Leonard Chuene’s real mistake
Athletics South Africa (ASA) president Leonard Chuene fell into the classic trap of not thinking far enough ahead when he made the fateful decision not to withdraw Caster Semenya from the Berlin competition.
Most of the criticism and calls for his resignation have been from the emotional/human level, his failure as a CEO of athletics SA.and the misplaced racism calls lodged by the government without first finding out the facts (more on that another day).
I think the problem is much simpler. He suffered from something we all do at times which is, in the heat of the moment, to not think strategically. This is not rocket science.
If he had played out the scenarios in his mind at the point when team doctor Harold Adams gave him the results of the tests and recommended he withdraw Semenya, he would have come up with 3 scenarios.
The three scenarios are based on the two biggest uncertainties that he faced; whether or not Caster won and if the gender issue which he was sitting on was found out or not.
The lucky break scenario, in professional athletics, is so unlikely that it is not even worth considering, unless as one of my students astutely pointed out, Caster only won by a narrow margin in which case there might not have been so much controversy. Either way I don’t think any thinking person would have taken that risk.
If she didn’t win then the ‘Doesn’t matter scenario’ is unlikely to have caused much controversy. Then again, why enter someone in the athletics world champs unless you are going for a win.
Which brings us to scenario number one, the most likely and the one whose story has been written all over the world over the past weeks.
This five minute exercise could have prevented all the commotion and embarrassment. A few minutes thinking about how the situation could have played out would have shown clearly what the right decision was. Then again the inability to think a little bit strategically is the nub of the problem.
Trevor Manuel: “I could close my eyes now…”
Imagine sitting in a room in 1991 with a group of South African’s trying to map out what the nation would look like in 2002. At the time we were in the middle of negotiations, the country was racked in violence and uncertainty, we were yet to have our first democratic elections and predicting the future was a risky business.
Nelson Mandela had been released from prison in 1990 promising widespread nationalisation which was the ANC economic policy at the time, and the Anglo Scenarios popularised by Clem Sunter were veering towards the Low Road.
At the time, Pieter le Roux of UWC was offered money from German foundation Friedrich Ebert Stiftung to organise a conference on the future of South Africa. Sceptical about the conferences that had been held to that point, where delegates reiterated their stated positions, Le Roux decided to follow a different approach and run a scenario-planning exercise.
Meeting outside Cape Town at the Mont Fleur Conference Centre, Le Roux gathered participants from all major groupings of political, business, academic and social organisations*. He chose them based on who they represented but importantly asked them to participate on a personal rather than organisational basis, allowing them the freedom to explore all points of view rather than toeing a particular “party” line.
That group of people today looks like the who’s who of South Africa and includes Tito Mboweni, Trevor Manuel, Christo Wiese, Vincent Maphai and Saki Macozoma (for a full list of participants — see below).
The scenario-planning exercise was facilitated by Adam Kahane who had cut his teeth on scenario planning at Shell, one of the world leaders in the process. The group met in September 1991 followed by a period of research until their second meeting in November that year. There they assessed their progress and developed four scenarios. They then started a period of consultation until March 1992 where they finalised their work and started the process of dissemination.
One of the groups that Mont Fleur participants presented to and consulted with were select cabinet ministers. Nick Segal, who has researched all major scenario-planning exercises in South Africa, reports that “after the presentation, Derek Keys** casually mentioned that he happened to have in his car slides of a presentation he had recently made to Cabinet on the state of the economy and asked whether the team might have any interest in seeing them”.
This presentation was very influential as the group realised that South Africa wasn’t the rich country that they had believed but was rather in a dire economic situation predominantly as a result of sanctions and a very expensive war with the frontline states.
Segal goes on to say: “In mid-September 1992, only a few weeks after this episode and at a time when political negotiations had broken down, a wide-ranging interview with Mandela was published in Johannesburg’s leading daily newspaper The Star. Mandela made the following comments on the economy: ‘We want to break the deadlock (in the negotiations), because if we don’t, I fear that the economy is going to be so destroyed that when a democratic government comes into power, it will no longer be able to solve it. The longer it takes for democracy to be introduced, the more difficult it will be to repair the economy.’ ” Mandela’s position was changed as a result of a meeting the previous week with Manuel where they had discussed Key’s presentation on the economy.
