What Keeps Global Executives Up at Night
At the end of last month, a major global trade report landed with a blunt verdict. The rules-based system that shaped world commerce for a generation is now in permanent disruption, being rewritten in real time by tariffs, artificial intelligence and geopolitics. For a South African executive, that is not a distant headline. We run businesses in a small, open, trade-exposed economy, priced in a currency that moves on other people’s decisions, selling into commodity cycles we do not set, and moving goods through ports and rail that test us on a good day. When the global map is redrawn, we feel it early and we feel it hard.
And yet, when I sit with executives here, the thing that keeps them up at night is rarely the strategy on the page. Most South African strategies I read are sound. The anxiety lives in the widening gap between a good strategy and what the organisation can actually deliver against a world that will not sit still. The ambition is intact. The performance is leaking somewhere between the boardroom and the branch.
We help leaders find that leak with a simple discipline. Six dimensions we call the 6Cs, the burning platform examined from every angle:
Context. What has changed in your world that you have not yet priced in?
Capability. What can you credibly do, honestly assessed, against what your strategy quietly assumes?
Commitment. What are you truly willing to pay for, and to stop doing?
Choice. Where will you compete, and where will you deliberately not?
Connectedness. Who owns the end-to-end outcome, and where does accountability fragment?
Continuity. What must hold true as everything else changes?
Across very different South African organisations, the same pattern surfaces. The strategy is fine. Accountability is spread so thin that no one owns the result. Data feeds board packs and oversight, but not action on the ground. Nimbler competitors win by owning the flows that matter, payments, logistics and data, while incumbents defend product lines and legacy positions. And the very discipline that once protected the business, the caution that carried us through greylisting, constrained-power years and political noise, quietly begins to trade off against momentum.
There is real reason for confidence. Our exit from the global financial greylist last year was hardwon proof that this country can fix serious things when accountability is clear and the work is sustained. That is exactly the lesson to turn inward. The businesses that thrive through this decade will not be the ones with the boldest slide. They will be the ones that name their burning platform precisely, then align the whole organisation behind a small number of choices, rather than firefighting whatever is loudest in the room.
None of this is a strategy problem. It is a choice and execution problem, and it is solvable. That naming, and the honest conversation it forces, is the work we do at IDS: helping executives think clearly under complexity and turn a credible strategy into a defensible one.
Three questions to sit with before your next executive session
- If a sharp outsider studied your business for one week, what would they see that you have stopped seeing?
- Which change in your environment have you been calling temporary, because treating it as permanent would be too expensive?
- Where does accountability for your single most important outcome fragment, and who could you make the one owner of it tomorrow?
If those are harder to answer than they should be, that is usually where the real work begins. We would be glad to think it through with you.
Sources
- DMCC, Future of Trade 2026, on tariffs, artificial intelligence and geopolitics driving permanent disruption in global commerce, June 2026 (dmcc.ae; as reported by BW Businessworld, 30 June 2026).
- World Economic Forum, Chief Economist Outlook, on accelerating trade fragmentation and economic nationalism, 2025 (weforum.org).
- Financial Action Task Force and the National Treasury of South Africa, on South Africa’s exit from the FATF grey list, 24 October 2025 (treasury.gov.za; fatf-gafi.org).
