To fix SA, listen to younger voices – Dion Chang

You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here.

JEREMY MAGGS: To fix or mend anything, I would contend that you need a sense of what the end goal is but, as important, what the operating landscape looks like. You need to have a sense of the environment and what is likely to change – and the how, the when, and the why. And that informs this edition of the Moneyweb podcast FixSA. You’ll hear from one of the country’s foremost future thinkers, and I hope the conversation is also going to take in what younger generations want – the millennial and the Gen Z cohorts.

Dion Chang says on his website that he will make you think differently.

He’s a strategic thinker, he’s a keynote speaker. But this is what I like – a ‘walking ideas bank’ and a ‘professional cage-rattler’. Boy, we need a lot more of that.

Dion is one of the country’s most respected trend analysts and the founder of Flux Trends, which takes the unique view of trends as a business strategy.

A warm welcome, I’m Jeremy Maggs. Our guests in coming weeks will be asked how we can make things better, how we can improve matters and, perhaps most importantly, how in the shortest space of time we can once again become a competitive and a successful nation.

Dion Chang, a very warm welcome to you. Let’s pick up on the one notion, if we can, about thinking. I wonder in this country if we spend enough time actually thinking. If we did more of that and less of just spontaneously reacting maybe we’d be more successful.

DION CHANG: Hi, Jeremy. Thank you so much for having me. To answer your question, the blunt answer is I don’t think we do really. It’s not only a South African thing, but I think generally if you just look at social media people, they get kind of carried away with a quick firing of some acerbic comments from their couch, on Twitter or whatever it is, and then kind of leave it at that.

But I also think in South Africa we’re mired in so many problems that generally now I do feel that there is a kind of despair.

It’s a bit different this year, the mood of the country.

It has obviously a lot to do with load shedding, but I think people are just kind of stuck. We are very good at complaining, but I don’t think we are very, very good at actually thinking and offering solutions and doing that. It’s not that everybody isn’t doing that; there are people just ploughing away and trying to chip away at this huge problem.

But I think in general what we are starting to see is just a whole argument about renewable energy or solar. So individual households will all decide that they want to do it – if they can afford it and are able to do it – rather than a complex or a village or a suburb coming together and saying, let’s get this done, and ending like that.

So I think that’s one of the main sticking points as to why we don’t really go forward as a society; it’s because we kind of keep to the individual, you look after yourself.

That’s kind of the message that we’ve been fed over the past years, that you are on your own. So I think the mindset is, well, I’d better look after myself, my family – and then we hope for the best.

JEREMY MAGGS: Dion, let me pick up on one phrase, and that’s ‘going forward’. I’m going to use a very bad analogy [of] what I think is the job that you do. Assuming that we are all on a very difficult journey through a jungle right now, your job I guess would be to climb the tallest tree to see what is ahead and then give us a sense of warning and intelligence. Why is that future vision important? Without giving away too many trade secrets, how do you do your job?

DION CHANG: We actually use a very similar analogy. We look for little smoke signals, we look for bumps in the road, valleys and mountains to climb, all of those kinds of things – and anticipate that. We’ve seen, again, just from this year, the new kid on the block or newish kid on the block is ‘generative AI [artificial intelligence]’ and what that can do, not only to publishing but to education, all of those kinds of things.

So we specialise in looking specifically for people’s or companies’ blind spots, and then especially try to find solutions.

Because we scan for things that disrupt a business model – whether it’s a sector or a company – we can look at those disruptions and say, ‘This is coming at you and we need to fix that’. In a nutshell that’s what we do. We scan, we look for potential problems that are going to come through for our clients, and then hopefully give them the solutions or an option of solutions that they can pursue.

JEREMY MAGGS: So, Dion Chang, why then is trend thinking important in business strategy, and do enough businesses pay attention to it?

DION CHANG: I don’t think they do. The approach that we have – the mantra is ‘trends as business strategy’. We are not really into colour forecasts or hemlines, or anything like that. It really is about business, and it’s about looking at what is going to fundamentally change a business model, and then your bottom line.

I think because we’re in this era of ‘poly-crisis’ or ‘perma-crisis’, whichever word you want to use, from 2022 we thought that was a great recalibration coming out of the pandemic. Then the [Russia/Ukraine] war started and it just sort of piled on again.

I think people are sort of emerging and hoping and holding their breath that 2023 is going to be that year of calibration.

But the more I speak to our clients, the more people and businesses are preparing for perma-crisis and [thinking] ‘this is going to carry on doing this’.

So it’s understandable that a lot of businesses and business leaders are mired in operational issues. They’ve got their heads down.

But what we say and what we advocate is that this is the most important time to actually put your head above the parapet and see what’s coming.

