• Overview
• Objectives
• Outputs
• Scenario Process
• Team
• Institutional Structure
• SA 2020 Press Release

• Scenarios Presentation
• Final Scenarios

In the early 1990s, at a time of great uncertainty, a group of 25 committed South Africans representing a wide spectrum of opinions met regularly over a period of several months in a pivotal exercise that helped shape the future of the rainbow nation. The product of that programme became known as the Mont Fleur Scenarios—fascinating and probing stories of how South Africa could develop in the future under different strategies that could be employed by the leaders of the time. Most of the group who participated in the exercise were in positions to influence the thinking of the leadership, and are now themselves high profile leaders in different sectors of South African life, including Ministers in the Government.

South Africa rejected the “Ostrich scenario” that characterised the status quo, and embarked upon “the Flight of the Flamingos”. Ten years down the line South Africa has achieved many remarkable successes, but many issues still remain unresolved, and others such as AIDS have emerged.

The youth of South Africa, and in particular the age group 25-35/40, have a strong interest in how the nation will develop over the next 15 years. It is this group of potential leaders that will inherit the leadership of different sectors of society in 2020, and discussions with opinion leaders in this age group indicate they are not entirely happy with what they envisage they may inherit. So what is the South Africa of 2020 that they would like to inherit, and how do they envisage that this can be brought to fruition? Clearly there will be different opinions on how South Africa could or should evolve, and the scenario process will allow for the exploration of different viewpoints.

What Scenarios do the next generation of leaders see for the future of South Africa, and what messages do these deliver? What South Africa do they wish to inherit as the leaders in 2020? What lessons can we learn by exploring the future through the eyes of those of a different generation and perspective? What does this generation of leaders believe to be the dominant issues that South Africa faces over the next 15 years both within the country, and in its role as a leader in Africa, and what could be the outcomes of tackling these issues in different ways? What can we learn from those young Africans who view South Africa from other countries in Africa? What are the critical leadership capabilities that this next generation of leaders need to have to deliver the desired future, and how do we build this leadership capacity? These are some of the questions this project will address. More specifically, the SA2020 exercise will:

• Provide a learning platform for South Africans in the 25-40 age group who have been identified as potential leaders within their sphere of influence, and who represent a wide cross-section of opinion and background, to debate and jointly explore the issues that will influence the future development of the nation.
• To attempt to build a common vision of the South Africa this varied group of potential leaders would like to inherit in 2020, and their perspective on key leadership strategies (in various spheres of activity) that need to be employed to achieve this vision.
• Explore the future from the perspective of the people who will be most directly affected by its outcome, and get them to construct insightful stories of the possible future of the Nation, and illustrate how to make their preferred story—the Vision—happen.
• Create frames of reference for further debate in government and other forums on the future path and strategies for South Africa, and produce publications and initial communication media that will facilitate this dialogue.
• Engender a shared perspective of the issues, the choices and potential solutions in the path to the future amongst a high profile group of future leaders who may well be in position in the future to influence the decisions and paths that are taken.
• Assess the leadership capacity and capabilities that will be required for this next generation of leaders to achieve the shared Vision of the team, highlighting what has to be done to achieve this capacity and capability.

Outputs of the SA2020 Project

The main project output will be a document whose content will largely be written by the participants as part of the workshop process, but which will be edited and coordinated by the project organisers. The final content of the document will be determined by the Team in discussion with the facilitators and project organisers, but it is likely to contain sections on:

• Overview of the current Situation
• The critical leadership issues of the next 15 years
• Shared Vision and alternative Visions of South Africa 2020
• The Scenarios – alternative paths the nation could take over the next 17 years, with very different outcomes
• Key Messages on Leadership Issues and Strategies
• Assessment of Leadership capacity and skills requirement, and how to achieve these.

As a second phase of this project, a multi-media presentation, including video, would be prepared on CD for widespread distribution to representatives of the various constituencies in South Africa and outside. The various forms of outputs would be used by Team members in seminars and other events organised after the project has been completed to convey to the broader community the output of the project, and encourage debate on the future of South Africa.

