The Past and Its Legacies

I am an African. ... My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as Ashanti of Ghana, as Berbers of the desert. ... I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression. ... I am an African. I am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa.

Thabo Mbeki, I Am an African speech (Cape Town, 8 May 1996, on the occasion of the passing of the Constitution of South Africa)

All humans need to understand their past, their roots, and their history so that they can develop a clear sense of who they are — their identity. Without a sense of identity, individuals are not sufficiently centred. They struggle to define their role in the present and approach the future without clarity and confidence. There is more than adequate research to support these assertions. What is necessary is to engage the past in order to understand the present and prepare for the future. Researchers in the field of societal culture have shown us the way with regard to how the past can influence the present and the future.

David Hackett Fisher prefaces his massive report on the study of how British cultural norms, transported to America since 1630 when the Puritans landed on American shores, survive to this day by making the strong assertion that empirical knowledge of the past is not merely useful but necessary to an understanding of our moral choices in the present. Niccolo Machiavelli, the Italian historian and politician, writing in the sixteenth century, had observed that 'whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past: for human events ever resemble those of preceding times'.

Why must leaders engage the past as they prepare to take their organizations to the future? Here is the simple reality: the there and then legacies of the past have direct relevance to the here and now, and they play a large part in shaping the future. Why is this the case? All human beings are products of their environment. This environment includes the culture, experiences (particularly in the early stages of life), relationships with significant others (including parents, siblings, relatives and teachers), values that they absorbed and assimilated, and world views that became, imperceptibly, the filters through which they interpret everything they engage with. Much of this is good and beneficial stuff, but a great deal of legacy experiences and assumptions can influence present and future choices and decisions in ways that can be detrimental to the future of organizations.

The problem with the past is that it intrudes into the present and the future. Psychologists tell us that unresolved issues from the there and then can poison the present and the future. Marianne Williamson argues, for example, that if bitterness in our past is brought into the present, it then sabotages our future. It was Martin Luther King Jr., the iconic leader of the American civil rights movement, who, eschewing black revenge against former white slave owners, appealed to former slaves to pursue the path of reconciliation because as he put it in his own words, 'hate is too great a burden to carry'.

The important issue here is not to disown the past. To disown your past is to deny who you are, and to do that is to undermine your identity. Leaders cannot do that without just shunting problems into the future. What is required is to honestly confront the demons from the past so that one is not forever a prisoner of the past. In his speech entitled I Am an African at the inauguration of the new South African Constitution on 8 May 1996 in Cape Town, Thabo Mbeki (at that time, deputy to South African president Nelson Mandela) recounted how the new South Africa was a reflection of all its past — good and bad, black and white and other shades of colour, and wars and battles fought across the continent and in South Africa.

In my book Personal Crucibles, I shared my personal story of detention, torture, and deprivation when I was a political prisoner during Zimbabwe's War of Liberation and how I overcame my bitterness and freed myself from the debilitating burdens of anger and racial prejudice after my release from several years of detention without trial.

There are a number of problems that can catch up with us from the past. A few of these are listed below.

1.1. Rear-View-Mirror Driving: The Strategy Blinkers from the Past

Leaders who are excessively focused on the past can fall prey to this malady.

This is best captured in Figure 1.1 below, which depicts what happens when leaders focus on the past and are driven by a mindset that assumes that the future will be very much like the past.

In a VUCAH environment, the likelihood for bends in the road is much higher.

Rear-view-mirror driving is prevalent in the corporate sector, where I witness CEOs and their teams approaching the future as if it were an extension of the past. This kind of tunnel vision can cause corporate leaders to be trapped in their strategic planning mode where multi-year strategic plans are rolled out periodically without sufficient critical thinking. Such plans are usually informed and driven by certain assumptions with regard to the anticipated state of the operating environment, in particular, with reference to key parameters, such as expected economic growth, exchange rates, inflation, consumer demand as well as the identified key risks in the environment. Almost all organizations engage in this process. There is nothing wrong with this. The problem, however, arises when organizations fall into the trap of the so-called pro-forma disease, where the strategic plans assume that the future will be very much a continuation of the past. This focus on the past can cause organizations to develop strategic blind spots, which make them susceptible to ambushes as they fail to anticipate threats.

One sees organizations engaged in so-called strategic planning, which in reality is no more than a rehashing of previous plans with a few macro and micro assumptions tweaked to give a new look to the numbers. I have often been invited to attend strategic planning...