In the moment of crisis, the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams - African proverb
The Call I Almost Did Not Take
I was exhausted. I mean genuinely, bone-deep exhausted. Three weeks inside a large banking institution that had stumbled on its own reputation, three weeks of negotiations, of sitting across tables from people who needed to tell the truth and could not bring themselves to do it. By the time that was done I had nothing left. I went home and I said to myself, Janine, you need to stop. Just stop.
And then the phone rang.
I almost did not pick it up. I really almost did not. But something made me. And when I heard his voice calm, measured, trained the way leaders train themselves when things are not going according to plan - I knew. I have been in this work long enough to hear what people are not saying. He was not calling me for advice. He was calling because his organisation was in trouble and he had run out of other options, and he was too much of a leader to say that plainly on a first call.
He had heard what I had done for the bank. Could we meet? Coffee. The next morning, ten o'clock.
I said yes. Because something in my spirit told me this person needed me. You learn to listen, the energy of honesty could not lie. The subtext was saying, I need you to do for my organisation what you did for that bank.
The next day. Ten o'clock. Sunshine hitting all the right spots on my skin. I got there first. I always do. I sat facing the entrance and I waited, I had done enough of these to know that the first thirty seconds tell you almost everything. How a person walks in. Whether they carry their title in front of them or leave it at the door.
Ten o'clock exactly, he walked in. Tall, tall that does not need to announce itself. A dark, well-cut suit, white shirt, no tie — precise without being stiff. He moved through the restaurant the way people move when they are comfortable in their own authority. No performance of importance. Just the settled weight of someone who had made difficult decisions for a long time and lived with the consequences. No scan of the room. No pause to let the space register his arrival. He found me, crossed directly to the table, shook my hand with a firm dry grip, and sat down. His face gave nothing away. Not unfriendly. Just composed. The face of a man who had been trained, or had trained himself, to keep the weather inside from showing on the outside. I have seen that face many times. It is the face leaders put on when things are worse than they are telling anyone. He did not ease into it, got straight to the point. I appreciated that enormously. I really did.
He told me about the mine. Phalaborwa Mine. A respected operation, a respected leader, and one rail line, one connecting their product to the port. That was it. Everything they produced, everything that generated revenue, moved along that one railway line. And not one of their seventeen brilliant engineers, with all their smarts predicted this major crisis. Documents and frameworks and crisis management plans, no one had anticipated that a train could derail.
The train jackknifed.
Can you see? Just like that. The train jackknifed on the only rail line they had, and the business stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. And now they had to figure out, in real time, what to do next. Now, how can 17 brilliant engineers in a large, successful business not plan that? They had documents and documents and documents on crisis management. But no one had forward thought through preparation. But that's our one risk.
And so often we can be blinkered. We can. And I have seen this a lot, even from brilliant minds. That is why people like me exist, not because I am smarter than seventeen engineers. But I am outside. I carry no loyalty to the way things have always been done. Fresh eyes see what familiarity hides. And sometimes the most important thing you can do for an organisation is walk in with no history and ask the question that everyone inside stopped asking years ago I mean, that's human nature. I accept that. I accept that we are human and we can make such mistakes. You plan for the risks you can picture, and somewhere in the room someone has quietly decided that this particular thing will not happen to us, and nobody challenges it, and so it does not go into the preparation plans. But here is a crisis in front of us that literally brought the business to a standstill.
I asked him about Plan B. He did not hesitate. And then, quietly, he told me what the trucking had done. It was really a nightmare.
He said it the way people say things they have not yet fully processed. Not looking away, not softening it, just saying it plainly across the table while the sun came through the window.
It increased AIDS. It increased prostitution. The drivers were on the road for days at a stretch, away from home, moving through rural communities that had no say in any of it. Then he told me about the cigarettes. The guys flicking them out of the windows. Into the dry bush. Along the Kruger National Park. He said that part quietly. Like he was still working out what it meant that nobody had thought about it.
The rubbish along the roads. The trucks they ran out of. The suppliers called in a panic because none of this was in the plan. They didn't have enough trucks. They had to source from multiple suppliers, all at once, under pressure, at cost, without the contracts or relationships that would have made it manageable.