The ANC’s economic policy was changing.
The four scenarios developed covered South Africa for the period 1992 to 2002 describing possible futures and how they would have an impact on the social, economic and political agenda. The idea was not to develop definitive truths but to stimulate debate on these topics.
The four scenarios described in the final Mont Fleur document are:
- Ostrich, in which a negotiated settlement to the crisis in South Africa is not achieved and the country’s government continues to be non-representative.
- Lame Duck, in which a settlement is achieved but the transition to a new dispensation is slow and indecisive.
- Icarus, in which transition is rapid but the new government unwisely pursues unsustainable, populist economic policies.
- Flight of the Flamingos, in which the government’s policies are sustainable and the country takes a path of inclusive growth and democracy.
Speaking about Keys’ presentation Manuel says “Derek sat around and chatted with us, and it was very important, because we were trying to understand the Icarus scenario and the dangers of macro-economic populism. That was certainly profound for me”. It was the start of a friendship and mentoring relationship across the political divide that Manuel and others admit was important in preparing the young team for the task that lay ahead. (From Alister Sparks’ book Beyond the Miracle)
Last year I invited Maphai (currently SAB executive director for corporate affairs and at the time chairman of BHP Billiton) to speak to our strategy students at UCT. Not wanting to miss the opportunity I asked him how much Mont Fleur had affected ANC economic thinking. He confirmed that the scenario exercise had had a profound affect on the participants who later went on to hold very influential positions in South Africa post 1994.
Mboweni, who became Reserve Bank Governor in 1999 stated in his inauguration address “we are not Icarus; there is no need to fear that we will fly too close to the sun”.
In his book, Solving Tough Problems, the facilitator of Mont Fleur, Kahane, quotes Manuel saying: “It’s not a straight line [from Mont Fleur to GEAR]. It meanders through, but there is a fair amount in all that going back to Mont Fleur … I could close my eyes now and give you those scenarios like this. I’ve internalised them and if you have internalised something then you probably carry it with you for life.”
With Manuel’s success as finance minister, following very similar policies to those outlined by the Flight of Flamingos Scenario, the question is whether he will now, in the possibly more powerful position as head of the National Planning Commission, be able to influence ANC policy sufficiently to keep the organisation on the right side of the balance between sound economic policy and macro-economic populism.
That the ANC is bigger than its individuals was demonstrated in the recalling of Thabo Mbeki last year. It is unlikely that Manuel was simply a renegade finance minister who managed a policy which wasn’t in line with broader ANC thinking.
Jacob Zuma’s resistance thus far to give into the labour movements’ calls for more populist policies, bodes well for a theory that it wasn’t Manuel alone that set the course of economic policy over the past years but that it was a widely accepted ANC approach.
ANC thinking is clearly aligned with that of Mboweni, Mbeki and Manuel and while South Africa has yet to demonstrate that sound economic policy rather than macro-economic populism delivers to the poor and not only the rich, a break with this thinking would lead us down a hole from which it will be difficult to recover.
* With the notable exception of the Inkatha Freedom Party
** Derek Keys — former Gencor executive chairman, brought into the cabinet by FW de Klerk as minister of economic affairs in January of 1992 later taking over the finance portfolio and becoming finance minister from 1992 to September 1994.
- The Mont Fleur Scenarios
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- This article also published on Dale’s Mail & Guardian Thought Leader blog
Full list of Mont Fleur participants:
- Dorothy Boesak
- Rob Davies
- Howard Gabriels
- Adam Kahane
- Koosum Kalyan
- Michiel le Roux
- Pieter le Roux
- Johann Liebenberg
- Saki Macozoma
- Tito Mboweni
- Gaby Magomola
- Mosebyane Malatsi
- Thobeka Cikizwa Mangwana
- Trevor Manuel
- Vincent Thabane Maphai
- Philip Mohr
- Nicky Morgan
- Patrick Ncube
- Gugile Nkwinti
- Brian O’Connell
- Mahlomola Skosana
- Viviene Taylor
- Sue van der Merwe
- Dr Winfried Veit
- Christo Wiese
Intellectual Vandalism
A friend told me about a house he was building. It took months to get it nearly complete. Lots of work by lots of people, creating something of beauty that everyone could admire. A week before completion vandals broke into the property and ripped the place to pieces, just for fun.