The SA2020 Scenario Process

The Scenario technique was developed to manage the complexity and uncertainties of the future, and distil the array of variables, forces and uncertainties into a limited set of divergent, interesting, simple and plausible stories of how the future could unfold, and in so doing deliver powerful messages on the choices and issues facing the nation. The Mont Fleur Scenario project at the beginning of the 1990’s was highly successful in enabling a disparate group of potential future leaders of South Africa to jointly explore the future and come to a shared vision of the way forward for the nation. A decade on, as South Africa emerges from its honeymoon period, and begins to take on its role as a leader in Africa, the SA2020 process will provide an opportunity for similar reflection by the next generation of leaders.

Critical to the success of scenario construction is the identification of and agreement on the key issues the nation will face in the scenario period and their inter-relationship, and recognition of the uncertainty of how these issues will play out. Inevitably there will be different perspectives on what the really critical issues are and how these will play out or what strategies should be employed to address them. These range from the social issues of poverty, AIDS, education, crime, unemployment, and unfulfilled expectations to economic issues of international competitiveness, productivity, privatisation and liberalisation, inflation and exchange rate volatility. Cultural and ethnic issues and associated inequalities have been critical in the past, but will these still plague the future of the rainbow nation? What of political alignments and power structures and governance issues? A new dimension is emerging of South Africa becoming the equivalent of the USA of Africa, and all the issues and opportunities that brings with it, whilst regional developments could well play a big role in aiding or hindering South Africa’s own progress. On the global stage we live in very uncertain times, and South Africa’s response to global political, economic and even cultural developments (and there is great uncertainty how these will all evolve), will strongly influence the future of the nation. This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list of the main future issues, which we will term the “leadership issues”, but indicative of some of the variables the scenarios may address. These are the sort of substantive issues the leaders of South Africa will have to tackle, and their success or failure in doing so, and the strategies they adopt will shape the South Africa our team of future leaders will inherit in 2020.

The scenario methodology that has been developed over many years of practical application, firstly in Shell International’s Group Planning department, renowned as the mother of scenario technology (and which was applied in Mont Fleur scenarios of the early 90’s), and then in the context of National Long Term Perspective Studies (NLTPS) that were undertaken under the auspices of the African Futures UNDP initiative in at least 20 countries in Africa will be applied. The methodology will be adapted to the particular circumstances of this project to provide a high quality output, focused on achieving the objectives outlined above.

In outline the theme of each of the workshops are:

• Workshop 1 – Establishing the Foundation, and identifying critical leadership issues and uncertainties.
• Workshop 2 – Alternative Visions and Stories of the future, focusing on the main leadership issues
• Workshop 3 – Agreeing the Scenario Frameworks, shared Vision(s), and alternative responses to critical leadership issues.
• Workshop 4 – Constructing the draft Scenarios
• Workshop 5 – Challenging and Refining the Scenarios
• Workshop 6 – Finalising the Stories and Output and articulating the main messages. Assessing the leadership capacity and capabilities required to achieve the Vision and how this will be achieved.

Between the workshops the participants will be required to undertake a certain amount of “homework”. For example, between workshops 1 and 2, they will be required to write a brief story constructed around key parameters, of how they see South Africa developing over the next 15 years. A series of online dialogue and debate will also be conducted over a private space created for the SA2020 exercise on the Internet in between the workshops. The African Leadership Institute will make available its network facilities to enable group work to be conducted electronically and for the Team to communicate in a private network.

The SA2020 Scenario Team

The scenario team consist of 25 South Africans. The participants are representative of a cross-section of opinion and affiliation and all are between the ages of 20 and 40. They were nominated by organisations representative of different communities of interest in South Africa and by the project Steering Committee. A key criterion for representation is that the nominee will have demonstrated potential to be a future leader in that community, and regarded as a promising candidate. Political parties are also well represented in addition to representation from several other communities, such as commerce and industry, agriculture, labour, women’s organisations, religions, NGO’s, health, education, civil society, etc.. The team constitute a grouping of high potential individuals who could in 15 years be the cadre of leaders in some of the most influential positions in the land.

The team is enriched by the inclusion of 6 young leaders from other countries in Africa, including West and East Africa, who have an external African perspective on the issues South Africa will face.

SA2020 Institutional Structure

The University of Western Cape (UWC), which also hosted the Mont Fleur scenarios exercise, is the promoter of the project in collaboration with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which is funding the initiative. The University of Western Cape will coordinate the project, as it did for the Mont Fleur exercise. The vice-Chancellor of UWC, Prof. Brian O’Connell, was a member of the Mont Fleur team. Prof. Pieter Le Roux, also a faculty of UWC and member of the Mont Fleur team, will be involve in the implementation of the SA2020 project.

