Creating possibility
By now you know that South African Tatjana Schoenmaker has set a new world record for the 200-meter breaststroke. If you haven’t seen the moments after her win, scroll to the 2 min 20 sec mark and watch, it will make your day.
In other South African news, Damon Galgut’s The Promise and Karen Jennings’ An Island have both been long-listed for the Booker Prize. And, SA-born payments company Yoco has raised approximately R1.2 billion in a Series C funding round. CEO, Katlego Maphai, is one of the most generous, considered people one could hope to meet.
Today’s letter is about creating possibility.
/ Strategy
I discovered The Mice That Roared, a Guardian newspaper story of how 8 Pacific Island countries took on the might of foreign fishing fleets, thanks to The Progress Network.
This discovery was, in turn, a consequence of Dr Carla Enslin, Head of Strategy at The Vega School, sending me founder Zachary Karabell’s recent column, Capitalism Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. Thank you, Carla.
The Progress Network describes themselves as an ‘idea network for a better future’. If you have some extra time, do visit their site. With articles like Slashing Child Poverty in Half and World’s Largest Seagrass Project Proves ‘You Can Actually Restore the Oceans, you’ll leave feeling inspired about the possibility of positive change.
Let’s get back to our roaring mice.
In 1982, eight Pacific Island countries became parties to the Naura Agreement, which governed fishing in their territorial waters, where most of the world’s skipjack tuna is caught.
The eight are six micro-states made up of tiny islands (Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru, the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau) and two midsized countries, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands.
Instead of undercutting themselves to attract foreign fishers, these countries have inverted the process. They determined how much tuna fishing was sustainable on a daily basis. Then they set a minimum price, and then they invited the fleets to bid on fishing rights. They called it the Vessel-Day Scheme.
It wasn’t an overnight success. It took nearly 30 years of experimentation to get to this solution. In 1982, the fish was being caught, not one landed in the countries from whose water they were taken, and they got no revenue. Under initial versions of the scheme, they receive less than 5% of the revenue that the fleets derived from the landed price of the fish. Today, they generate a collective $500m a year.
There is such richness in this story.
They connected and collaborated. Can you imagine what that took? Representatives from 8 different countries! Nevertheless, they created a solution that benefited them all. No doubt it took compromise. They had to hear each other. They had to listen.
They put in a place a foundation – The Naura Agreement. And then, they worked it. They looked for ways to improve it, and what was ‘IT’? It was the lives of their people and ensuring that their environment was sustainable. So, they had a purpose, a vision to pull them forward (Do you?) and they never stopped exploring what might improve their outcomes.
How often is the way we do something completely ineffective? But, we keep doing it because it’s become habit, or it’s ‘the process’.
Today, pause and ask, “What outcome do I/we want?” and then, get creative, “What other ways might I try to generate better results?”
When you, or your team, have your first round of solutions, pause, and ask, “What else might we try?” Choose something, try it, see what results you get, learn, and then repeat.
/ Self
The kind of creativity that gave birth to the Vessel-Day Scheme requires you to have time and energy.
How can you get that in such a busy life, one that is always on?
One of the most powerful actions you can take is to identify the places where you’re leaking energy and resources and plug the hole. By doing less, you enable yourself to be more effective.
Do you have contracts for services that you never use? A streaming service, a subscription? Whatever it is, cancel it.
Do you have outstanding commitments with people in your life that you are not meeting? Make a list and decide. Communicate your decision. Do you ask them to give you more time? Do you tell them you can no longer meet the commitment? Or do you want to move ahead? Then commit, do whatever is. Choose. Outstanding commitments waste your mental and emotional energy. Get closure.
Have you kept to your regular assessments of health and finance? The dentist, the dermatologist, the physician, your financial advisor. If you haven’t, then schedule them. You might, quite literally, be leaking energy and resources, it’s good to check. And, in any event, like with outstanding commitments, just knowing that it needs to be done, but you haven’t, is costing you energy.
/ Soul
I came across this saying from the people of the Kalahari thanks to Jay Naidoo. Jay was a hero of mine for many years. He still is, albeit in a different form. As Cosatu’s founding general secretary he was on the frontlines of fighting for democracy in South Africa. Today, he occupies a gentler space, but one imbued with the same principles and humanism that fired his earlier activism.
The Kalahari San say, “tell your people they must wake up twice in the morning. Once to get up and once to awake their heart to the touch of the world upon them.”
As I write to you, I feel the touch of the early morning’s cold on my cheek, the winter’s fog carries the call to prayer from the Bo Kaap’s mosques across Cape Town’s City Bowl into my study, I hear the bird’s waking in the trees outside.
Feel the touch of the world on your heart. Let it energise you, so that you can protect this world. It needs you.
Karl
PS: I invest 600 hours a year in reading and learning to support my clients. This newsletter is a product of that investment, you can subscribe here. I share extra snippets on my Instagram and LinkedIn profiles. If you’d like me to recommend something to read or listen to, drop me a mail. I am always happy to do so.
PPS: If you’ve built success in your life but are feeling frustrated, if you know that you could be more effective in your impact, but are uncertain how to get there, get in contact with me. Perhaps there’d be some benefit in us working together.
(this letter was first published on 1 Aug 2021).