On making choices that matter when everything is uncertain
There’s a particular kind of courage required to build something meaningful in South Africa today. It’s not the courage of blind optimism or reckless ambition. It’s the courage to look unflinchingly at reality—and then to act anyway, with precision and purpose.
After years of working alongside leaders who’ve built enduring businesses in one of the world’s most challenging markets, I’ve come to understand something fundamental: the organizations that thrive here don’t succeed despite uncertainty. They succeed because of how they respond to it.
Strategy, properly understood, is not a prediction exercise. It is an act of intelligent defiance against chaos.
The Dangerous Seduction of Beautiful Plans
Let me tell you about two companies that began their strategic planning in the same year.
The first assembled their executive team in a sleek conference room overlooking Sandton. Their strategic plan was impressive—a 60-page document with growth projections that curved upward like a hockey stick. It assumed stable electricity, predictable logistics, and steady consumer confidence. The PowerPoint was flawless. The plan collapsed within eleven months.
The second company met in far less glamorous circumstances. Their planning session began with a brutal question: What are we pretending not to know? They listed the realities no one wanted to acknowledge—load shedding that could strike at any hour, freight costs that defied forecasting, a skills shortage that wouldn’t resolve itself, regulatory changes that arrived without warning.
Their plan was less polished. It was also still working five years later.
The lesson is uncomfortable but essential: In volatile environments, elegance is not a virtue. Honesty is.
Begin With What’s True
The most critical moment in strategic planning is also the most overlooked—the diagnostic phase. This is where you must resist every instinct to minimize problems, to emphasize what’s working while downplaying what isn’t, to confuse aspiration with assessment.
Ask yourself:
- What structural forces shape our reality, whether we acknowledge them or not?
- Which challenges are genuinely within our influence—and which are storms we must learn to navigate?
- Where do we hold advantages that volatility cannot erase?
The businesses that dominate difficult markets don’t start with vision statements about where they want to be. They start with cold-eyed clarity about where they actually are. Only from that foundation can you build something that lasts.
Strategy built on wishful thinking isn’t ambitious. It’s expensive self-deception.
The Liberating Power of Saying No
I’ve watched countless leadership teams tie themselves in knots trying to pursue every opportunity simultaneously. They want market share and premium pricing. They want aggressive expansion and operational excellence. They want to serve everyone, everywhere, with everything.
The result is always the same: teams exhausted from running in circles, capital spread too thin to make any real impact, customers confused about what the business actually stands for.
Now consider the alternative. Consider the organizations brave enough to make real choices—to declare explicitly which customers they will prioritize, which markets they will exit, which activities they will stop doing entirely, even if those activities are profitable.
This is where strategy becomes real. Not in the ambitious things you commit to doing, but in the valuable things you commit to not doing.
The Questions That Demand Answers
A strategic plan earns the right to be taken seriously only when it provides clear answers to uncomfortable questions:
- What opportunities will we deliberately ignore, even if competitors pursue them?
- Which customer segments will we decline to serve, even if they ask?
- Where will we withhold capital, time, and attention—knowing those resources are finite?
In a constrained environment like South Africa’s, focus isn’t just helpful. Focus is your competitive weapon. While others scatter their efforts across a dozen priorities, you become formidable by concentrating yours on three.
The hardest word for ambitious leaders to say is “no.” It’s also the most powerful.
Economics Don’t Negotiate
Here’s a story about two retailers, both eager to grow.
The first developed an aggressive expansion strategy based on market opportunity and competitor moves. They opened stores rapidly, driven by revenue targets and market share goals. Within three years, they were trapped—too extended to retreat, too unprofitable to continue.
The second company took a different approach. Before committing to any expansion, they dissected the economics of every store format, every location type, every customer segment. They understood their unit economics with surgical precision. They knew which configurations generated returns and which ones destroyed value, even when revenues looked attractive.
They grew more slowly. They also grew sustainably.
Ground Your Strategy in Economic Truth
In environments where capital is precious and margin pressure is relentless, your strategy must answer these questions with precision:
- Where does profit actually originate in our business—not where we hope it comes from, but where it demonstrably does?
- Which activities generate value, and which ones merely consume it while creating the illusion of progress?
- What fundamental conditions must hold true for our strategy to deliver returns—and how likely are those conditions to persist?
Volume is seductive. Profitability is essential. In the South African context, where economic headwinds can materialize overnight, strategies built on growth-at-any-cost assumptions are strategies for eventual crisis.
You cannot strategy your way out of broken economics. But you can let economics guide you toward strategies that endure.
Designing for Storms You Can’t Predict
The past few years have taught us something sobering: resilience isn’t optional, and foresight is overrated.
