When the first iteration of the Indlulamithi scenarios were presented to the Anglo American board and top management in 2018, we listened intently to what they had to say, especially since this was the largest funder of the project at the time.
However, there was one opinion in the room we especially wanted to hear, and the team beamed when Clem Sunter not only expressed his approval but asked if he could use the scenarios in his presentations.
Scenario-based planners owe much to Sunter, who passed away last week, for his promotion of the use in South Africa of scenarios, which slowly rose to prominence after World War 2.
Hermann Khan, the systems theorist and military strategist employed at Rand Corporation, decided in the aftermath of the horrors of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan to use scenarios to bring home the consequences of the use of such weapons.
The Shell Corporation was one of the first corporates to use scenarios in its planning, and produced the first wave of business strategists, scholars and academics who left the corporate world to teach the topic internationally.
Sunter’s genius lay in recognising the potency of this new discipline in strategic management. However, as most scenario planners will attest, even today it isn’t easy getting this approach accepted.
In Michael Cardo’s biography of Anglo American tycoon Harry Oppenheimer he describes how Sunter excitedly tried to show Oppenheimer the value of scenarios. Oppenheimer turned to him gently, saying it was all very well, but should he be doing this during working hours?
Sunter was able to get some of Shell’s key planners to help build a strategic foresight function at Anglo American in the early 1980s, especially to highlight the future options available to South Africa. The scenarios produced were simple by design, titled The High Road and The Low Road. One led through negotiation to political settlement and the possibility of shared prosperity. The other through confrontation to civil war and economic ruin.
It became a major talking point around the country, having been presented to various stripes of the political and economic elite. Ever since, the scenario methodology has been widely used globally, not restricted to the military or business worlds, but also by trade unions, civil society, legislative bodies, and governments.
Perhaps the most enduring exercise is that of the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra), co-ordinated through the Indlulamithi Scenarios Project. This multistakeholder initiative has reached scores of organisations and thousands of decision-makers.
Mistra’s staff had been involved in two scenario exercises in the 2000s under the aegis of the Thabo Mbeki presidency. The launch of the Indlulamithi scenarios by President Cyril Ramaphosa on June 21 2018 revived that intellectual and strategic tradition.
The current Indlulamithi 2035 Scenarios project, which present three possible futures for SA, draws directly on the same intellectual tradition that Sunter did. The methodology — identifying key uncertainties, constructing internally consistent narratives of possible futures, testing strategic plans against those narratives — is among the key ingredients scenario practitioners use around the world.
When we designed the Indlulamithi process we held the same standard that other leading practitioners had been setting: the measure of success would not be whether our scenarios proved accurate, but whether they prompted organisations and institutions to think differently about the choices they faced.
The questions today are different from 1986, but the underlying challenge is recognisably similar: can we see the forks in the road clearly enough to choose wisely? Can we resist the comfort of assuming the future is already determined?
Sunter spent 40 years insisting we can, and that the quality of our thinking about possible futures has direct consequences for the futures we actually inhabit. That conviction — more than any specific scenario, any particular flag, any memorable metaphor — is his enduring bequest to those of us who work in this field.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.