The project will be managed and facilitated by the African Leadership Institute (ALI), which coordinates a network of Institutions across Africa focused on building leadership capacity and capability in Africa, and runs programmes to achieve this goal. UWC is ALI’s Institutional partner in South Africa. UWC will facilitate the nomination of the Team, assist in promoting it with different communities, and provide logistical and administrative support to the running of the project.

An Advisory Board consisting of representatives from civil society provides overall guidance for the SA2020 project. In addition, the board will assist in promoting the SA2020 project and its outputs in various constituencies, help build legitimacy with the government and other major actors and establish forums for discussion of the outputs and work in progress.

An Executive Committee has been set-up to oversee the day-to-day management of the exercise. The committee reports to the board and ensures that the project runs smoothly.

ALI designed the SA2020 project, and its faculty is facilitating and coordinating the implementation. Two individuals, highly experienced in visioning, scenario construction and African leadership issues are allocated to manage and facilitate the project. They are:

• Peter Wilson (South African) - formerly with Shell International Group Planning, then Business Futures, and an international expert in the use of scenario methodology and leadership issues in Africa. He has consulted with UNDP African Futures in a number of countries in Africa over the last 10 years, and has previously constructed South African scenarios for major corporations.
• Olugbenga Adesida (Nigerian) - formerly the scenarios expert in UNDP African Futures, and as such has designed and applied the visioning and scenario methodology in numerous countries in Africa. He is an expert on African futures having edited a book on young Africans visions of the future and served as a guest editor for a special issue of the journal Futures on the Futures Studies and the Future of Africa.

In the early 1990s, at a time of great uncertainty, a group of committed South Africans representing a wide spectrum of opinions met regularly over a period of several months in a pivotal exercise that helped shape the future of the rainbow nation. The product of that programme became known as the Mont Fleur Scenarios—fascinating and probing stories of how South Africa could develop in the future under different strategies that could be employed by the leaders of the time. South Africa rejected the “Ostrich scenario” that characterised the status quo, and embarked upon “the Flight of the Flamingos”. Ten years after its first non-racial democratic elections, the country has recorded some remarkable successes in guaranteeing freedom and improving the quality of life for millions of its citizens.

But while we celebrate the successes of the past decade, we must also focus on the future. The occasion of the tenth anniversary of freedom was an opportune time to think about where South Africa goes from here and how best to create a desirable future. The scenario process has proven to be an excellent means for a diverse group to share their stories and their logic and their desires of how this wonderful country of ours could develop, and to reach agreement on both desirable and undesirable possible paths to the future. It is for this reason that a follow-up to the Mt Fleur Scenarios was embarked upon by another generation of South Africans in 2003.

The new set of scenarios explores plausible futures for South Africa with an emphasis on the role of leadership. The four scenarios provide key messages on how a desirable future could possibly be created, and identifies the pitfalls that must be avoided (see figures below). In summary, the scenarios are:

DEAD END which explores the possible outcome of self-serving leadership, uncurtailed corruption, and rampant individualism – a disastrous depressing Dead End.

SHARP RIGHT TURN which examines the implications of focusing only on achieving high economic growth.

SLOW PUNCTURE which explores the possible outcome of South Africa choosing to beat the same path rather than adopting a bold vision and decisive leadership to reduce inequalities.

ALL ABOARD THE DUAL CARRIAGEWAY which examines how South Africa as a country chose to challenge its approach to growth and development and chose a bold path to enable all to climb aboard the dual carriageway to a better life.

As always, the scenarios are stories about possible paths to the future, and not predictions. However, they do create a framework for discussion and debate, and it is our hope that, much like the first Mt. Fleur scenarios, the outputs of this exercise will be widely discussed across South Africa, and that it will stimulate a collective reflection on the kind of future South Africans want to build.

The players in this exercise were twenty-three dynamic young leaders from a broad spectrum of ideas, philosophies, and backgrounds in South Africa: potential occupants of the leadership cadre of the nation by 2020. The team was enriched by six young leaders from other regions in Africa for an external African perspective on the issues South Africa may face.