Unpredictability appears to be the new normal. This may have been the most important lesson of 2018. For instance who would have thought that removing international sanctions from Sudan and Zimbabwe would lead to their economic and political collapse?
As professionals, many of us are very much into data collection, analysis, and forecasting. Our era may then very well be coming to an end. This unpredictable era suits those who are pragmatic and very responsive to changes in their environment.
If it is not possible to reasonably predict the future then how does one make plans? For instance, how would a steel mill decide where to deploy capital if it cannot predict the volume and nature of future demand? Merchants, fabricators, and consultants who have relatively lower investment requirements face similar problems.
If Zimbabwe’s political crisis deepens the most important role for architects, engineers and fabricators would be to come up with quick deployment resting places for potential refugees. Moreover, food, water and sanitation requirements at camps could become extremely urgent. But how is a company executive to know that catering for refugees – rather than diamond mines – would be the next major demand. Even the South African government with all its resources does not seem to have anticipated the situation in Zimbabwe.
The answer may lie in reconfiguring ourselves and the companies in the industry to promote innovation and responsiveness. If an industry or firm adopts an attitude of tracking emerging needs and innovating consistently then it would be able to respond quickly to new and even unusual demands.
This will likely require a major shift in priorities for our industry members and associations. The first challenge will be to recognize that investment in people is significantly more important than in machines or other technology. This goes against the grains of most current management methods.
We are more likely to celebrate the newest imported fabricating machines and artificial intelligence gadgets – themselves products of prior innovation – than we are to support investment in key innovators in our own industry. Many of our industry members do not have experienced engineers within their companies. Our industry associations do not have architects who can plan and design emergency camps and settlements.
The underlying assumption is that our role is to produce standard products, and innovation is for others. Unfortunately, the competition is merciless and the environment too dynamic for us to focus on producing the same products and services for very long.
A company in Germany is unlikely to respond to a refugee crisis in Zimbabwe by asking South Africans to solve the problem. They will more likely solve the problem in Germany and sell their products to South Africa from Europe. If so then we either need to invest in innovation in our own backyard to compete or find ways to partner strategically with such innovative foreign companies so that we can absorb their culture through collaboration.
2019 will likely be less predictable than 2018. An attempt to plan for the year using historical data and standard forecasting methods is highly unlikely to work. A better approach may be to anticipate that we probably face several years of unpredictability and reconfigure ourselves to be able to respond quickly to sudden changes.
