Day 40: Proximity blindness

Kobus’ mom arranges an interesting charity for the local kids in Paternoster. This remote little village on the South African west coast still functions as an active fishing community. Over the summer school holidays the local kids are left pretty much to their own devices on the dusty streets and sandy outcrops of the bay. What serves as a lovely retreat for the B&B crowd in search of isolation and the quiet coastal tug of the southwester, is a stimulus desert for the young minds. With no parents or planned activities, drug use and teenage pregnancy is rife.

Sanna van der Merwe started the West Coast Kids charity which is set up to provide a framework for the kids during their summer holiday. The majority of the salaries and projects are funded by sales from her shop. Tonight we had a long conversation about the difficulties she had in engaging the local community in the program. Paternoster has a lot of successful tourist and travel based businesses. The bed & breakfasts, hotel, shops and various restaurants all earn a living by trading off the unfettered charm of the local fishing community. When it came to funding the kids program they all turned a blind eye. The tourists who come to Sanna's shop were the ones to buy vouchers and tokens to fund kids meals and christmas presents. It seems that charity does not begin at home, or perhaps familiarity is the source of this contempt.

Sanna's daughter tells me that when you give the little kids a small gift of a sweet or drink there will often be a fight. When one of the kids however comes in with a little bit of money to buy a sweet they will go to great lengths to share, demonstrating their largesse. I wonder if we shouldn't think of the local businesses as gifts, a setting and sense of belonging given by the less fortunate fishermen to the property entrepreneurs. And like the kids they now jealously guard this precious thing. How could one change the paradigm so that they understand that the essence of what they provide is an earned privilege. Crime free nights with streets free from beggars is an interest earned. It takes a community to make ends meet.

Day 39: Rose tinted revelations

On this trip I have been wearing sunglasses with rose colored lenses. The landscapes, sunsets and nuances of desert sands have taken on a new beauty as the contrasts and colors spring to unnatural life. Clouds that look flat and white through the naked eye take on a drama and new emotion when viewed through these rose tinted spectacles.

Today Colin accused me of seeing South Africa's current economic climate through rose tinted lenses too. This is in spite of The Economist's interesting focus on Africa Rising in the latest edition. With consistent growth, and not all of it from oil, there are legitimate reasons to have hope about Africa's emergence. On this trip I have been constantly amazed by the strength of vision in the creative arts and business. Perhaps I have been offered a rose tinted tour and to see the best version of events. I keep being reminded by 'in the know' tourists and locals alike that corruption will spoil the party. Somehow I think they forget that corruption is endemic in all societies. Isn't that what OWS is all about?

The rose tinted sunglasses have however shown me just how useful it can be to use an unusual lens when viewing the landscape. By increasing the contrast between green and brown I am able to see all kinds of little plants and fresh growth, ordinarily obscured by the glare of the desert sun. The Kalahari literally comes alive. My memories and experiences of the landscape are just as valid as the ones I would have had without this filter, just far more emotional, rich and colorful.

We often think of people with rose tinted lenses as naive or not in touch with reality. Perhaps we should pay more attention to their ability to spot opportunity that others can't see. In nature different animals use different parts of the light spectrum to identify exactly when their favorite food is just ripe. Applied at the right moment, corporate optical shift can show new routes through the undergrowth. A photoshop filter for excel, to reveal buds and blossoms hiding in plain sight. A redirection of the management might spectrum could create just enough refraction to reveal otherwise invisible ideas.

Day 38: The space of things

As Julene, the owner of Namies Namakwa Retreat informed me today, Northern Cape has the biggest land mass of all South Africa's provinces, but the smallest population. This places bigger distances between things. According to her this has two benefits; lower crime and and a greater appreciation for friendships. When you live in such remote isolation a friendly cup of coffee with a neighbor, who lives 50km away, takes on a whole new meaning.

