6 Discussion
6.3 Applying the Lessons Learned
6.3.1 The Charter’s development model
The genesis of the 2003 Charter was introduced in Chapter 2 and explored and presented in Chapter 5, including the external pressure applied to the sector in the early 2000s, pressure which as this thesis has shown, helped bring the leaders of the sector to the negotiating table.
Fifteen years later, it is the nature of the country’s triple challenges that should be the source of an equivalent “pressure” on not only the sector but government and other social partners to start to discuss changing the approach to economic transformation. Secondly, the design and development of the Charter offers insight on how to run a second phase process, insights that link to the robust action-based, three-pronged approach described by Ferraro et al (2015).
The key aspects of this framework are set out in the tables below:
Table 9. The use of a participatory architecture Participatory Architecture:
Discussion on Finding Considerations for a 2ndround process Considering the genesis and formulation of
the Charter, it is evident that there were varied actors involved in the design stage (trade associations, ABSIP and
government), but notably the community element that had been so vocal in initiating and conducting the Red October campaign, was excluded, as was the government department responsible for black economic empowerment policy, the DTI.
The involvement of a wider group of social partners in the subsequently established FSCC was an attempt to broaden the base of participants, though this took place once the core tenets of the Charter had already been agreed.
Going forward, both the Community element – more broadly defined – and the DTI should be included more directly in the framework development process.
Table 10. The adoption of multivocal inscription
Table 11. The application of distributed experimentation
As the executives of the larger companies in the sector who were interviewed indicated, a strong hand was needed initially to sell and then bed down the implementation of the Charter inside their organisations. This speaks to an “ability to manage and navigate institutional complexity” (Ferraro et al., 2015) and such an ability will need to come to the fore again to develop a distributed and collaborative response (Padgett & Powell, 2012) in the form of a new framework for transformation.
Multivocal Inscription
Discussion on Finding Considerations for a 2ndround process There were early bilateral discussions
between parties, the discussions at
NEDLAC and the Financial Sector Summit.
Then there was the intensity of the Charter negotiation process and the complexity of developing the charter pillars and
accompanying targets. This enabled a diversity of opinions to be brought to the fore – so much so that external mediation was required at times.
Going forward, this diversity of opinions needs to be prevalent, as is a strong
mediation presence, but having small groups of knowledgeable, senior leaders from all sides will be vital to give proceedings credibility and gravitas (a weakness of the latter years of the Council’s work), and to understand the boundaries of the “possible”.
Distributed Experimentation
Discussion on Finding Considerations for a 2ndround process The fact that financial services companies
compete today based on their published B- BBEE scorecards for both public and private procurement opportunities created (in the early years of implementation in particular) a series of innovations and market-driven feedback loops that meant that learnings of how to achieve various targets became adopted market practices over time.
One of the unexpected findings from the research was the deliberate use of the competitive forces in the sector to drive innovation and more positive outcomes.
Harnessing the financial engineering
potential of the sector will be important, but such innovations will need to be encouraged not stifled by the narrow application of rules through one-size-fits-all regulatory codes.
Taking the assessment above a stage further, there are three additional dimensions (per Martí, 2018 and Mair & Hehenberger, 2014) to the Charter development process that would be relevant to the development of a new transformation model as advocated above. These are
“scaffolding”, “proximity” and “convening”:
As noted by Martí (2018) scaffolding is the process of using an adaptive structure between an organisation and its social environment. The initial NEDLAC-driven Financial Sector Summit, followed by the Charter negotiations which ran during 2003, gave rise to the Council.
Table 12. Scaffolding
Such a sense of commitment to a new transformation framework and to maintain “proximity”
to the end goal of solving the country’s social challenges would be required amongst the participants in the process to sustain what would undoubtedly be highly complex and contested negotiations:
Scaffolding
Discussion on Finding
Considerations for a 2ndround process
The Council was supposed to be this
“adaptive structure”, bringing together the voices of communities, labour, and other arms of government with the original negotiators of the Charter.
The Council has, despite its ground-
breaking concept at the time, never fulfilled its potential, as was revealed by various interview respondents under the Issues and Consequences category in the previous chapter.
This is deeply ironic as the concept of the FSCC – premised on the consultative NEDLAC approach – was original to the sector and one of the innovations of the Charter.
Going forward it may be that the Council is dropped as a forum and that its policy and consultative role returns to NEDLAC, or the Advisory Council on Black Economic Empowerment (a statutory body established by the B-BBEE Act to report to the president of the country).
Table 13. Proximity
The description by interviewees of the Charter negotiation’s year-long collaborative process in 2003 represents an example of Mair and Hehenberger’s front-stage and back-stage convening concept (2014):
Table 14. Front-stage and back-stage convening Proximity
Discussion on Finding Considerations for a 2ndround process The manner in which the Charter’s pillars
were conceived and agreed speaks to the emphasis of using the machinery of the Financial Services industry to promote change not only within this industry but to fund transformation (for a profit) in other sectors of the economy too by promoting procurement from black-owned suppliers and loan funding for black entrepreneurs to expand their businesses.
Nonetheless, whilst it is not possible to accurately determine on the basis of a single interview with each of the research
participants, whether there was “proximity”
in the sense used by Martí (2018), there was amongst those interview respondents from the trade associations, from companies and from ABSIP who were closest to the
Charter’s development process, a deep sense of personal commitment to change and to embedding that change in their
organisations.
Convening
Discussion on Finding Considerations for a 2ndround process The “back-stage” (i.e. separate) meetings of
the trade association and their business constituencies, of ABSIP and its black business constituencies and of various government departments allowed the debating of positions and formulation of arguments, which were then presented in
“front-stage” gatherings of the key negotiators.
While there were clearly divergent positions from all parties that at times required
mediation to reconcile, through this convening a “collective rationalisation”
progressively took place that enabled the parties to transcend their narrow, initial interests and coalesce around the concepts that became, in the end, the Charter.
If such a back-stage and front-stage
convening process can be recreated as part of process to develop a new approach to
transformation in the country there is a real opportunity to take tangible steps to
addressing the country’s present-day economic and social concerns.
However trust would need to be re-
established between the negotiating parties as a precursor to an effective convening process.
These six areas are thus important examples from the 2003 Charter development process that, if applied to a new transformation framework would help procure a far reaching, yet balanced and pragmatic set of pillars and accompanying targets; creating in effect a new charter to guide a collective transformation effort for the next 15 to 20 years. Such a collaboration would represent a second South African example of what Selsky and Parker describe as a CSSP to further the aims of the catalytic alliance mentioned above. In other words, different types of organisations working together to “address real-world challenges that naturally cut across organizational and sectoral boundaries” (2005). This echoes the observation about the modern- day imperative of business to work with other social partners to “collaborate collectively”
towards a larger social aim (Bitzer & Hamann, 2015).