You Led Through Crisis. Why Design for Comfort?

There is a particular kind of dissonance that settles over a boardroom when the conversation about organisational design bears no resemblance to the conversation about business risk happening in the same building, often in the same meeting.

Leaders who spend an hour dissecting geopolitical exposure, currency volatility, and supply chain fragility will spend the next insisting that their people model stays exactly as it was: full-time, office-bound, locally sourced, managed through visibility rather than outcomes. The strategic mind and the organisational instinct are not speaking to each other.

In South Africa right now, that gap is not a philosophical inconvenience. It is a material risk.

Cast your mind back to 2020. Not to the anxiety of it, but to the organisational performance of it. Within weeks, businesses that had spent years debating distributed work simply implemented it. Hierarchies that would have taken a formal restructuring programme to dismantle flattened under necessity. Leaders who had never fully extended trust discovered it was not the liability they had assumed. Cost structures that looked immovable proved, under pressure, to be anything but.

Talent that had seemed geographically constrained was suddenly accessible across borders, time zones and employment contracts that nobody had imagined signing twelve months earlier.

Organisations ran leaner, moved faster, and in many cases served their customers better than they had during years of comfortable, stable operation.

That was not crisis management by exception. It was proof of what a different operating model looks like. The crisis simply made the proof visible.

What happened next is the part that should trouble every thoughtful leader. The immediate threat receded, and organisations began the quiet work of reconstruction. Office mandates returned, dressed in the language of culture and collaboration. In 2024, the proportion of remote or hybrid roles advertised in South Africa dropped from 4.3% to 3.7% in a single year, and 60% of local employers were actively pulling people back into fixed, office-based structures. Approval layers re-emerged. Headcount crept back toward the old watermarks.

The jar that Covid forced open is being methodically resealed.

The reasoning offered is almost always the same: we need people together, we need visibility, we need ‘control’.

That last word is the one worth examining. Because the drive to reinstate pre-pandemic operating models is not primarily a strategic decision. It is a psychological one. When organisations survive acute disruption, leadership instinctively moves to restore whatever felt controllable before the disruption hit. Control, even the illusion of it, is deeply comforting.

Requiring physical presence is less about the productivity evidence, and more about visibility as a proxy for certainty. If I can see my people, I can convince myself I know what is happening. If contracts are permanent and roles are fixed and teams are collocated, the organisation feels legible in a way that distributed, fluid, outcome-based models do not. The problem is that legibility and resilience are not the same thing. In fact, in volatile conditions, they are frequently in opposition.

The conditions have not stabilised. They have compounded.

The WEF’s 2025 Global Risks Report, drawing on surveys of over 900 experts worldwide, identifies geopolitical conflict and trade disruption as the most immediate threat to business stability, expected to remain a top three global risk through 2027. This is not abstract. In the past 18 months, the United States has redrawn the architecture of global trade through tariff policy at a scale not seen since the 1930s. BRICS is actively reconfiguring the multilateral financial system, with direct consequences for how capital moves across this continent. Supply chains rebuilt at great cost after Covid are being redesigned again, this time along political rather than commercial lines. The world your operating model was designed for is not the world you are currently operating in.

In South Africa, the exposure is acute and entirely local in flavour. Load shedding cost the economy an estimated R1 billion per day during peak outages. Logistics systems remain structurally fragile. The rand, one of the most volatile emerging market currencies globally, turns every import-dependent cost base into a permanently moving target. Fuel security sits not in the long-term risk register but in the present-tense anxiety of operations directors. And the next disruption, whatever form it takes, will not announce itself with adequate notice for a rigid, slow-moving organisational model to respond in time. Running a people and leadership model designed for 1998 inside this environment is not conservative. It is reckless.

The talent dimension makes this harder still, because it closes off the obvious workaround. South Africa’s senior leadership pool is constrained and tightening. The 2025 Xpatweb Critical Skills Survey found that 84% of large corporations and multinationals struggled to source highly skilled talent in the past year, up from 79% the year before. Across the continent, approximately 70,000 skilled professionals leave Africa annually. The executives with genuine depth, people who have built at scale, led through genuine complexity, and held accountability for outcomes rather than just advice, have global options. Many are exercising them. And the organisations most likely to lose them fastest are precisely those insisting on the most restrictive terms: mandatory physical presence, narrow employment structures, rigid role definitions that reflect the org chart rather than the work that actually needs doing.

What this points to is not a recruitment problem. It is a design problem.

Organisations are making structural decisions, about how work gets done, where people sit, how capability is contracted and accessed, how leadership is deployed, based on a value system that prioritises control over adaptability. And that value system, however unconsciously held, is producing outcomes that directly contradict the strategic priorities those same organisations claim to be pursuing. You cannot build a resilient, responsive, talent-rich business on an operating model whose central nervous system is the assumption that things will stay roughly the same.

The organisations navigating this well are making different design choices. They are moving from presence-based management to outcome-based accountability, because they have accepted that what matters is what gets delivered, not where the person delivering it is sitting. They are accessing talent across borders, because the skills shortage is real and the artificial constraint of geography serves nobody. They are structuring engagements around the work rather than around the role, bringing deep expertise in at the moment it is needed and releasing it when it is not, rather than carrying overhead against a future requirement that may never materialise in the form anticipated. They are building organisations that are deliberately porous, able to draw on external capability without losing internal coherence, because they understand that in an unpredictable environment, the competitive advantage belongs to whoever can reconfigure fastest.

None of this is radical. It is rational.

It is what the evidence from the past five years of operating in genuinely volatile conditions actually supports. The radical position, though it rarely gets named as such, is the one that insists on rebuilding the 2019 model in 2026 and expecting a different result. Africa has always produced leaders who build under constraint, make consequential decisions with incomplete information, and find ways to move when the conditions are against them. That is not a disadvantage relative to the global operating environment right now. It is precisely the capability this moment demands. The question is whether the organisations on this continent are building structures worthy of the people they are trying to attract and retain, or whether they are slowly designing those people out of the picture.

The world moved in 2020. The organisations that treated that movement as a temporary detour are now rebuilding structures for a world that no longer exists, while the world they are actually operating in keeps moving without them.

What, exactly, are you still designing for?