You are Ricardo Alves, Head of Strategic Foresight at Costa Verde Industries. Read the signals wrong and you either bet the firm on a mirage or get blindsided by a disruption you saw first.
Costa Verde makes rigid plastic packaging and is highly profitable, but your foresight unit has flagged a convergence of weak signals: tightening single-use plastic regulation, a start-up scaling a fibre-based alternative, shifting retailer sustainability pledges, and early customer sustainability audits. None yet dents current sales, and the commercial team dismisses them as noise. Your scenario work suggests a plausible future in which the core product faces structural decline within five to seven years, but the timing and severity are genuinely uncertain, and acting too early would burn capital and credibility.