RSA Group Reflections August 2025
Dear friends
South Africa’s National Dialogue has suffered from the withdrawal of a number of key organisations and stakeholders in recent weeks, threatening its viability. And, despite the clear struggles in bringing different stakeholders together, questions linger about whether even a successfully attended event would truly be able to achieve what South Africa needs right now.
One of the key points often raised is the fact that our country has significant challenges to address in terms of practical, on-the-ground ability: the maintenance of key infrastructure nodes, basic service delivery, and the effective enforcement of constitutional rights for all citizens. There is a case to be made that highlevel strategic discussions at this point in our society’s evolution may not be as important as working out how to actually implement our strategic thinking effectively.
The National Dialogue scenario casts intriguing light on the crucial – and complicated – relationship between strategy and tactics in business, organisational life, governance and civic society.
In simple terms, strategy can be defined as ‘what’ you intend to do, while tactics can be defined as ‘how’ you intend to do it.
Once a strategic idea has been developed, it has to be implemented; and only then can the successes and failures of the implementation be considered in the light of the strategy, and the strategy adjusted accordingly. Ideally, a healthy feedback loop between strategic intent and implementation ability (tactics) is created.
If, however, there are fundamental problems with the implementation side, the entire equation is at risk of collapse – and no amount of excellent strategic thinking will rescue it. And the inverse is also true. You can’t simply plug away at implementation without considering the wider strategic picture: the ‘what’ that is so important in guiding the ‘how’.
This is a hugely important idea for us to bear in mind in our professional lives. No matter what your role in an organisation is, you can’t escape the need to get the implementation of your work right, again and again. Because it’s only when we engage in strategic thinking on a strong and well-established operational foundation that we can use that strategic thinking to push our agenda forward in a productive, quantifiable and controllable way. If we aren’t able to establish an effective feedback loop between strategy and tactics, we put ourselves in a position where it’s close to impossible to develop and execute a plan over the medium and long term.
‘Talk is cheap’, as the old saying goes. But maybe this is too simplistic. As South Africa’s troubled National Dialogue case study shows, talk – when poorly executed, or when carried out on a weak tactical foundation – can actually turn out to be pretty expensive, resulting in spiralling costs, lost time, and poor resource use.
For RSA Group, the lesson is clear. It is, and always will be, absolutely imperative that we maintain top level performance in every single daily, technical aspect of what we do.
No matter your role, geographic location or position in the company, continuing to deliver top level performance matters not only in terms of performance in the here and now – it also creates a critical wider base for our business, without which we could really struggle to do all the work, strategic and tactical, we need to.
Best wishes
Jaco Oosthuizen