Vandalism sits on the opposite end of the continuum to creativity.
This story has many parallels in the world. An employee spends hours working on a new idea only for their boss to reject it without offering any suggestions for improvement.
A child spends hours on a project only for a teacher to dismiss it without proper acknowledgment.
The hallmark of intellectual vandals are those that only break down without offering an alternative. Criticism is always welcome, if constructive. Intellectual vandals seldom offer anything constructive.
Their interactions mostly consist of vigorous attempts to shoot down ideas and make them less valuable.
The destruction of ideas, thoughts and concepts is much easier than creating new thought. Vandalism is much easier than creativity. As in the example of the ‘house-breakers’, the ‘idea-breakers’ use a fraction of the energy of the creative.
Like the child who breaks down sand castles on the beach because they are more beautiful than hers, the intellectual vandal looks to bring all ideas down to a size that he can feel less intimidated.
Zuma’s Wednesday Challenge
South Africa isn’t short of skills, people, resources or imagination. What it is short of is a common vision. Common implies most of us buy into it and will take whatever steps it takes to achieve it. Sometimes we will need to make sacrifices in the short term for the long.
The world has known a few common visions that have worked. Mahatma Ghandi brought the British Empire to its knees with his (it took 30 odd years). JFK put a man on the moon with his (7 years – watch and listen to his inspiring words).
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.” (Read the full speech from Rice University on 12th September 1962)
Nelson Mandela galvanized a generation around his vision which took 27 years to emerge:
“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” (Read his full speech from the dock of the Rivonia Trial on 20th April 1964)
More recently Barack Obama got elected on the simple promise of “We can”.
Companies have been built on great visions too. Henry Ford dedicated his whole life to “consumerism as the key to peace” and his legacy stands for itself (despite most recent woes).
Bill Gates pictured a PC on every desk and got some people to follow him and look what happened. Larry Page and Sergey Brin saw an opportunity to organize the worlds information and Google continues to live this vision.
The word ‘Vision’ has unfortunately in recent years been killed by overuse. Consultants and others have reduced it to a ‘Vision Statement’, lost amongst piles of strategy papers, mission statements, values and principals.
Imagine Nelson Mandela with a ‘Vision Statement’ on the wall of his cell, neatly framed and repeated everyday like an affirmation. It loses some of its effect doesn’t it?
True vision is much more powerful than a plaque on the wall. It describes something which gets our hearts beating faster. It creates a desire to do more. It is compelling. When clear, the last thing I want is to be left behind or left out from that vision.
A compelling vision is also simple. It is not a shopping list or an agenda. It is bold, uncomplicated, accessible and embraced.
Unfortunately over the past years our country has become visionless. We are falling well short of our potential. Mbeki lost the plot once he got into the presidents chair. He became defensive and a petty squabbler. Arguing about the issues rather than raising above them. He fell short of the political leader that he could have been.
South Africa needs a leader who can inspire and unite. There is no place for division amongst true leaders. The leaders above are remembered for their bold view of the future which united people to join and follow them. Paradoxically it is simple and it is hard.
On Wednesday, Zuma will give his state of the nation address. His task is not easy, what is the single vision that could unite South Africa in 2009?
Vision takes time to emerge. Wednesday may however just be the start that we need. I believe that we are hungrier than ever for a compelling vision. Like a CEO taking over a troubled company, the bad times are sometimes easier to make bold moves and to change course decisively.
Dare we dream that it is possible.
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The case for optimism
Even if I’m completely wrong.
If there had been two ways that something could work out and I have chosen the incorrect one.
If I had been smoking my socks and there is no validity in what I thought would happen.
If it is now entirely clear that I have been unrealistic and out of touch with the reality of how things work.
I believed something better would happen than it did. My judgment failed me and left me choosing a fantasy rather than seeing the harsh reality of the situation.
When my optimistic view on the issue, which I have held on to, is proven out of touch with what has happened. When my optimistic view has been held up for all its faults.
When, on that day, I am devastated by the consequences of choosing the wrong option and have left dealing with how to cope with a scenario I had not anticipated.
On that day, the day that I am wrong, I will say, “You were right, I was wrong.”
Between today and then however, I will have been happier, slept better, held more hope and had more fun, than the pessimist.