Because you might have this business plan or this trajectory, and you’re saying you’re going to veer sort of five degrees to the left – and suddenly you discover in 18 months’ time you are actually 25 degrees to the right, that trajectory. If you don’t put yourself onto that new trajectory as soon as possible, the outcomes a couple of years or a couple of months later are going to be far worse for your business than you think.

JEREMY MAGGS: That makes absolute sense, and it’s easy for us to talk about that from the sidelines. But if you are in manufacturing, for instance, and you are mired in those problems that you refer to, it’s very difficult to raise your head above the parapet and find the courage to do so.

DION CHANG: Yes, absolutely. I think that word that you used, ‘courage’, is one of the biggest things, unfortunately – as difficult as it is to do. I do modules about the business of innovation at different business schools, and I always talk about ambidextrous leadership, because that is what everybody is doing. I think it’s been heightened in South Africa this year. Even before the pandemic, and during the pandemic, leadership has [had] to try and implement new things.

I think what came out of the pandemic, one of the clear signals, was meeting the velocity of change, because the velocity of change just sped up exponentially during the pandemic.

Now we’ve got these additional problems, a ‘poly-crisis’, all those kind of things. So you have to keep steering the ship.

As you say, it’s easy to say it from the sidelines, but you actually have to use that ambidextrous way of doing things and implement new things while trying to steer the ship as well.

It’s really, really tricky and I think every single business owner, in South Africa specifically, is dealing not only with reconfigured supply chains, all of those things – the ripple effect from the war, global economies – but has this huge burden of unreliable energy and what to do about it. We are haemorrhaging, every single day and with every single load shed.

JEREMY MAGGS: Where’s the starting point, then, once you’ve made that decision to be a little more ambidextrous?

DION CHANG: I think the starting point, going back to this module that I do, is that there are ways in which to measure that innovation. So it doesn’t mean that you try and embark on something and just hope for the best.

There are systems and ways to be able to structure an innovation process, but it also requires a lot of commitment.

So a lot of companies that I go to, especially if they have an innovation hub within a big corporate or within that company, [say]: ‘Well, we’re fine, we have an innovation hub, we have people to do that for us.’ I say therein lies the problem, because if everybody isn’t invested in that process you miss out on sometimes seemingly simple ideas – which [could] have a radical impact and change – from the least likely sector.

For example, we are talking today kind of in the middle of strikes and everything. But the one case study that I always use is actually from a hospital in New York.

They were trying, as every company is, to increase their efficiency and get rid of – I love this term – ‘corporate cholesterol’, and just kind of streamline processes.

It was a hospital trying to do this, and they did the usual things there. They spoke to the doctors, the nurses, the admin staff, everything. Eventually they discovered that the most valuable insights and change processes actually came from the security guard who stood at emergency admissions. He or she saw the chaos happening there and said, ‘I think there’s a better way of doing this and you should maybe do that’.

So sometimes you are looking for the solutions in a very different place. And sometimes, as ironic as it seems, your expertise sometimes gets in the way of that innovation because you probably go for a slightly safer way of doing things.

When I say that to people, they look at me rather strangely and say, but how can expertise be a hindrance to any of this?

There’s actually a Nasa [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] case study where there was a robotics competition, and they actually saw that the top scientists inside Nasa didn’t have the biggest ideas; and it was [from] people that came out [with what] they called ‘feasibility preference’. So you look at what’s feasible within your expertise, you say, ‘okay, this is it’; but you don’t take those giant leaps of faith.

I think where we are in South Africa, we need to take those giant leaps of faith and do something different.

JEREMY MAGGS: All right, that’s the theoretical blueprint, then. Now let’s move on to the fix. But before we can fix anything, we’ve got to establish what the biggest problem facing South Africa is right now. You have quite a choice, Dion Chang.

DION CHANG: Yes, I do. For me what’s been bubbling up for a long time is our electoral system. It’s so fantastic. We’re a democracy, an electoral democracy, but for a long, long time and from various sectors it’s been coming through [that] we need to change this.

We can’t have a few thousand people at this moment at an ANC conference choosing the leader of the country.

That’s just the way we are set up. I think that leads to what you started off saying: we have this disconnect and we don’t feel we have agency, because we are just kind of watching an accident happening in slow motion. And I think that [a change in the electoral system] would go a long way in doing that.

If we see the future of where we are going with coalition government, it’s a hot mess right now. We need to figure out how – because that is going to be the future – we are going to have to deal with coalition government and coalition municipalities. It can’t be a party which is completely disproportionate in terms of who voted for them suddenly – because of squabbles and because of different processes and ideologies – [to] become mayors of major metros.

So too with the leader, the president of the country and all of those kinds of things, I think that would go a long way in starting to at least feel that the whole country feels that they’ve got some agency and can contribute positively.