The distance between people is not the only thing that is vast. This arid moon landscape can go years without rain too. Today I had the privilege of driving through a rainstorm. With such a gift I could not sit isolated in my little steel and glass cocoon, so I drove about 100km with the windows open. The smell of the African desert drinking up the rain is intoxicating. The excitement as life instantaneously springs up from the desert floor to greedily capture every little drop for growth, pores through your senses on every dimension.

There is an old chinese parable of a great leader asking his generals how one makes the strongest cart wheel. Some insisted that their blacksmiths made the strongest steel, which surely made the tough rims needed for strength. Others boasted of their ancient forests with hard wood, needed for the tough, flexible core. The general who got to lead all others answered: "the strength of the wheel comes from the empty spaces, between the spokes. The master craftsman knows how to space them just right."

The space between things is one of the most powerful elements of a team and company's design. In this age of digital connection and instant access, how much time do we spend on deliberately creating space? Space to reflect and appreciate each other. Space to bring about a new form of listening that invigorates all the senses. The joy of reconnection and surprising friendships evaporates like lost raindrops on baking stones when we spend our time in the burning light of our screen-terface.

Day 37: The self help solocide

Driving through the Kalahari today the car got stuck in thick red sand. It took me two hours to dig the car out again, which gave me a lot of time to reflect on the self help movement.

California is seen as the birth place for the human potential movement. This mindset has progressively attached itself to more and more aspects of people's lives. The objective being a self reliant soul that is at peace with its needs and can achieve anything it sets its sights on. Everything from parenting to politics can now be viewed through the Aquarian enlightenment. I wonder if all this focus on the self is not somehow leading to a kind of organizational solocide - death of potential due to excessive focus on self confidence. With a generation of managers fed on a diet of "believe in yourself" I wonder how much room they leave for others.

Even though one often hears noises about "we are all one" in these circles, it strikes me that the net effect is a self indulgent one. After all, you mostly just hear about people working on themselves.
On this journey the one thought that has returned to me again and again is how we might find ways to change the focus from self perception to collaborative envisioning. Most of the executive function in business revolves around how a group of leaders convinces itself and its shareholders of the new strategy. Like self help groups there seems to be the pervasive belief that if we believe in ourselves enough, this plan will come to pass.

But how about a different lens? What would happen if instead of asking: "what is the size of the potential market?" we ask instead "how many people want to see us succeed?" What is the reflective image of our ambition?

By shifting the focus to an external perspective we completely change not only our potential risk and revenue model, we also open new ways to co-pete. By shifting the discussion from our 'narrowsistic' set of interests we set the basis for more robust discussions about a business constituency.

Just imagine the difference between: "how many people want to see us succeed with new widget x" (the answer: only us and that is why we spend so much money convincing everyone else)
and "how many people want to see us succeed in eradicating childhood obesity through sport/food/community programs." This is similar to the old marketing myopia discussion, about focussing on benefits versus features, however the twitter nation makes it possible to scope the debate in new ways. Who you engage and how you engage with them makes all the difference in focussing on the right problem to fix.

Companies should be engaging with the people who want to see them succeed to avoid the slow inward spiral of over confidence that gets you stuck in the sand.

Day 36: The 0.2 Percent

A very close friend of mine is a deeply dedicated marathon runner. Today he missed his target time by 30 seconds. In his mind the 30 seconds define the race as a failure. The goal he set is so naggingly close which makes it even more frustrating. Which hill could he have run up faster, where did he spend too much time enjoying the view? Every moment of the race is now tainted by the way in which it conspired to rob him of his goal. The tiny moments, in this case 0,2%, define the whole.

Over the past almost 40 days I have met up with old friends every single day. In some cases it was the first time in 20 years that we saw each other. Yet, on every single occasion we walked straight back into the passionate and inspiring conversations we had always had. We connect back to a defining moment we shared, by which we will always be able to navigate our dialogue. What is the quality of such a defining moment, one that stays fixed for ever as the key to someone else's personality? Tragedies, divorces and deaths do not take away the magic of the defining moments that tells us who this person really is.

