BEE Partner, South Africa Economy Watch

With this view of your value-based strategy, and an ‘as-is’ assessment of the seven key dimensions of transformation, you are now equipped to consider three core questions in order to bring transformation into your strategy.

1. Who is my customer?

For many businesses, an emerging black middle class represents a huge new market opportunity. Given these new markets that are developing, you need to answer the following question: ‘Who is going to be my customer in the next five to ten years?’ Leading on from this, you need to ask, ‘What action needs to be taken that will help me understand this future customer and what they value?’ Can your existing team understand the needs of this market? You might literally be speaking another language. You need to sow the seeds now to build this sense- making capacity. List the actions that result from this question.

2. What actions can I conceive to enable transformation? Given the specific purpose and nature of your business, ‘What actions can I conceive that will enable transformation?’ For example, a business school could significantly enable black entrepreneurs by offering them free courses. Oddly, many businesses become so focused on the seven scorecard dimensions, they forget to ask, ‘Given who I am, how can I help transformation?’ List the actions that result from this question.

3. How do I put growth and transformation into tension? Transformation actions that also grow your business can be explored through asking the question, ‘How can I action transformation so that it enhances the value drivers and furthers the goals of the business?’

This question can be posed by placing your business’s purpose and value drivers with their corresponding goals on the same page as the dimensions of transformation to be considered. This should then ensure that the company explores the two at the same time. The tension that exists between the two aspects requires creative and insightful thought to unlock powerful possibilities, and so should be explored with a team of key people who might have the right insights to develop these transformation action items. It has been said that freedom results from the creative conversion of constraints, which is the core of what is being attempted here.

The team should not neglect the action items needed to achieve business goals in favour of action items aimed at transformation, but rather action the developed goals in such a way that transformation is enabling the business. If possible, the team should avoid setting additional goals that have a transformational component unless these goals clearly enhance the value drivers already identified.

The team should also avoid a value driver called empowerment, as it will allow this category to become potentially a catchall for any actions that have a transformational impact, and yet which would dilute the creative tension. The overall intention is to find actions that make good business sense and give impetus to transformation.

The nature of these action items are very specific to each organisation and might dig right into, and affect, the purpose of the business. They need to be explored more broadly than just the specific dimensions of the scorecard, and rather focus on upholding the ethos of sustainable transformation for South Africa.

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