The question “When will the crisis happen?” is seductive.

It is also frequently the wrong question.

Complex geopolitical events rarely offer reliable calendars.

Wars, sanctions, regime changes, capital controls, export restrictions and political ruptures emerge through interactions between structural pressures, strategic decisions, enabling conditions and unpredictable triggers.

Trying to forecast an exact date can create false confidence.

But rejecting temporal prediction does not mean abandoning foresight.

A much stronger question exists:

What event could challenge the project, and under what configuration of conditions would that event become increasingly plausible?

This changes everything.

Suppose a company is considering a major investment.

Rather than predicting whether the government will impose capital controls next year, analysts can identify the event itself:

Capital controls materially restricting repatriation.

Then they can identify the conditions supporting that event.

Declining foreign-exchange reserves.

Balance-of-payments stress.

Increasing central-bank intervention.

Political pressure to preserve hard currency.

Growing divergence between official and parallel exchange rates.

Restrictions imposed on selected sectors.

None of these indicators predicts a date.

But together they can show whether the conditions associated with the scenario are strengthening.

The method therefore becomes:

PROJECT CORE → CRITICAL EVENT → CONDITIONS → INDICATORS → CONVERGENCE → SCENARIOS → PROJECT IMPACT

This is decision-relevant foresight.

It also forces analysts to define the project before studying the world.

The same geopolitical event may matter enormously to one company and hardly at all to another.

The correct question is therefore always relational:

What could happen that would challenge an assumption on which this project depends?

That may include:

continued banking access,

currency convertibility,

supplier availability,

regulatory continuity,

market access,

physical security,

technology access,

or enforceability of contracts.

Once these assumptions are visible, the organization can define what it must monitor.

Foresight becomes practical.

Not prediction.

Not speculation.

Not headline commentary.

It becomes a disciplined attempt to identify decision-relevant configurations before they fully materialize.

But this produces another analytical problem.

If several indicators appear, how much weight should management give each one?

That is where evidence quality and scenario configuration become essential.