What Keeps You Anxious During the Day

Last month I wrote about what keeps South African executives up at night: the global shocks, and the gap between strategy and performance. This is the sequel, because there is a second, quieter anxiety, and it does not wait for the dark. It arrives in the middle of the working day. It is not the 2030 vision. It is the two o’clock reality.

The defining shift of this year is that artificial intelligence has crossed a line from experiment to operation. On the latest global count, close to nine in ten organisations now use it in at least one part of the business, and agentic systems, software that acts on its own, are beginning to make calls that people used to make. On a strategy slide, that is exciting. On a Tuesday afternoon in a Johannesburg or Cape Town office, it lands differently. It lands on teams already carrying years of change. It lands on managers wondering whether the new system removed work or simply added a step. And it lands on leaders in a country that somehow holds both a scarcity of data and engineering skills and an unemployment rate near a third of its people, quietly worried that their best performers are running on empty while the roles of tomorrow go unfilled.

Where the night-time question is whether the strategy is right, the daytime one is more human. Will the work actually change, and will my people come with me? We help leaders navigate that with three instruments, Mirror, Map and Compass.

Mirror.  Reflection. Be honest about your own house. Are your people practising real competence, or performing it in meetings? Is the toil you keep tolerating actually a choice you have quietly made?

Map.  Planning. Read the terrain as it is, not as it was. What work should no longer exist at all? What are you optimising that you should simply abandon?

Compass.  Navigation. Hold a steady direction while moving people through change without breaking them. Productivity gains only appear when work is genuinely removed, not when new tools are layered on top of the old ones.

The pattern I see most often is this. Organisations announce transformation from the top, then are surprised when belief does not follow. In a country where people have heard many grand plans, belief cannot be mandated. It is earned by a small group who choose to try something, prove it quietly, and tell their colleagues honestly that it worked. In our culture, that word-ofmouth trust is everything. One visible win, owned by people who volunteered for it, persuades more than a hundred slides ever will.

That is our craft at IDS: helping leaders reflect clearly, plan honestly, and navigate change in a way their people actually trust, so that scarce energy goes to the work that matters and the organisation carries its talent with it, rather than wearing it down.

Three questions to sit with this week

1. What is the one task your best people do every week that should not exist at all?
2. Where have you layered a new tool on top of old work, instead of doing the harder job of removing the work?
3. If you had to earn your team’s belief with a single visible win in ninety days, what would you choose, and who would you invite to prove it with you?

If these are the questions occupying you in daylight, you are asking exactly the right ones. We would be glad to help you work through them, in a structured way.

Sources

1. McKinsey & Company, The State of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation, on AI moving from experimentation to operational deployment, with close to nine in ten organisations using it in at least one business function and agentic AI emerging, November 2025 (mckinsey.com).
2. Statistics South Africa, Quarterly Labour Force Survey, Q1 2026, official unemployment rate of 32,7 percent, released 12 May 2026 (statssa.gov.za).