Some organizations fractured under pressure—not because their leaders lacked intelligence or commitment, but because their businesses were designed for stability that no longer exists. Rigid supply chains broke. Inflexible cost structures became anchors. Single-channel strategies became liabilities.
Other organizations bent but didn’t break. They adjusted pricing dynamically. They pivoted to alternative suppliers. They activated new channels. They restructured costs without destroying capability.
The difference wasn’t that these organizations predicted the future better. The difference was that they designed their businesses to survive multiple possible futures.
Build Optionality Into Everything
Resilient strategies share common characteristics:
- They create alternatives before alternatives become necessary—multiple suppliers, diverse revenue streams, flexible capacity
- They stress-test assumptions against scenarios that feel unlikely but aren’t impossible
- They build buffers—of cash, of capability, of relationships—that feel expensive until they become invaluable
Yes, this costs more in stable times. But stable times are an increasingly rare luxury. And when volatility strikes, optionality is the difference between rapid adaptation and paralysis.
Growth gets the headlines. Resilience gets you through the next decade. Both matter, but only one is non-negotiable.
From Document to Movement
I’ve seen too many strategic plans that exist only in boardrooms and on shared drives. Brilliantly conceived. Thoroughly researched. Completely irrelevant to how the organization actually operates.
Strategy fails in the gap between articulation and execution. And that gap is almost always about alignment—or the lack of it.
Make Strategy Operational
For strategy to move from theory to reality, three things must change:
First, translate strategy into initiatives with owners and deadlines. Vague priorities remain vague. Specific projects with named leaders get done.
Second, align incentives to strategic outcomes. If your strategy emphasizes quality but you reward speed, you’ll get speed. If your strategy prioritizes long-term value but you measure quarterly revenue, you’ll get short-term thinking. Your incentive structure is your true strategy, regardless of what your plan says.
Third, clarify decision rights ruthlessly. Who decides on new investments? Who can say no to requests that contradict strategic priorities? Who owns execution, and who owns results? Ambiguity here guarantees drift.
The organizations that execute strategy brilliantly don’t have better plans. They have better clarity about who does what, measured against which outcomes, accountable to whom.
A strategic plan that doesn’t change how your organization makes decisions every single day isn’t a plan. It’s a wish list with formatting.
Strategy as Living Practice
The final insight might be the most important: strategy is not something you do annually and then file away. It’s something you live continuously.
The most effective leaders I’ve worked with treat strategy as a dynamic system. They revisit assumptions regularly—not in formal annual sessions, but as new information emerges. They adjust tactics while preserving direction. They distinguish between signal and noise. They know which elements of their strategy are foundational and which are flexible.
This requires discipline of a particular kind—the discipline to hold your core thesis firmly while adapting everything else freely.
Monitor, Adjust, Preserve
In South Africa’s complex environment, effective strategy demands three concurrent practices:
- Watch leading indicators, not just results. By the time your financial statements show problems, those problems are already deeply embedded. Watch the signals that predict where you’re headed, not just the scoreboard showing where you’ve been.
- Refresh assumptions as reality changes. When economic conditions shift, when regulations evolve, when customer behavior transforms—your strategic assumptions must adapt accordingly. Loyalty to outdated assumptions is not strategic consistency. It’s stubbornness.
- Preserve strategic direction while adjusting tactical execution. Don’t confuse pivoting your approach with abandoning your strategy. The strongest organizations maintain their core strategic thesis for years while constantly adjusting how they execute against it.
Rigidity masquerading as consistency will kill you. Real consistency means unwavering commitment to your strategic logic, paired with relentless flexibility in how you bring it to life.
What Strategy Actually Is
Let me end where I began, with a different definition of strategy than you’ll find in most textbooks.
Strategy is not a document. Strategy is leadership made visible through choices.
It’s revealed in what you invest in and what you starve. In which opportunities you pursue and which you walk past. In what you’re willing to be criticized for doing differently. In what you protect during crisis and what you let go.
In South Africa’s demanding operating environment, the businesses that endure don’t achieve certainty—certainty is a mirage. Instead, they achieve something more valuable: clarity about where they’re going, discipline in how they get there, and resilience to survive the unexpected obstacles they’ll encounter along the way.
That clarity, discipline, and resilience—that’s what strategic planning is meant to deliver.
The question isn’t whether your environment is challenging. Of course it is.
The question is whether your strategy is designed for the environment you’re actually in.
Because the market doesn’t care about elegant plans. It rewards intelligent choices, made with courage, executed with discipline.
That’s strategy. Everything else is just paperwork.