If you could choose 30 seconds from your life to share, 30 seconds that will give someone that quintessential insight into your being, which 30 seconds would they be? Yesterday I saw Alistair set aside a carafe of juice for the children at the party. It was not something that was expected of him. The children did not really need it but by making this effort he elevated their experience by making them feel cared for and included. This tiny gesture expressed his deep compassion and presence of mind around the wellbeing of the people around him in immaculate detail. In these small moments we often see far more than grand deliberate gestures try to conceal.

Downtown Johannesburg is littered with corporate grand gestures. Edifices that in their time aspired to being the titans of industry's defining moments. Grand works and symbolic gestures to anchor and cement their dominance on Main street. But if you looked closer I am sure you would have seen the 30 seconds that revealed the cracks in the ceiling. The way coffee was served perhaps, or who was allowed to speak during a board room meeting. As with with our attempts to divine happiness, we seem to gravitate towards exactly the wrong indicators for defining corporate character. We look at spreadsheet, org charts or even the resume's of 'talent.' But what do you look at when you are building the kind of relationship that will still be strong, productive and inspiring in 20 years' time? As with the 30 seconds of my friend's marathon, perhaps the 0,2% really does define success or failure.

Day 35: Speed vs. Resolutions

As a student we used to take day trips from Pretoria to Rosebank to see the foreign films with restricted distribution. The two hour drive meant that we would often see five films back to back in order to get the best from our student savings fuel fund. Today I took a trip on the Gautrain, which now connects the heart of the Campus in Pretoria to the shopping complex in Johannesburg in under 40 minutes. Going to Johannesburg is now easier and faster than going to downtown Pretoria, bringing about a complete reversal of not only the shopping patterns but also the demographics in these centers.

The speed at which we travel has a huge impact on what we see. David Byrne's bicycle diaries expose the cities that most people's auto-capsules obscure. The dirty grittiness and creative resurrection of fringe zones go unnoticed as fly-overs and high speed connections cut off focus attention on the dotted directional dividers of the 'free-way.' The bit-rate of the human mind bombarded at 300km/h in a bombardier body, hurtling through empty tunnels and across elevated fly-overs. At this speed, the resolution of our observation suffers. We don't see individual buildings, people or ideas with the same depth or with the same appreciation. Serendipity stumbles at speed.

Recently the UK debate about high speed rail raised the interesting argument that high speed hubs lead to greater economic concentration. In the UK, London will be the big winner and the rest of England will be reduced to simplified and standardized satellite status. Speed of access, be it through the internet, jet airliners or high speed rail ultimately has a homogenizing effect. Being confronted by the same stimuli, people generally begin to have the same thoughts and expectations.

The tension in business though, is always for greater differentiation. Cementing the just noticeable difference between you and your industry foes, through innovation. In essence, seeing what the competition does not. But how can you see or find these sources of differentiation if you are moving at the same speed or in the same vehicles as they are (or hiring against the same profile for that matter)? How can you build in foot paths and alleyways to deliberately divert attention away from the beaten track? The quality of new year's resolutions in your business plan can benefit from slowing down.


   

Day 34: Preparing for the unpredictable

In 1994 Iaan and I spent many hours developing a game called "Malbal" (Literally mad ball). Similar to bowls the objective is to place eleven balls next to the "sun" before your opponent does. There are many rituals around how one achieves this but the real stars are the balls. Iaan has turned beautiful balls made from various wood varieties. The madness in the balls comes from their lack of symmetry and lead weights sunk below the surface. It is entirely impossible to accurately predict how a ball will roll. Over the year we ascribed personalities to the various degrees of madness, or unpredictability and ultimately risk inherent in each ball. Tonight we had our first international championship. Iaan was the winner with a final score of 11:9:6:3 after 5 hours and 28 rounds.

