“We are midstream on a multi-year journey to build the company we want, not simply optimize the one we have.”
These words from a firm memo by AT&T CEO John Stankey to managers last Friday, giving frank feedback on an employee engagement survey, should be less remarkable than they are. In fact, they should be every government and business leader’s opening words in any engagement with stakeholders from staff to shareholders, community members to citizens.
If your organisation or department is frantically trying to optimise what it has and isn’t doggedly rethinking and rebuilding for what it – and its customers or voters – wants and needs, it will quickly find itself redundant. Yet Starkey’s comments remain remarkable because too many leaders and organisations are stuck in the panic and inertia of the demands of complexity and change.
While South Africans might be uniquely skilled at navigating volatility and complexity, today’s barrage of economic and political pressures, institutional breakdowns, corruption scandals and digital disruption has created a leadership environment where playing it safe and tweaking what we have often feels like the only viable survival option in a sea of change.
But it’s confidence in this ambiguity that leaders need to embody, and excellent leaders already know that success is becoming less about clarity and control, and more about confidently choosing change, “as messy as that journey might (be)” according to Starkey. However, building that confidence, and meaningfully driving growth and trust in our organisations, economy and society, will require confrontation with a few hard truths.
Failure is not the enemy
There is a reason that global innovation hubs like Silicon Valley infectiously normalised phrases like “fail fast” and “iterate quickly”. These leaders understand something many others prefer to avoid: that failure is a natural part of innovation.
In SA, whether in our boardrooms, team talks or Cabinet, we still seem to spend too long agonising over, and getting stuck on, punishing failure instead of learning from it. Dishonest and unethical conduct aside, our governance culture is fixated on auditing errors instead of creating an environment and culture that unlocks breakthroughs. This means risk committees often wield more power than innovation teams, and institutionalised cautiousness that might well protect the status quo, but will never create a new one.
We need to reframe failure as curiosity at work. Not reckless failure, not ethical lapses, but bold, intelligent experimentation that pushes us out of stagnation. We should all be asking ourselves and one another: where are we experimenting meaningfully? What are we willing to try, even if (especially if) we don't know the outcome? How are we measuring all potential value?
Failure, when held within a framework of transparency and accountability, is a trust-builder. It tells your teams that you value courage over compliance, curiosity over shame. It signals to investors and citizens that you’re willing to learn and evolve. Without this shift, our innovation agenda will continue to limp forward, always playing catch-up, and eventually catching us out.
Innovation cowers in a climate of fear
Fear acts a paralysing force in any system by discouraging dissent, disguising uncertainty, and deferring action. But in too many public institutions and private entities, fear is the silent director of culture: fear of losing jobs, reputations, budgets or political capital. Fear kills innovation, not because people stop thinking, but because they stop sharing, second-guess themselves, and default to safe and familiar. They don’t question established ways of thinking and doing.
Conversely, high-trust environments respond to volatility differently. They empower people to act with the changes towards an unclear tomorrow without being paralysed by an outdated imperative to master or remove evolving uncertainties. This is essential as we face combined pressures of artificial intelligence (AI) advancements, climate volatility, geopolitical instability, and ever-deepening inequality.
Too many leaders still see innovation as a neat key performance indicator for the IT team to solve, when the truth is that you cannot expect innovation from people you won’t protect. Leaders should reward initiative across the board, defend creativity, and ensure that good ideas don't die in the corridors of bureaucracy. This is especially true in government, where talented officials can feel caged by red tape and risk aversion. It extends to the private sector where demands to chase targets on well-worn paths mean any deviation is punished as a performance issue.
Speaking at our recent “Getting S#!t Done” event, where tech and business leaders are empowered to make things happen, dynamic entrepreneur Miles Kubheka wisely reflected that “opportunity doesn’t send a meeting request” and “you cannot innovate if everybody has to ask for permission”. Put more plainly, if we are not creating spaces and teams that are encouraged and supported to make opportunities and test the limits then we have failed in our roles as stewards of humanity’s innovation and progress.
“Good enough” doesn’t cut it anymore
The reality is that we are navigating through an unprecedented age of polycrises through chaotic overlapping shocks. Energy, water, education, employment, environment, ethics, diplomacy, political stability - all are under pressure and no institution, business or family is exempt. What is abundantly clear though is a panicked pursuit of an acceptable middle zone, a fictional and mediocre place where the good enough can get by, will not help. It will not grow jobs, restore trust in public institutions, increase competition, nor repair our fragile society.
Contemporary leadership has now become more than a performance role but a personal practice of tolerating discomfort, adaptation and holding your nerve when others are hedging theirs. As former Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie reflected last week, after 25 years in the management team, “you must make your own decisions. I always say, if you make a decision, [it] doesn’t matter if it’s wrong, but you need to give me two or three reasons why you’ve made that decision, and if [they are] good reasons, I’m happy with that.”
South Africans have long been masters at managing strife through resilience. But we should no longer allow that strength to blinker us in the short-term from the urgency of what’s required to build a future of opportunities, growth and jobs – not just survive the now. If you are a president, CEO, director-general, board chair, team lead, school principal, community leader, parent, you should be asking yourself: Where am I tolerating mediocrity? What am I too afraid to say out loud? Where am I punishing risk when I should be rewarding it?
If we are serious about creating momentum, rebuilding trust and unlocking the full promise of this country and all her people, we must work to forge a leadership culture that rewards intelligent, curious risk and demands excellence. The time for waiting for someone else to lead this quest is over. As Fourie says: “Every single person must be a CEO, not only myself. The C stands for client, E for energy and O for ownership.”
Craker is CEO of iqbusiness