JEREMY MAGGS: Do you think there is a willing majority of people who would want to fix that problem or, as we’ve discussed on other podcasts, is the divide of cooperation and collegiality now too wide – that positions have become too entrenched?

DION CHANG: I think they have, but I remain the eternal optimist. I think that we’ve stared into the abyss quite a few times in this country’s history and we’ve managed to pull back.

I hope that the squabbling and what happens with trying coalitions is that people will eventually pull back and say ‘we actually need to do that’. The horrific alternative is that there are just complete uprisings. It’s no coincidence that you are seeing a split. I use the lovely Afrikaans term because it’s got such a lovely feel in the mouth, ‘alles ontrafel’ – it unravels, and we see the unravelling around the world.

And this whole thing about right-wing extremist groups suddenly [being] elected into governments – a lot happening in Europe, Italy, for example, all of those kind of things – people say, well, it’s a left-wing, right-wing thing.

I read a really interesting paper, and this is a real bellwether and a big warning for South Africa – it said it’s not a left-wing or right-wing argument …

[It said] it really is a dissatisfaction between the haves and the have nots, because if you look at kind of the fundamentals of democracy, there should be some semblance of equality and equity within that society to make that democracy work.

If we live in the most unequal society on the planet, and you’re seeing the rest of the world where these extreme right-wing groups are being voted into government, it’s not because they want that right-wing government, it’s because they’re dissatisfied with the way services are not being delivered; the government not delivering.

We’ve had that for a very long time and we’ve seen what happened in KZN. We are at that tinderbox state where it is going to take one little thing and it can ignite.

We are seeing this with these strikes. It’s building, it’s building, it’s building. There’s a very uneasy feeling in the country at the moment.

JEREMY MAGGS: All right. So you’ve identified the problem, the electoral system. How would you start fixing it?

DION CHANG: Well, we are seeing around the world, and even seeing on this continent, that we need to get some younger voices into government or into the public sector.

We’re starting to see some much younger mayors than we’ve seen previously doing quite remarkable things in the country.

If you look just to one of our neighbours, Namibia, just before the pandemic Emma Theophilus became the deputy ICT minister at the age of 23. She was the youngest cabinet minister on the African continent.

I don’t want to rap on like a beauty queen and say it’s ‘the future of our children’, but I’ve done a lot of research in the past eight years on this Generation Z – the social-justice barometers, how they fight for things, and what they fight for as well.

You are seeing this generation move into politics or civic activism at a much younger age than previous generations have done. So even millennials, I think, are a little bit more ‘kumbaya’. [But] you’re seeing a very disgruntled Generation Z come through.

Don’t forget that the African continent is not a millennial continent. It’s a very, very definite Generation Z continent.

And in South Africa we’ve got a lot of young people within that age group.

I don’t think that as the first digital natives of humanity, they are given the kind of credibility or the space to put their hands up and say, ‘I think maybe we can do this in a slightly different way’.

We discard them because of age, but we forget that they are the most connected …

And they are going to be – because of the way in which they learn and because of the way in which they get things out of the internet – one of the most educated or aware generations we’ve had in a very, very long time.

JEREMY MAGGS: So how do you harness their power, their influence, and bring them into the decision-making orbit?

DION CHANG: That needs to start with – and therein lies the problem – acknowledging the fact that they can be contributors to a solution. I think that is the biggest problem. So whether it’s in government, people that are young in government, or – in their late 40s or something considered young – just in business, [we] don’t give this young cohort I think enough space.

JEREMY MAGGS: Dion, if you were tasked with this job of fixing, who would you call in to help you?

DION CHANG: Oh gosh, logistically you’d want the Gift of the Givers to really come in and just … learn from the processes.

Read/listed: SA ‘not close to breaking point at all’ – Imtiaz Sooliman

Everyone is asking him [founder Imtiaz Sooliman] ‘Don’t you want to go into government?’ I would rather just say, ‘Can we learn from your processes, can we learn how you get things done?’ and use the framework of the organisation to be able to do that, try and do that, and just to get these people. I think what we need are really practical solutions.

So I don’t think we need more ideology. I think a lot of ideology and old ideology has got us into this mess at the moment.

I think what we need to really do [is have] people who can fix and find those solutions – and those are the people who are really good in operations. Let them figure out how we do this, how the best business leaders can manage or cut down and [reduce] that corporate cholesterol as much as possible because, boy, do we have a lot of governmental cholesterol. So we need that corporate cholesterol to be kind of dissolved and gone through.

For me, it’s really people with very practical and pragmatic minds who can get things done really, really quickly. Also I think putting those people in is to also put things into more transient ways of doing things.

So it’s not to say okay, you put somebody into that position and then you are in for another five years or something. You are there as a contractor, you’re there to fix that problem.

