 2025, and compressed planning horizons create blind spots at exactly the moment the signal environment is expanding.

The threat level was named before the environment worsened. The board will re-rate it. The CFO who has not re-rated first loses the narrative. More than half of CEOs at companies representing ten percent of global market cap named macro as their top threat in a world where Hormuz was still open. The current environment is materially worse. That threat level has not been re-rated.

If you are the CFO before the next board cycle closes, the macro assumptions that underpin your current Q3 forecast are worth auditing for date-of-set. If they were set before 13 March, meaning before the blockade, before CPI plus 3.3 percent monthly, and before Brent peaked at $116 and retraced, they are stale regardless of what you conclude about the environment now. What the board is going to see is a signal-adjusted scenario presented alongside the current plan, framed not as a revision but as a confidence interval, with the delta named explicitly (Hormuz Day 86 against Day 0, Brent $116 peak against $101 current, CPI monthly move of plus 3.3 percent against baseline), and the exposure each of those creates quantified against your specific pipeline. The decision open at your next board briefing is whether to present the scenario yourself in front of the board or wait for the board to ask and present under questioning. If you hold current assumptions and the compound intensifies, Q3 arrives with a pipeline miss against a plan built on retired macro numbers, guidance gets cut in front of the analyst call, and the board sees the stale assumptions after the miss rather than before. The other side is quieter: if you present the signal-adjusted scenario and the compound de-escalates cleanly, the pre-adjusted forecast overshoots conservatively, and the operational reputation of the CFO who called the signal-adjustment first carries through to the next revision cycle.

If you are on the board committee running its own reframe, the pre-blockade macro assumptions cannot stay intact in the forecast book. A signal-adjusted scenario with named assumptions and confidence intervals is worth requesting from the CFO ahead of the next board cycle rather than after Q2 close, and executive performance metrics set against the pre-blockade environment need recalibration to the current one. The distinction worth holding is between signal awareness (which executives clearly have, per the survey) and signal translation to P&L (which the survey does not confirm). The decision open at your committee is whether to run the reframe on the board's own initiative this cycle or wait for the CFO's Q3 print to make the reframe unavoidable. If you hold current governance rhythm and the compound intensifies, the reframe happens under Q3 miss conditions with less discretion on framing, less time to reset executive metrics before year-end review, and less credibility with the executive team the reframe is being done to. The other side: if you initiate the reframe proactively and the compound resolves, the pre-emption carries as method that held through the compound, and the executive team runs the next cycle inside a governance rhythm that saw the signal before the print.

The board is building toward one question, and it will arrive at the next cycle whether the CFO is ready or not: *"How confident are you in the number given what has changed."* Take the revision early or take it under board questioning in Q3. The window to adjust assumptions before the board cycle closes is shorter than it looks. Fifty percent of planning time on sub-one-year horizons means compressed decision loops at exactly the moment the signal environment is expanding, and the shorter the loop the harder the reframe is once the print lands against the plan.

Status: Open. The horizon closes at the next board cycle, and the entry review is scheduled for 7 May 2026. Between the 13 April registration and now, the Hormuz cascade has continued through Day 86 and past, Brent has moved from the peak at $116 through the current retracement, CPI has continued to post monthly moves consistent with the plus 3.3 percent March print, and the IMF has posted its April revision (see IRP_3) which is precisely the multilateral confirmation the survey pre-dated. The central claim, that pre-blockade macro assumptions in Q3 forecasts require signal-adjusted re-run before the next board cycle closes, has not been contradicted. The next update triggers on either the OECD June revision, actual Q3 forecast revisions surfacing in board minutes or investor briefings, or an executive-team departure attributed to macro miscalibration, whichever arrives first.