JONATHAN COOK: Serenity, determination and wisdom in creating the future

As a boy I was captivated by CS Forester’s Hornblower series. In one of the books a ship carrying a cargo of rice survives a stormy battering. Each day the inexperienced captain carefully checks for leaks, but finds nothing. Yet unbeknown to the captain the seawater has been soaking into the rice. The cargo silently swells and eventually splits the ship apart. 

That has been a lifelong lesson to me, to look beyond obvious indicators to check for hidden risks and opportunities. As we begin to wind up planning for next year it’s a great warning against complacency. 

We see the consequences of letting things drift all around us every day, with potholes merging to form canyons in our roads, water pipes bursting through lack of preventive maintenance, rundown treatment plants producing raw sewage rather than drinkable water, and electricity infrastructure failing from neglected maintenance. 

We see it at home when failing to paint allows rust to take hold, or when forgetting to insure leaves us with an enormous bill. In our personal lives we may delay going for tests until a disease has taken hold. We postpone exercise until that never-never age of enough time. In relationships we ignore warning signs of hurt or frustration until things fall apart. 

We see it in news items about crises that should never have unfolded. Why were hundreds of informal miners allowed underground in Stilfontein for years before safety became a concern? Why were warehouses and informal shops not inspected before children began to die from rat poison?

Internationally some leaders still claim climate change is a hoax while we drift towards what could be the greatest threat to our existence. We accept injustice, poverty and exclusion until frustration and anger boil over. 

Complacency is rife in organisations too. Managers imagine that their job is to repeat now what we did in the past. There is a special kind of managerial blindness that fails to notice as the building becomes shabbier, as the equipment wears towards collapse, as people lose energy, and as the changing business requires new solutions. The organisational arteries carrying life-giving energy become clogged as clots create a kind of managerial thrombosis.

Sometimes the signs are not obvious and require expertise. Companies can grow themselves into failure by not anticipating cash-flow crunches. What key clients may be about to fold? Are key decisionmakers in the company aware of threats front-line staff see? Can anticipation be taught? Like many good management practices I expect it needs to be learnt through example and wise words from mentors.

Leaders can contribute to a better world daily by passing this lesson on to the next generations. Responsibility seems to come naturally to some awe-inspiring people, but I had to learn to become more responsible by seeing meticulous managers at work and by being asked awkward questions by my boss.

Gradually habits are formed of anticipating and taking hold of future events, rather than hoping for the best. I well remember as a young man realising with shame that I had been doing just enough to have a credible excuse if things went wrong. From that moment I determined never to make excuses for myself, because that weakened my determination to achieve the required result. 

Sometimes it is wise to let things lie and see what happens, but for most of us the temptation is greater to ignore signs that we should act now. To paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous serenity prayer, we need the serenity to accept with grace our lack of agency when we can’t or shouldn’t interfere, the determination to take charge where we can and should create the future, and the wisdom to know when to do which. 

• Cook, a psychologist and director of companies, chairs the African Management Institute.