Edition 50 | 01 September 2026

Welcome to The Perspective, a weekly note on work, leadership, and clarity. The aim isn't to add another voice to the noise. It's to slow down for a moment, look at something carefully, and see what's actually underneath. Some editions land practical, some more reflective. All chosen to help you navigate complexity with a steadier hand.

A small milestone this week: the fiftieth edition, and the one-year mark. But the plan for the day is what it always is: a note worth reading, and nothing that isn't.

Playing Out of Position

South Africa's opening Test against New Zealand ten days ago wasn't a good result. Saturday just past, of course, produced a different story. But what stayed with me from the first game wasn't the score. It was what happened to the backline.

Rugby has fixed-looking positions. Nine is the scrum-half, ten the fly-half, eleven and fourteen the wings, twelve and thirteen the centres, fifteen the fullback. On a team sheet it looks like a fixed structure. During the first Test, it wasn't.

Both wings got injured, one in each half. Neither time was it a simple swap. A centre moved out to cover the first injury. The second triggered two more changes further back, a fly-half shifted to fullback, a fullback shifted to wing, a scrum-half shifted to centre. Four positions moved to adapt to the change in the game.

South Africa lost that opening Test. But the structure held through both disruptions without falling apart. Nobody was playing a position they had never trained for. The shape kept functioning even while the specific result went the other way.

This is what playing out of position actually looks like when it works. And it is worth noticing away from rugby too.

Most conversations about organisational resilience focus on bench depth. How many replacements are ready. How well the second string is developed. How quickly a name can be moved into a vacated seat.

Which is real, and useful. But there is a different kind of resilience that gets talked about far less, and that matters more in the moments where it counts. It is the range already inside the people you started with. How many of the people already there can competently play out of position if the shape is forced to change. How many can move sideways under pressure without falling out of shape.

Bench depth is about who you can bring in. Range is about who is already in.

The two are related but not the same. Most executive teams and boards have thought carefully about bench depth. Fewer have thought carefully about whether the people already in the seats have enough range to hold shape if the composition changes suddenly.

Which matters, because it usually does. Someone leaves unexpectedly. Someone becomes unavailable. A crisis absorbs one person's attention for a quarter. In the moment when the shape has to move, bench depth is often not what saves it. The named successor takes weeks or months to land properly. What actually saves it is whether the people still in place can shift a step sideways without the whole formation collapsing.

That range is built quietly, over years. Cross-training that has no immediate purpose. Roles that people took on temporarily and never quite let go. Committees they served on that stretched their thinking. The habits of moving between problems rather than only owning one.

None of it is visible until it is needed. And by then, if it isn't there, no bench depth will fix it.

The team won on Saturday. That is a different game, with its own dynamics. But the observation from the first Test still stands on its own, because it named something that had nothing to do with the final score. The kind of resilience that showed up in the backline that day is the kind organisations often want and rarely build.

👉 I shared the shorter version of this on LinkedIn last week:

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

Playing the Long Game

I've been building a podcast, quietly, over the last few months, that picks up where The Bottom Line left off. It's called Playing the Long Game, and by the time this note lands the trailer plus four episodes would be out.

It's solo. No guests, no co-host, no interviews. One idea per episode, given the time it deserves. Episodes run around ten minutes each: short enough to fit into a commute or a walk, long enough to hold a proper argument. The first four are about the decisions that show up years from now, being broke by month-end, why plans don't survive the strategy session, and the gap between saying and doing.

New episodes release every week, running through the end of September.

Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music. All the links, plus everything else I do, sit in one place.

Go to Playing the Long Game

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New this week: a piece on the Rand

The Rand traded below R16 to the dollar for the first time in months. Most of the coverage called it a psychological barrier. My question, in a piece published yesterday on my website, is why so little of that strength actually reaches most people, and what the difference is between strength we earn and strength the world lends us on the way to someone else.

Titled A Stronger Rand. So Why Does Nothing Feel Cheaper?, it works through where the currency actually shows up (and where it doesn't), how much of the recent move is South African and how much is arithmetic that fell our way, and why a stable Rand is worth more to a household than a strong one.

Engage with whichever suits.

Read the article

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On My Desk

This edition marks one year of The Perspective. A year of Tuesdays. I am grateful to everyone who has read, replied, forwarded, or quietly stayed on the list. The plan for year two is the same as year one: something worth reading on a Tuesday morning.

Closing Perspective Most organisations plan carefully for who might leave. Fewer plan carefully for whether the people who remain can play out of position without the whole shape collapsing. Both are forms of preparation. Only one shows up when it's needed. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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