View this post on Thought Leader, includes comments and links to related postings by other authors.
SA: Best place for kids to grow up
I’ve met many people who have left South Africa or are planning to leave because of their kids. I think it’s a lousy reason. It’s seldom about the children and even if it was, it’s a mistake. Our children get more out of growing up in South Africa than they would in some safe little town in Australia.
Having two beautiful young children I can understand the dilemma. We have to balance keeping ourselves safe while not being paranoid and paralysed by fear. It’s not always easy. Despite the dilemma, South Africa offers one of the best opportunities for children to learn about the world and grow into better people.
This view only works if you can start by wondering whether life is about more than just being comfortable and safe.
The usual reasons in favour of South Africa are the warmth of our people, our lifestyle and opportunity. Brenda Weis, an American sales executive, discovered this when she visited the country in 2007 and again in 2008. She fell in love with South Africa and its people. Based on her brief visits, she has made the decision to retire here rather than in the United States. As she says, “It is a good country with great potential … and I look forward to calling it home.”
On the other side, there are of course a number of arguments why you should get on the phone to Stuttafords and start planning your emigration. That’s the usual debate though and not the point of this article.
Make me stronger
A unique aspect of our country is that, unlike other countries where you might not have to think about some of the big issues in life, South Africa forces you to take a view. More than just a view, you are often forced to look at yourself and challenge your beliefs.
Isn’t it possible that the problems we have in South Africa make us stronger? It was the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who in 1888 said, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Could this be the attraction to our country for people like Brenda Weis?
A world in one country
The nature of South Africa with it’s complex history can be seen as a microcosm for the world, with all it’s beauty and troubles. I don’t know who came up with “South Africa — A world in one country” — it is a perfect description of our land.
There are many issues which South Africa has dealt with or is dealing with which have yet to be resolved by the world at large. In many cases the world looks to South Africa for solutions and our four Nobel Peace Prize laureates are proof of the value placed on our leadership.
Race
While race as an issue is hardly resolved (see “On being a recovering racist”) we have certainly dealt with issues in a more open and engaging manor than elsewhere in the world.
South Africa under apartheid was the cauldron of race relations for the world and while countries such as America abolished their own form of apartheid many years before, the issue is far from resolved.
There have been at least two racist right-wing plots to kill Barack Obama, simply because he is black and the president. Clearly all is not well in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the country which first coined the term race riot and where Los Angeles erupted in 1992 as South Africa was negotiating its transition to a non-racial democracy. Europe has similar issues with a growing right-wing movement.
Race in South Africa is real. We haven’t stopped talking about it, which is healthy. We don’t all agree and that’s fine. It’s explicit, it’s messy, it’s in our faces and we have to deal with it. And we will. And the world can learn from our experiences while we will be better prepared for a world facing similar issues.
Shifting Power
China is growing faster than America. At some point, it’s likely China will be a bigger and more powerful country than America. This is likely to cause some tension. There are other shifts in power around energy, nuclear capability, food and even water, which are likely to affect who has the biggest voice at the table.
In South Africa we’ve recently shifted power quite significantly and quickly. In the late 1980’s the National Party saw that their model was flawed and effectively negotiated themselves out of power, avoiding a meltdown and providing an opportunity of a more peaceful and prosperous future.
The ANC was founded in 1912 as a collective of Africans resisting initially colonisation and later Afrikaner nationalism. In 1990 they suddenly found their cause removed and they were thrust into power and have been reinventing themselves ever since.
This shift takes some adjusting on all fronts. It’s not just about politicians and leaders. Living in South Africa, you and I have faced issues as a result of this change in power that the rest of the world hasn’t since World War II.
Dealing with the bad guys
Fifteen years before terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Centre and shocked America to its core, we were already dealing with the reality of armoured vehicles cruising our neighbourhoods and bombs exploding in restaurants as people fought for their causes.
You may remember the bombing of the Wimpy in Benoni in 1988. That year there were more than 100 incidents of attack and counter-attack scattered across our country while the nationalist army and Umkhonto we Sizwe fought their war. As civilians we learned to live in this environment.
Without being paranoid, there will always be bad guys. It’s not doom and gloom, it is just reality. People fight and people get hurt, they always have. Better to have strategies for dealing with it than looking for a place to put your head in the sand.
