By Yacoob Abba Omar, Director Operations at MISTRA and Executive Committee of the Indlulamithi Scenarios project
Scenarios, strategy and crisis
The practise of using scenarios in strategic planning was slowly making its way through corporate boardrooms after Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation used it in 1960 to highlight the consequences of an all-out nuclear war. He borrowed the term ‘scenario’ from Hollywood where a scene is constructed within which actors play their roles.
From 1967 Shell executives actively and successfully used this appraoch to horizon scanning, and to figure out a response to the oil crisis of 1972-1974. Ever since, the practise has not only become embedded in Shell’s planning processes but has also spread far and wide with governments and government departments, civil society organisations and labour movements jostling with corporates to draw on this burgeoning methodology.
Pierre Wack and Peter Schwartz provided intellectual succour to the methodology, when the former wrote two seminal articles in the Harvard Business Review and the latter, who became the head of scenario planning at Shell in 1982, published The Art of the Long View – voted the best all time book on the future by the Association of Professional Futurists. Another foundational source for understanding scenarios is Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation, written by academic and former Shell executive, Kees van der Heijden’s, and published in 1996. And the literature on scenarios keeps on growing.
Pioneering scenarios in South Africa
Anglo American, especially through its executive Clem Sunter, has been the pioneer in South Africa in the use of scenarios. As Michael Cardo indicates in the biography Harry Oppenheimer: Diamonds, Gold and Dynasty it wasn’t easy to get this approach embedded at this venerable institution. When Clem explained what scenarios were, Oppenheimer turned to him and said, ‘that’s all very well Clem, but do you think you should be doing that during your working hours?’
South Africa has a long history of using scenarios, most famously the Mont Fleur scenarios of the early 1990s, on the eve of the county’s democratic transition, when a group of leaders from across the spectrum speculated on the possible futures for South Africa.
The approach MISTRA follows is termed the Intuitive Logics approach. It draws upon the works of key writers and practitioners and combines the ‘intuitive’ insights of the subject experts and leadership of the organisation, as well as the ‘logic’ of research and data modelling. The approach places strategic conversations at its centre, whereas many other approaches prefer computing scenarios. We find the Intuitive Logis approach useful because it helps inform the strategic planning processes more directly.
Scenarios in the new millennium
Joel Netshitenzhe, Executive Director of MISTRA, and I began working within this methodology as far back as 2002 when then President Mbeki was convinced to use scenarios to help government carry out long term planning. At the time Joel was the head of policy unit in the Presidency. Similar to Oppenheimer, so unsure was government of this newly fangled methodology, they insisted that an executive from Shell should be briefed on it by us, who then had to report to a Cabinet committee, chaired by the late Kader Asmal.
We got the ‘seal of approval’ for the 2002 scenarios titled Memories of the Future: Scenarios for 2024, opening the way for many more years of future-oriented thinking. By 2007 there was a growing realisation that South Africa was going to take a major turn especially in its political constellation and that year we launched South Africa scenarios 2025: The Future we Chose, which captured much of what happened at the ANC’s watershed December 2007 Polokwane conference, and its aftermath.
Sadly, with the change in the Presidency in 2009, such practice came to an end. During the depths of the Zuma administration era, former CEO of Anglo-American Mark Cutifani, was touring the country in 2017 trying to get our leaders to start thinking beyond the morass of that time. Joel Netshitenzhe convinced him that the best way to do so was to engage in the kind of open-ended conversations that scenarios engender.
The Indlulamithi Scenarios
This led to the birth of the Indlulamithi (giraffe in the Nguni language) Project in 2017, which set out to answer the question: what would social cohesion look like in 2030? It described three possible futures for South Africa:
- Nayi le Walk, meant to describe a country on track to achieve the 2030 targets of the National Development Plan;
- iSbhujwa, which describes the continuation of the status quo; and
- Gwara Gwara, which describes a floundering false dawn of dreams deferred.
It was launched by President Ramaphosa on 21 June 2018. It was significant at so many levels, not least in fusing two important historical streams in scenarios work – that of the state and that of the corporate sector.
In a turn of unforeseen synchronicity, the 21 June, which was set around the President’s diary, turned out to be international giraffe day! Hundreds of workshops ensued, with many organisations using the scenarios to directly inform their strategic planning. Also, in 2019 the project launched the Indlulamithi Barometer, which provides an annual report of which scenario the country was moving into, usually presented around June 21 – which we dubbed Indlulamithi Day.
Impact of combined major global events and trends
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and especially given the rise in the use of various technologies, the emergence of AI, impact of climate change, increasing geopolitical tensions, moves towards great integration of the African continent, the Indlulamithi project team began consulting practitioners across the world, including Shell executives, the extent to which developments had been impacting their scenarios. We found we were in good company arriving at the conclusion that the prevailing scenarios needed to be revisited.
Also, the Indlulamithi Barometer was indicating that the situation had moved from the status quo isBhujwa scenario to the Gwarra Gwarra scenario, and that post-pandemic SA was moving into a worse case which we had not even envisaged. We started referring to this as the GG+ reality.
There was much discussion at the time on why had the possibility of the pandemic not featured sufficiently in our thinking, whether the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a black swan which Nassim Nicola Taleb, author of Black Swan, described as a highly improbable event which has a major effect. There has also been increasing appreciation of the notion of ‘grey rhinos’, as described by Michele Wucker, author of a book by that name. The subtitle is indicative of what is meant by this term: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore.
Factoring uncertainties into the future
Given the emphasis on separating the certainties of what we know and predict from the uncertainties of what we don’t know, the Johari Window has also been a tool MISTRA has been using to help us in the scenario process. (See Figure 1 below).
Named after a combination of the first letters of the first names of the psychologists who devised this toolbox in 1955, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, the Johari Window has four quadrants: that which is known by the subject and all others; that which is not known by the subject but known to others; things which the subject is aware of but not known to others; and that which is not known by the subject as well as those around the subject .
This eventually led us to the current set of scenarios, which – given the various uncertainties – tried to answer the question ‘what would SA look like in 2035?’ and produced Journeys into the future: South Africa 2024 to 2035.
Embedding scenarios in South African development planning
The process has come full circle – just as the policy unit in the Presidency ran the 2002 process, the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation has been a key partner in the most recent scenarios for South Africa’s future, along with vast sections of civil society, political parties, trade unions and the business sector. The 2035 scenarios have been embedded into developing the medium-term development plan – government’s five-year plan for 2024 to 2029.
Corporates as well as provincial and local governments, media organisations and NPOs are already looking at how the scenarios can help in their planning processes. Some organisations are using the scenarios to ‘stress test’ or ‘wind tunnel’¹ their existing strategies. The best use of the scenarios would be to stimulate creative thinking around how organisations and South Africa could respond to these possible futures – as the country sings, screeches, or warbles into the future.
Philanthropy and scenario planning
Scenarios can also be useful to help philanthropy plan in the context of the polycrisis. IPASA has engaged actively with the development of the Indlulamithi scenarios project, both at the 2023 and 2024 Annual Philanthropy Symposium. A workshop in January 2025, will allow PASA members to delve deeper into the scenarios to understand the implications it has for the future of philanthropy in South Africa.
At this time, when philanthropy remains challenged to simultaneously transform and play to its strength in the polycrisis, embedding scenario planning in strategic planning can help philanthropy to position itself better and to leverage this positioning for transformative change.
Figure 1: The Johari Window
Source: Mapungubwe Institute (MISTRA)
[¹ ] In aerodynamic research wind tunnelling refers to testing the effect of wind velocity on solid objects.