And then once you fix that problem, we’ll see what the landscape is and then we bring in other people, and kind of do that.

People will argue that you don’t get the consistency with that, but I think we’re at a stage where we really need to fix things very, very quickly, just to have a foundation from which we can build.

Unfortunately we are at that stage where we have to rebuild that foundation. We don’t have that foundation; we’re standing on very shaky ground.

JEREMY MAGGS: It’s a very good argument. So what I’m hearing is more technocrats. But in order to have more technocrats to bring into the fold, and just allow them to get on with the job, we’ve got to find them, we’ve got to train them, and we’ve got to upskill them. That in itself is another avenue of conversation, isn’t it?

DION CHANG: Yes, absolutely. When you’re talking skills, Jeremy –I’ve read a really interesting report from the World Economic Forum.

For me this is one solution that can fix a lot of things. We are all back in this, let me call it outdated notion, that an academic pathway to tertiary education is the only way.

I was really hammered back in 2015 when ‘Fees must fall’ was first coming through. I was saying we’d picked the right war, but the wrong battle.

We are seeing everybody fixated on ‘you’ve got to do this degree, especially a four-year based degree’, in order to succeed.

Let me just say also, the latest stats of people applying for a R350 relief grant – 800 000 of those, almost a million of those applicants … were post-graduates. They all had degrees.

So that should tell you something is very, very wrong with pursuing that system.

So what the World Economic Forum is suggesting is to ramp up skills, specifically in emerging markets, and create millions of jobs by 2030.

They are proposing ‘micro-credentials’.

Micro-credentials are short courses, internships. You could be doing a coding course, you could even be volunteering at a food bank.

What they’re proposing is a backpack of skills; you collect these short courses and skills.

So, in a South African context, you are able to upskill people in a shorter space of time – rather than looking at a four-year degree [and] then you still don’t have the experience to be able to do that [type of work].

Then if I put my futurist hat on, if you look at the future of work, it is going to be decentralised. You want people with very, very hybrid skills who think like entrepreneurs and are able to cross over with different things.

So for me micro-credentials is not only a good future-of-work solution, but a very, very pertinent solution for South Africa.

JEREMY MAGGS: We’ve touched on so many different issues, but as we come to the end of this conversation I want to get back to the original problem that we identified, and that was the electoral system. There is that old cliché, isn’t there, Dion, that you can’t manage anything unless you can measure it. So if we were applying some of the thinking that you’ve outlined in terms of the principal problem, what would define short-term success?

DION CHANG: I think in business when you look at the measure of your innovation it is your customer experience and your branding, because that is driven and built by your innovation process inside an organisation.

So if you take it to a government level, your customer experience would be your citizens, and your branding would be the reputation of South Africa.

There are other little metrics that you can use, whether you are using sort of big technological breakthroughs, generative AI, things like that, digitalisation, all of those kinds of things.

Fundamentally, I know it sounds quite vague, but in terms of branding and in terms of innovation in a business sense, this is a real fundamental one – if your customers are really happy and there’s good feedback from it, your brand is reputationally doing really well. And that obviously shows [on] the bottom line. Then you know that the innovation process that you’ve embarked on is [succeeding].

However, that said, you have to identify what the steps are of that innovation process because you can’t just say, okay, we’re going to innovate and we’ll do that. I think you need to put those markers down, you need to put timelines down for that, and then you need to measure it with these things …

… is there internal innovation happening, what kind of applied sciences or big breakthroughs in science are being used there, because you can’t keep to same old, same old and then think you’re going to get a different result.

So you have to put [in] all of these measurements, which I frame [as] an innovation space: how innovative are you and how innovative is your thinking? Then you can put those measurements in place. There are very different measurements that you can put in place.

JEREMY MAGGS: We end every podcast with the same question to all of our guests. When you are talking, Dion, to young people in 20 years’ time, what are you going to tell them about the early 2020s and, most importantly in building South Africa, what is their role as the baton-holding generation and, obviously in your case, against the backdrop of the work and the study that you’ve done into Gen Z?

DION CHANG: Well, I would say that I was looking at this generation for the answers.

And I would say to them ‘I can see what you have done’, because I actually believe they will do things very, very differently.

And I would say to them, ‘Don’t make the mistakes that we did and not listen to a younger voice’ and not give them the agency to be able to do that.

So listen to younger voices because they plan very, very differently for the future.

JEREMY MAGGS: I said at the beginning of this conversation that you are a walking ideas bank and a professional cage-rattler. I think that you have [demonstrated] both of those [qualities] today.

Dion Chang from Flux Trends, thank you very much for joining us. My name is Jeremy Maggs and thank you for listening to the FixSA podcast on Moneyweb.

Listen to previous FixSA podcasts here.