South Africans have moved beyond being paralysed by the actions of the bad guys. From neighbourhood watches to private security, we have organised ourselves to live despite the threat.
Life would be better if we didn’t have to look over our shoulders, but we do. The New York, London, Madrid and Mumbai attacks illustrate that nowhere is safe and our only error is to believe that somehow, we can insulate ourselves from “the bad guys”.
The great deciders
The shifting of power and global terrorism are big macro issues, and while interesting, they are not as real as the conversations and interactions we have on a daily basis. We are the people on the ground, living our lives in our neighbourhoods and offices. We are the citizens who live and work, raise families, have friends and find meaning in our everyday existence.
This existence in South Africa, is at a different intensity level to other countries. Irrespective of who you are and who I am, we have been challenged since 1990 to review, perhaps change, but at least look at our beliefs around some big issues.
Race, crime, community, citizenship, religion, politics, education and health are some of the topics that we have had to examine. Even if we haven’t changed our minds, we are forced to make decisions.
Many of us have had to look life and death situations squarely in the face, either ourselves or among our family and friends. We have to decide how we let it affect us.
Politically, it doesn’t matter whether we supported the Communists or the AWB, or somewhere in between, we have had to examine our position as things around us have changed.
What feels normal to us is certainly not normal for much of the world. While the daily papers in Helsinki are scratching around for a motor accident to put on the front page, journalists in South Africa seldom have a slow news day.
Contrasts
In South Africa we live in rich contrasts. There is not much that is just average. Life is mostly on the ends of continuum rather than the middle.
We have to think, reflect and grapple with life. As anyone who has bungi jumped, rock climbed, skydived or done something putting their lives in danger will attest, there is nothing that makes us feel as alive as facing death. In South Africa we get to think about this more often than most.
Admittedly, we may be a little far on the “wild west” side of the continuum and I don’t believe we should be fighting for our lives every day. I do however appreciate having to deal with sometimes complex — but always real — issues. I feel richer, stronger and more ready for the issues that we are faced with in the wider world.
Australia
When visiting Australia I’ve seen the apparent idyllic lifestyle so often talked about. Gas barbecues, which are never vandalised, are available in the parks for free. Everyone drives at the speed limit. Rules are obeyed and everyone lives happily ever after.
In Sydney I was apprehended by a local who stopped me from jay walking, a term I was vaguely familiar with. I was confused. We stood staring at a red man on a pole without a car in site.
My friend Neil had a similar but much more hilarious experience at the WACA after a cricket game. You can read his column entitled “One foot in, one foot out” (and look at the photo).
So would I rather my children grew up in Australia where rules are strict and govern just about every aspect of my life? It’s safe, but we might just die of boredom (suicide rates are up). Or live in South Africa where life is definitely more dangerous but I feel challenged and alive every day?
The issues we grapple with are deep and meaningful and matter in the world. They are seldom petty. I feel eternally grateful for the challenges and mind changing experiences that have influenced me.
Working in a very international environment in my mid twenties, South Africans were always revered for their resourcefulness and ability to engage in a broad range of issues. South African business people are revered for similar qualities today. Could it be as a result of the issues we face at home that make the rest of the world look tame by comparison.
Life is difficult
Talking about this with my friend Rob over breakfast the other day, I thought of the opening paragraph of M Scott Peck’s best selling book, The Road Less Travelled, which states;
“Life is difficult
This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
South Africa offers some of the best opportunities to deal with difficulty and transcend it. It’s not for sissy’s, but the rewards are high.
For my kids, I believe I would be doing them a disservice to take them away from this rich and rewarding life that we lead.
Either you are looking for what is good about the country and you will find more than ample evidence, or you are looking for what is wrong with the country and again you will discover enough to fuel dinner party conversation with doom and gloom stories. Either way, what you look for you will see.
I’m off to Australia for a holiday in a few weeks and while looking forward to the trip and seeing family and friends, I’m not looking forward to the feeling of pulling on a straight jacket as I walk out of the airport.
It leaves me longing to be cut off by a taxi. Just to feel alive.
Coaching South Africa
I spend some of my time coaching executives in South Africa and across Europe. I got thinking the other day what South Africa could need from a coach. I mean the whole country. Not the president — not any individual — all of us who live on this southern slab of Africa. All together — melted down into one, put on a chair and ready for an executive coaching session with me.
