(Published in Business Day – 11 June 2024)
Systemic or ecological thinking tells us that any organisation needs flexibility to respond to changes in its environment through effective feedback processes. Like organisms adapting to changes in the physical environment, those organisations that adapt to the changing socio-economic environment survive. Those that don’t go extinct.
Consider this alongside a very useful concept that came to me as a student from an unexpected source – Professor John Cumpsty, then at the UCT Department of Religious Studies. Cumpsty described the development of religious tradition as an interplay between the traditional, represented by the priest, idealistic represented by the prophet, and pragmatic, represented by the king.
Translated into a secular context, this suggests that any organisation needs the feedback provided by conservatives who ensure that we remember the bases of our success so far – our “secret sauce”. But left to their own, conservatives will eventually preside over the death of the organisation, because they won’t change with changes in the environment.
So organisations need radical “prophets” who challenge the status quo and call us to strip away the accumulated but now-redundant practices that obscure our founding mission and values. The radicals and conservatives really irritate each other, but each needs the other. Without a tradition, the radical has nothing to challenge and renew; and without renewal, the tradition will die.
Meanwhile the pragmatist gets on with dealing with day-to-day necessities. In most situations, the CEO should be a pragmatist. At particular stages of the organisation’s life cycle one may need to have a conservative or radical CEO, but if either lasts too long disaster will ensue in a quiet death of irrelevance or an explosion of misjudgement.
This understanding has often helped me to appreciate apparently difficult people in management teams, and interpret them to the others. One of the critical jobs of a leader is to help the organisation change as the business environment changes. This requires spotting the need to change and interpreting it to the followers in a way they can accept. It’s probably the most difficult and important leadership task. To do it well, leaders need to attract a team with a diverse set of opinions. A cabinet of clones is dangerous.
Look for the colleague who irritates you most and consider whether she/he stands for something you most need to hear.
We are currently seeing the same process playing out in South Africa’s politics. Both the ANC and DA are in desperate need of renewal. The ANC in particular has strayed so far from its mission and traditional values as to be almost unrecognisable. The electorate has provided an opportunity to learn from radicals to the left and to the right, as a few dozen new parties spring up to point out interests that feel neglected.
All of them are shouting about the collapse of basic services. The unexpected rise of MK might be saying, “Get back in touch with your grassroots”. Those on the right calling for immigrants to be deported and the death penalty to be restored point to the unacceptable rate of crime. I don’t like their policies and am certainly not endorsing them; just suggesting that their underlying legitimate interests be understood and addressed pragmatically in a way that ensures all of us survive.
Maybe some pragmatist will arise who can accommodate and co-ordinate all these interests in a new government, without giving in to the crazy policies they espouse, in the way Madiba did after 1994. He was remarkably adept at hearing the people’s voices and then doing what they needed, not necessarily what they said they wanted.
Leaders of organisations need not endorse the odd ideas of either conservative or radical colleagues, but they would do well to hear and respond pragmatically to the legitimate interests to which they draw attention.
Jonathan Cook chairs Thornhill Associates