The risky way is the only way

Our shared future in SA depends on us wandering off the beaten track, writes Mark Barnes

We were about 250m down the fairway of the second hole when an old friend quipped: “I’m going to write a book.” I gave the idea not much more than a half-raised eyebrow and turned my attention to the business of the day — progressing a dimpled white ball forward, towards a little hole where it would eventually come to rest, in what John Feinstein once famously described as “a good walk spoiled”.

I inquired as to what the book might be about, after having sent yet another ball scurrying into the rough off a badly hit, overly ambitious iron (I always look up too early and try to hit the ball too hard).

“How to play your second shot first” would be the title, he replied, with something of a satisfied grin on his face.

I took a brand-new ball out of my bag, dropped it on the fairway and hit a five iron further than you’re supposed to, dead straight, pin-high, just off the green — that took some of the smirk off his face. He still had to play his first-third shot and we were both wondering whether, like me, he’d have to play another from the same spot (there was water ahead).

Mistakes can be wonderful things, if you let them be. You learn from mistakes, whether you like it or not, but they can either dig holes or form foundations — that part is your choice. Do you want to move forward or fall back? It’s as simple as that.

Experience doesn’t come from not doing things — on the contrary. Watching an expert handyman at work can lead you to believe it’s as easy as it looks. It isn’t. Hammering a nail into concrete with the minimum number of perfectly aimed hammer strikes doesn’t come without going through swollen thumbs, broken fingernails and colourful expletives on the way. Proficiency is more often a result of hard-learned experience than not. Respect the process, embrace it.

Higher-consequence outcomes, like airmanship and yachtsmanship, require more controlled-environment mistakemaking, but fighter pilots and skippers have to test boundaries to make mistakes, to learn, to know.

If you never take risks you won’t make mistakes, but neither will you achieve anything out of the ordinary. In business (and most other endeavors) it’s the risk-return profile that sorts out the winners from the losers, that determines the cost of capital, the capacity to adapt, the ability to survive or thrive.

Middle-of-the-road doesn’t win wars or grasp opportunities. As much as higher levels of success follow higher risk, so do higher incidences of failure, but you can’t have one without risking the other. Who, after all, wants to wander around aimlessly in the soggy, crowded marsh that is the middle of the bell curve?

It will be trial and error that finds a vaccine for Covid-19, not a conventional recipe. A healthy dose of previous lessons learnt will open short cuts and identify dead ends. It will be the experience of mistakes that guide us to the answer.

Besides, who needs boring, contained, right-all-the time (but who cares) people — we all know them, some of my best friends … actually, no.

Mistakes can cause damage (even if it’s just to your ego) and injuries can leave scars. So what? It’s the scars, the lines, the blemishes that make us comfortable with one another — not the make-up and coverup and pretence. Perfection is flawed. As the Leonard Cohen song goes: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

We cannot advance through repetition, but only through experiment, adventure and discovery, and occasionally wandering off the beaten track.

As Stephen Fry once said in a debate on political correctness: “Progress isn’t achieved by preachers or guardians of morality, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics.” I would argue this holds true particularly when it comes to embedded bad habits, of which we, in our country, have many. Go for it. Take risk. Make mistakes. Make changes.

Nothing could be more necessary and urgent than for us to trust and take risks on one another now, particularly as we seek to address the economic and other chasms that divide us. We have to throw ourselves, borderline recklessly, into that cauldron of the no-go zone that separates us, and then take risks (educated, informed by previous mistakes) to find our way out of our obsession with the past.

We’re going to have to invest where established capital fears to tread, we’re going to have to embrace and fight each other in equal, honest measure to discover that imperfect but pragmatic and palatable middle ground that will define the foundations of our shared future.

In so doingwe will make many mistakes — that’s the deal of barrier-breaking, of discovery, of renewal.

Bring it on! Not taking those risks is the biggest risk of all. We sure as hell aren’t going to get there with polite populist promises, now are we?