Let’s start with what I mean by executive coaching. A definition of coaching is problematic because everyone is a coach these days and definitions are all over the place. I’ll define it based on what I have been doing for the past seven years.*
Executive coaching involves a coach, who has both executive experience and training in the art of coaching, working with a person, a client (mostly executives, entrepreneurs etc) on a shared concern.
The shared concern is something brought to the relationship by the person being coached. Being a shared concern means something that we can both get motivated to work on, and resolve.
In this case the client is South Africa. Armed with the above definition, and a shared concern of creating a country that can grow, prosper and develop to its full potential, we start our process.
There we are, South Africa and I sitting in a room, having our first conversation about how we are going to achieve our objective. At first it’s hard. We haven’t yet built rapport and the conversation is exploratory.
I’d start by assessing the current situation and understanding the strengths and talents of my client followed by successes to date. Let me tell you why.
My philosophy is that as humans we are uniquely talented and that our challenge is to uncover and use these talents. I’ve been trained by Gallup (the research people) on this approach and amongst all the tools, models and techniques I have come across, their research has stuck with me. I agree with their findings that we do much better playing to our strengths, than fixing our weaknesses.
Gallup originally got interested in this topic when they came across research by psychologist Elizabeth Hurlock. In 1925 she studied school children in a maths class and discovered that when she divided them into two groups, and gave the one group critical feedback, they improved by 19%. Critical feedback is the type we are all aware of — pointing out mistakes and suggesting how to correct them.
Nineteen percent is not bad, but the second group got an improvement of 71%. How did that happen? What she did with them was to skip the critical feedback and only reinforce the positive aspects of their performance.
By ignoring their faults and focusing alone on what they were doing right, the school children produced a 71% improvement vs the 19% achieved by giving critical feedback. Since 1925 there have been reams of scientific study that back up this approach. Gallup has been at the forefront of this research examining more than 3 million people and thousands of companies around the globe.
The original research has given birth to a whole movement called positive psychology. While positive psychology is gaining a foothold, there are still many people and organisations that spend a huge amount of energy focusing on fixing weaknesses rather than building strengths. Besides the deficiency of results using this approach, it also takes a lot more effort.
I often start workshops on the topic of positive psychology, by asking participants what they would say if their child came home from school with a 5 As and a C? The answer, almost all the time, is how to get the C to an A. Wrong answer. It is much better to focus on the As as there is, somewhat counter-intuitively, more room for improvement with the 5 As than there is with the C.
So with South Africa across the desk I focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. Armed with the experience of Hurlock and her more modern peers, I know that I have more chance of addressing our shared concern talking about success.
My first series of questions would look at what is working, why it’s working and how do we make the talents and strengths of South Africa explicit and more visible so that we can spend time building and entrenching success thinking.
Would I just ignore the negatives? No, that would be naive. What is important is the ratio of positive to negative in our conversation. Dr Marcial Losada found when examining teams that the ideal ratio of positive to negative was between 3:1 and 8:1. Higher than 8:1 and less than 3:1 teams became less effective. The negative aspects have to be covered, but, and this is imperative, they have to be examined in a context of overall positivity, if we are to produce significantly better results.
Next it would be interesting to understand the context within which South Africa operates. I can often, without jumping to superficial conclusions, make some simple assumptions about a person depending on whether they are in their 20s, their 40s or closing in on their 60s.
Erik Erikson, the psychologist, broke down our lives into eight developmental stages and described the nature of each stage. More specifically, he describes the series of crises that we face. This is our rite of passage into the next stage. Each crisis has a positive or negative outcome.
To illustrate this, Erikson describes the crises faced in the first year of our lives as being about trust vs mistrust. Children who are consistently cared for build a sense of trust with parents, the world and themselves. Those who don’t make it through this initial hurdle, emerge with a sense of distrust which affects all later stages.
For South Africa — thinking about 1994 as birth — certainly of a new age in our history, I’d probably find myself sitting opposite the equivalent of a pimply teenager faced with Erikson’s stage five or adolescence crises.
The adolescence crisis is about identity vs role confusion. It is a time when we need to ask “Who am I?”. To successfully answer this we need to have integrated the positive outcomes from the earlier crises.
