What do we want?

“If you sit on a rotten log to eat pawpaw, your bottom gets wet and your mouth also gets wet.” – African proverb

As we contemplate what the year 2026 would come along with, one of the challenges we need to surmount as a nation, is the art of appearing to change everything while changing nothing important. The average leader in our society faces a predicament that would have made the famous king Solomon himself reach for an aspirin and a stiff drink. For starters, the Ghanaian leader is expected to be two people at once: a revolutionary and a librarian. He or she must tear down the chief’s palace while carefully preserving its foundations. And he or she must run toward the future at full gallop while walking backward to ensure nobody trips over the past.

The task is rather like being asked to light a fire and put it out simultaneously, then write a quarterly report on why it did not work. This is because he or she is constantly faced with a scenario where the people on Monday, demands artificial intelligence, blockchain, and ‘digital transformation’ delivered by Thursday morning. Then on Tuesday, the same people start inquiring, rather pointedly about why we have abandoned the systems that have worked perfectly well since independence, thank you very much.

In a nutshell, the stakeholders want quarterly growth. The same people want patient, sustainable development. They want bold risk-taking, and then they want guaranteed returns. They want you to think like a startup, yet they want you to provide the stability of a 50-year-old institution. They want innovation, and they absolutely do not want anything to actually change. The demand is rather like being asked to make an omelette without breaking eggs, disturbing chickens, or acknowledging that chickens exist.

In our call for innovation, one thing that sticks out is how the elite, having been schooled in modern management thinking, make demands on the leaders to choose between tradition or modern, African or a global citizen and risk-averseness or entrepreneurial. On the surface, these sound like progressive until you realise these choices have instituted the tyranny of ‘either/or, and is causing more organisational damage than all the incompetent hires businesses undertake as a result of their network.

We need to appreciate how innovation, means different things depending on who is taking the decision. To the Ghanaian business leaders, it means figuring out how to keep the lights on when ECG has other plans for your electricity. To the politician, it could mean an app that nobody needs, solving a problem that does not exist.

But true innovation for us requires understanding what the academics call ‘institutional memory’ and what ordinary people label as ‘knowing which person to call when things go sideways.’ This is so because we cannot simply import the ‘move-fast-and-break-things’ philosophy of the rich economy to a market where the things you break might be the only things preventing catastrophe. When your supply chain depends on relationships built on a network, you do not ‘disrupt’ it with an algorithm. You enhance it, carefully, the way one might enhance light soup, with respect for what is already in the pot.

To the leader who desires success in the years to come, he or she need to understand that tradition and innovation are not opposites but partners in an arranged marriage. They may not always agree, but they need each other desperately. Tradition without innovation becomes stagnation. Innovation without tradition becomes chaos with a budget. We all need to understand that the question is not “innovate or preserve” but rather “innovation and preservation” in different proportions.

As we enter the New Year, we will face pressures that would test the patience of biblical Job and the wisdom of Kofi Annan combined. The global economy demands Artificial Intelligence integration. The local economy demands you keep paying salaries when your largest client has not paid their invoice in six months. And let us not forget that while the global ESG frameworks require carbon neutrality, your generator, which runs on diesel cannot afford such neutrality.

The paradox, it turns out, is not a paradox at all. It is simply life in a place where contradictions are not problems to be solved but realities to be managed, where ‘both/and’ is not a compromise but a competitive advantage, and where the leader who can hold two opposing ideas in his or her head while still functioning is not suffering from confusion, but demonstrating the exact skill set that the society demands. The rest of the population will eventually figure this out.

The Ghanaian leader already knows it, which is why they smile patiently when the people come with their either/or frameworks and their disruption manifestos. After all, you cannot disrupt what has already survived everything history could throw at it. You can only learn from it, build upon it, and occasionally unplug it and plug it back in to see if that fixes the problem…

The post What do we want? appeared first on The Business & Financial Times.

Read Full Story