SA Rugby needs ‘a mind like a fox’

This last Monday afternoon I had the absolute and distinct pleasure of being invited by BDO to listen to an hour and a half of Clem Sunter, going on about scenario planning, terrorist attacks, the collapse of the economy, the rise of the economy and the future prospects of South Africa.

If you haven’t attended one of his presentations, you would most likely have heard of, as I had done, that Clem Sunter is a past Chairman of Anglo American and has the usual large corporate big wig, with blah blah blah and yada yada yada resume to go with it.

Well on Monday, this man had my riveted attention. Not because he wrote to President George Bush predicting the terrorist attack in New York, three months in advance of 9-11; or that he made a presentation to FW de Klerk and the Cabinet in 1986 and visited Nelson Mandela in prison to discuss the future just before his release; or that he provided a scholarship to UCT Chemical Engineering for a 17-year-old black St. John’s student, who got straight As for matric, and then came first in the USA for having patented a rocket propellant superior to that developed by NASA, but because this man can laugh infectiously and talk sense at the same time.

Clem Sunter’s famous quote of: “It is better to be vaguely right, than precisely wrong” sent a chilling message, of how dogmatic and stubborn we South Africans can be, with our blinkered tunnel vision, which he describes as a “hedgehog” characteristic with a one goal only approach, which most corporate CEOs have.

Conversely, Clem advocates that one needs to have a mind characteristic of a fox that enables one to react to different market forces and influences with a variety of options and actions that one has partial or full control over.

His premise is simple: Business is a game and just like any other game, the point is to win.

First you need to decide what type of game (business) you’re playing, where the game is being played (the geographical footprint of the business) and who you’re playing against.

Next, you need to understand the rules of the game.

So let’s take rugby in South Africa. Their business is rugby as entertainment, the game is being played nationally, in the southern hemisphere and Europe and they are playing against the SANZAR, CAR and the Top Ten IRB listed rugby nations . List their modern day challenges that they need to overcome and then randomly list them and suggest possible scenarios. Of course skeptics will say there are too many to mention, so we will limit this to just the Top Ten (for starters) and rank them on a scale of one (for extremely bad) to 10 (for outstanding) rank in SA Rugby.

1. Growth of rugby
2. Transformation
3. Financial sustainability
4. Expansion of the Super 14
5. Expansion in the southern hemisphere
6. Bidding for the 2015 & 2019 Rugby World Cups
7. Competent administration
8. Accountability
9. Performance driven
10. Winning

Of these Top Ten criteria, SA Rugby can only rely on point 10. Winning as being above average and even that category is being decimated. One out of three wins in the end of year tour against Wales(8), Scotland(15) and England(22) will be rated as a failure, three out of three would be a good round off to the year and two out of three wins would again be above average.

In the meantime, SA Rugby’s relationships with key stakeholders are fragile to hostile, with:

1. Its nine smaller unions (Pumas, Griffons, Griquas, Falcons, Leopards, Border, EP, SWD and Boland)
2. Parliamentary Portfolio Committee of Sport
3. Minister of Sport
4. SANZAR partners New Zealand and Australia
5. Confederation of African Rugby
6. Sponsors
7. Broadcasters
8. Ireland
9. Argentina
10. South African rugby players

Almost without exception, SA Rugby’s modus operandi is reactive to events, rather than being proactive in which they can be “vaguely right, rather than precisely wrong” and the organisation is continually on the back foot having to defend itself or try and litigate its way out of conflict scenarios, with enormous financial liabilities looming.

In the process, SA Rugby as an organisation is being stigmatised and marginalised from mainstream sports and South Africans in a continuous process of attrition that has started to make the game appear dysfunctional.

Racism is rife and players are killed on and off the field in bouts of violence and thuggery that remain uncontrolled, in a state that is unlike anywhere in over 100 rugby playing nations around the world.

In the next three to four months there will be a series of momentous events that will rock rugby and put it in an apocolyptic state, necessitating an intervention to salvage the dignity of the game.

Every single one of the Top Ten Achilles’ Heels will trigger its own sequence of negative events that will compound itself with one or more of the other categories, resulting in an organisation spiralling out of control.

Virtually everything about SA Rugby’s future is uncertain and beyond the control of individual players in the Presidents Council, except that of Regan Hoskins, who as President of SA Rugby can bring about initiatives to halt this, as he has the leadership role and is involved in every single one of the above Top Ten forces that are about to change rugby’s environment.

For SA Rugby to stave off this meltdown, it has to introduce a model that integrates scenario planning of these Top Ten categories, into the mainstream process of strategic planning and decision-making in South Africa and abroad.

It will allow the executive teams of SA Rugby, SANZAR, Confederation of Rugby, IRB, sponsors and broadcasters and the 14 SARU Unions to test the resilience of their strategies and tactics against different scenarios and implement alternatives faster and more effectively.

The issue is of course: does SA Rugby acknowledge that there is an elephant in the room and do something about it?

If not, fasten your seatbelt and don your crash helmet as there is a roller coaster ride ahead that will make your head spin.

In a final message from Clem Sunter, the critical difference between hedgehogs and foxes is their attitude to strategy. Hedgehogs will stick to a strategy through thick and thin and never consider any deviations.

Foxes will stick to a strategy but regularly check out the environment to see whether the strategy should be amended in any way. It is his contention that while a hedgehog approach to strategy may have been successful in the past because a company’s environment was predictable and, up to a point, controllable, that condition no longer applies and a foxy approach is more suitable.

Strategies where you have limited power and certainty differ materially from strategies where you can create the certainty because you have the power.

It is really up to SA Rugby to create these certainties with an unabashed campaign of engagement and interaction, as opposed to isolation and hostility.

The responsibility falls squarely at Regan Hoskins’ feet and for him to be backed by the SA Rugby Presidents Council.