Did we develop a basic sense of trust? Do we have a strong sense of independence, competence, and feel in control of our lives? Once the easier crises’ have been resolved, adolescents can face the “Identity Crisis”, which Erikson considers the most significant.
Solved positively South Africa emerges with a strong identity, and ready to take on the challenges of the future. However, without a positive outcome, we sink into confusion and are unable to make important decisions.
At this point, and this would probably be after a good couple of sessions, I would draw on the work I did in my thesis which covers the use of scenario planning for coaching. This is particularly apt for South Africa as scenario planning has had a deep impact on our country. Most prominent is the Anglo American work, better known as Clem Sunter’s “High Road” and ‘Low Road” scenarios. Back in 1988, who would have thought that we could avoid going down the “Low Road”?
In addition, The Mont Fleur Scenarios in 1992, looked at what South Africa would be like ten years down the road. I have to take an aside here to ask you to imagine what it must have been like in 1992 trying to map out possible futures for South Africa. Violence was widespread, we had no idea how negotiations would turn out and the country was effectively bankrupt as result of sanctions and wars fought on our borders.
Perhaps it was as a result of the difficulty of the exercise that it had the impact that it did on the participants, most notably Tito Mboweni and Trevor Manuel. Both participated in the exercise and later took significant leadership roles in the country.
Together with my client, we would jointly create scenarios for 2014 which would describe plausible futures for South Africa. These would likely emerge as follows.
1: Labelled and limited
This scenario describes a South Africa which follows on its current path of division. We compare ourselves to other “First World” countries and label our shortcomings loudly and destructively.
There is little tolerance and labels such as “democracy” are used as a stick to beat ourselves up and show how we are not up to the level of other countries who proclaim to have “better democracies”, despite their obvious shortcomings.
We constantly highlight our non-achievement, ignoring significant steps we have taken. To the rest of the world this further illustrates how little we have achieved since 1994. “I told you so” becomes our mantra. As with the person who compares themselves to others and always finds someone better, we dwell on our weaknesses rather than our strengths.
We are indignant and divided into smaller and smaller pockets of angry, frustrated losers. Like the sports team that isn’t getting results and enters the downward spiral of turning on themselves, we illustrate this to the world through the law of diminishing returns, as we squander the numerous opportunities that were once available to us. Blame is a cornerstone of our culture and we use our energy and resources to push responsibility onto anyone but ourselves.
2: Strength in diversity
The second scenario plays to our strength in diversity. South Africa creates its own identity which is a unique democracy not modelled on that of any other nation. We stop comparing ourselves to others in a way which limits our imagination and always show us up for being deficient. Instead we learn from others while creating our own positive future.
Our diversity, which currently divides us, is reframed to be a strength. As in the world of agriculture where scientists are finding monoculture is limited and susceptible to disease, we create a new culture for South Africa which is formed from the melting pot of our varied and diverse backgrounds.
Like Brazil, where there is no typical Brazilian, South Africans are no longer classified by the obvious and limiting labels such as black, white, Xhosa or English. Rather we focus on much more meaningful descriptions of ourselves. “Ubuntu”, “a boer maak a plan” and “the friendliest people in the world” will be some of our own labels, describing unique South Africanisms, which the rest of the world will look to with envy.
Brand experts know that in the busy, noisy and cluttered world that we live in, success requires standing for something unique and leading as opposed to following others while trying to be better. South Africa will be unique in this way — a shining light for the world to see what is possible.
Our strength will come from striving for our own ideals rather than those that others have created before us. Our people will be more tolerant of each other and while dialogue will be robust, it will be within an overarching framework of positivity and success. As individuals and as a country, we take responsibility for our future rather than casting blame.
Choices
With these two scenarios before us as possibilities for the future, I’d leave my client, as all good executive coaches would, to reflect and make their own decision as to which future they would like to create. It’s never easy and there are of course things outside of our control which need to navigated.
There are, however, always facets very firmly in our control. The scenarios become a roadmap for us to hold up our individual and collective behaviour, attitude and actions. We see what we look for, and if we want to look for different things, the scenarios provide a textured background against which we are able to make our choices.
* If you are interested in a more completed definition of executive coaching then let me know. This one is intended to give a taste of the most important elements and purposely omits detail.
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