The fascinating thing about malbal though is how it confronts you with randomness. How you make every effort to prepare for it by holding the ball in a certain way, using zen like focus to control your arm, wrist, hand, posture and all manner of mental machinations. How in the end the balls decide where they want to go and who to reward. Make no mistake, the game demands a huge degree of skill because everyone is dealing with the same degree of unexpected trajectory. Tapping into their 'flow.'

When Brian Eno played the game with Iaan in 1998 they discussed using it for developing strategies in music. The outcomes can be codified and tabulated to reveal all kinds of patterns that say far more about our patterns creating ability than the randomness my imply. This is the closest thing I have seen to a tool for revealing Black Swans.

What mechanisms do strategy modeling tools apply to develop the personality traits needed in leaders to deal with random and unexpected events? As with the individual balls, can we ascribe personality types to different levels of risk? What does the debt swap derivative ball look like and how do we invite others to play with it, so that we may discover new ways of dealing with a particular risk?

In malbal some players throw the balls through the air, reducing the impact of crazy patterns to a smaller impact surface. Others give the same ball a specific spin, using the flywheel effect to contain its camber. Ultimately all these things reveal elements of a player's identity (or as Iaan calls them 'Id'-entities) more than they say about the balls themselves. How long will it be before the value of play is recognized in the boardroom (or is this the real purpose of golf)? Not only to release creativity and develop new outcomes, but also to reveal the deeper nature of the leadership personalities who are responding to and shaping the risk of a corporate strategy.

Day 33: The death of influence

This morning I paid a visit to the graveyard where my grandmother was buried. She was a very eccentric woman to say the least and insisted on living in her home until the very end. I remember paying her a visit when she was already in the advanced stages of dementia, unable to recognize my father. She was perfectly capable of holding up a conversation but unable to recognize any of us. She lies buried in the Mountain rise cemetery, just outside Pietermaritzburg. Being buried so far away from her family, the grave depends on the local infrastructure and caretakers for its upkeep. I could not find her grave in the end. The whole cemetery is overgrown and the markings are impossible to find. In the end I chose to spend the time quietly with the knowledge of her, if not the physical demarcation of a grave. In some sense this is more reflective of her subtle and pervasive impact through her writing, charity work and call in contributions to home remedy shows. Ultimately, in Africa, all influence is ultimately subsumed into the red soil.

The fading influence of Japan in Africa was such a reminder of the transience of good intentions and influence.  The delegation, in their hyper formalized and impenetrable PowerPoints, dragged the audience through three hours of unintelligible English being red from templatized tracts. The fact is, Japan with its fascinating technology has invested beautifully in ecological good. The problem is though that their proposition is impenetrable.
For western minds, trained on finding the objective and idea as quickly as possible, the endless slides on context and organizational charts (before getting to the meat of their solutions) is tiresome. We are less interested in who endorses the idea that who will do it.

Fantastic technology that can turn plastic bags back into oil, pin point maps of rainfall, agriculture and population growth go unused because the messenger confounds the message. METI's patent on active carbon is still only used in a fraction of the solutions it could bring to health and climate clean up. Their "3L for Africa" investment plan will most likely under deliver because it simply comes across as self interest. They focus almost entirely on the technology they supply without giving real examples of how it will uplift communities.
In stead of burning eyes, passionate about the idea I have bleeding eyes from pixel overload. I feel angry and disappointed at the consequences of this disconnect. But who is to blame? And how does one design for this constraint? Is this any different from inarticulate employees in your company who struggle to bring good ideas to bare. How many times have you personally been frustrated by an inability to connect another mind with the content of your idea? To co-municate.

On the flip side, how many bad ideas have people latched on to just because they are articulately laid out in a dashing display of charisma? As Osama Bin Laden called it: "following the strong horse," which does not mean following the good horse!

As in the graveyard, thickets and wild growth clutter our access to  what we hold dear. How do we move beyond the morass without wielding a blunt machete that could end up doing more harm than good?