Edition 42 | 07 July 2026

Welcome to The Perspective. Each week, a few reflections on work, leadership, and clarity. Not to add to the noise, but to slow things down just enough to think properly. Some practical, some more reflective, all chosen with the same intent: to navigate complexity with a steadier hand.

This week's note picks up a thread from a LinkedIn post last week and takes it a step further. Some ideas benefit from sitting with them a little longer before the line gets drawn.

The Rarest Habit in the Room

There's a mindset almost nobody trains for. Most people know the concept: Nassim Taleb called it the Black Swan, but very few workplaces act on the harder version underneath it.

The shorthand is familiar. Expect the unexpected. It's also the reason the idea gets nodded at and quietly ignored. You can't really plan around a sentence that vague.

I've been reading 50 Ideas That Changed the World of Work, a compendium where each chapter takes one concept and gives it three or four pages. Short enough to fit into a morning, long enough to leave something behind. The Black Swan chapter runs through a handful of practical implications. Don't over-rely on historical data. Be proactive about risk. Build in redundancy. Prepare for surprises. All sensible. All things almost every organisation would say it already does.

The one that struck me as harder, and rarer, isn't a practice at all. It's a mindset.

Being humble about what you actually understand.

The kind of humility that says our best guess is probably wrong at the edges. That resists the pull, in a serious meeting, to reach for a confident answer when the honest one is "we don't know". That treats a well-put-together plan as the beginning of the work, not proof that it's done.

That's the discipline nobody signs up for, because there's very little upside to it in most rooms. Most workplaces reward confidence over accuracy. The person who describes a situation with certainty gets listened to. The person who says "I'm not sure this covers what could actually go wrong" gets called cautious. That labelling is usually the actual risk.

The pattern shows up everywhere. A well-put-together plan gets waved through because it sounds coherent. The colleague who raises the uncomfortable question is thanked for the input and then quietly worked around. The senior person who admits a genuine gap in their understanding is respected for a moment and then, subtly, taken less seriously in the next meeting. Fluency wins. Doubt costs.

What it costs, mostly, is accuracy. Decisions get made on incomplete information dressed up as complete information. Assumptions that should have been tested are treated as facts. The confident voice fills the room, and the quieter voice, (the one that might actually have been closer to the truth), gets crowded out. When something eventually goes wrong, the post-mortem usually finds that someone somewhere had known, or half-known, and hadn't been heard.

None of this is anyone's individual failing. It's what happens when groups of people have to make decisions under time pressure and the loudest signal in the room is the one that sounds most sure. Certainty is cognitively economical. Doubt is expensive. So we reward the economy, and pay for the doubt somewhere down the line.

The rarest habit in most rooms isn't intelligence, or preparation, or even good judgement. It's the willingness to sound less certain than you could get away with sounding, because you know something the fluency doesn't cover.

Almost nobody trains for that. Almost every organisation would benefit from it.

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

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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Lessons from a Business Mastermind

Series Four: Whitey Basson

Episode 7: Cut the Noise

When Whitey Basson bought Checkers, he found a company drowning in its own paperwork. Head office produced financial reports by the ton, stacks of them across four or five tables, month after month. He and Callie Goosen went through the lot and threw away roughly seventy percent. Nobody came back asking where their important report had gone.

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In their place, he designed a single four-page report on each store: sales per customer, inventory turnover, the numbers that actually decided whether a branch was healthy. Within six months, every manager had one on their desk. Suddenly, they weren't administering a system; they were running a business. They could see what was happening and what to fix.

Volume of information had been mistaken for control. Cutting it was what created control.

The Lesson:

Reporting isn't about producing more numbers. It's about producing the few that let the person doing the work actually see the business and act.

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On My Desk

A board appointment worth naming this week. I've joined the board of Make A Difference (MAD) Leadership Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2003 by Francois Pienaar that funds scholarships and long-term development for academically talented young South Africans from low-income households.

MAD's scholars go on to become chartered accountants, engineers, scientists, and commerce graduates, with not only financial support, but also mentorship and personal development wrapped around it. The programme is designed for what happens after the scholarship, not just the scholarship itself.

I've written before about the first step out of poverty being work, not wealth. That step gets a lot easier when the earlier step, access to education that leads somewhere, has been made possible. MAD sits at that earlier step. It's genuinely useful work, and I'm glad to be part of it. 💚💚💚

New article today

Also going live this morning: a longer piece I've written called Why I Wrote a Book (and What I Learned by Writing It). It's about the year of writing The Bottom Line, the two roads to publishing in South Africa, and what a book actually does for you that no marketing plan can predict in advance.

👉 If that thread interests you, click the button below to read the article.

Read the article

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Closing Perspective The loudest voice in a room usually isn't the best-informed one. It's just the one that's decided to sound sure. The work, most weeks, is in noticing the difference, and in whichever direction, being the person who does something useful with it. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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