I sat with that. I did not rush past it the way people rush past the parts that are hardest to hold. Those women along those roads, those communities, they were not in a single document. Not one page. Not one line.
How could you not have planned? I ask that genuinely. Not to shame anyone. But because that question is the beginning of every conversation worth having about crisis management. A business does not operate inside its own fence line. It never did. It breathes in and out into the world around it, and when it fails to plan, that world absorbs the consequences.
He told me all of it. Sitting across from me at that restaurant, this leader told me the full picture. He did not try to manage what I heard. He did not give me the version that made the organisation look better than it was. He was honest, openly and directly honest, and that is rarer than it should be.
I want to be clear about something. When I walk into a first meeting with a leader in crisis, what I am watching for is not competence. Competence I can assess later. What I am watching for is whether this person is willing to tell the truth about what has happened. Because if they are not, there is nothing I can do for them. You cannot fix a problem that no one will name.
This man was naming everything.
I asked him one question before I agreed to take it on. How open is the organisation to learning?
He said they were on their knees. And I said: good. Forgive me, I know how that sounds. But I mean it. Sometimes when you are broken, when you have hit the ground, that is when you finally go, okay, let us bring in someone who maybe knows better. Let us actually look. A company on its knees is ready to listen in a way it never was when things were running smoothly. I have seen that truth more times than I can count.
I agreed to go in. The first thing we did was not walk into a boardroom. It was walk into a town.
When the trucks started moving through Phalaborwa town, the walls started shaking. I mean that literally. The roads were not built for trucks that size. People's walls were cracking. The vibrations were moving through the foundations of homes that had nothing to do with the mine, nothing to do with the crisis, nothing to do with any decision made in any boardroom. They were just living there. And now their walls were falling.
We went in. Not with a press release. Not with a statement. We went physically into that town. The hairdressers. The bars. The barbers. The youth centres. The churches. We painted some of those churches. We fixed some of the granny's walls. We went into the townships and we engaged. We sat with people and we answered the questions they actually had. Why are you trucking through here? How long will this go on? Is there a solution? What does this mean for us?
You have to make that effort. You have to. Because your crisis has now put a crisis on the local community, and they did not choose that. So you owe them the truth, the time, and the respect of showing up.
We found out the youth were drag racing at night. I mean, there is not much to do in Phalaborwa. A lot of Phuza-phuza (drinking), the youth doing what youth do when nobody has given them anything better to do. So we addressed that too. We started youth programmes. Education opportunities. Bursaries so that young people from those townships could go and study.
And it worked. It worked.
Because when you embrace a community, when you go in honestly and you say here is what happened, here is what we are doing about it, here is how long it will take, something shifts. People forgive mistakes when they are treated with dignity. And those young people in those townships? They become your future employees. You inculcate your values, your culture, your way of doing business at the ground level, in the surrounding environment, from the beginning.
We got spokespeople into the hairdressers and the churches. People talk in hairdressers. They talk in churches. If you do not get the truth into those conversations, rumours fill the space. Rumours grow. They reach the media. And then you spend the rest of your time fighting a narrative you could have shaped from the start.
It does not have to be like that. It really does not.
And then I drove to the mine.
I walked into that building the following week and what I found was not the organisation I had been described on the phone. It never is. There is always a gap between the account of the crisis and the lived reality of it, and that gap tells you everything about how much work there is to do.
There were people there who had worked for twenty, thirty years on the assumption that the systems around them were sound. That somebody, at some point, had thought through the contingency. The jackknife had not just stopped the line. It had broken that assumption. And people do not always know how to stand when an assumption that large gives way.
Some of them looked at me and I could see it immediately. The not-quite-welcome. I have been in this business for almost forty years. I know that look. And I know exactly what it carries.
She is a woman. She is white. Oh my God, and she is going to tell us what to do. So we put up these barriers from a personal point of view instead of saying, sure, okay, she's been in the business for 40 years.
There's been some successes. Let's see how, even if we take certain nuggets and see how we can turn that around.
I will be honest with you. That moment costs me something every time. Every time. Not because I am surprised by it - I am not. But because I know what it takes from the work before the work has even started. I walk in carrying the full weight of what I know, forty years of it, and the first thing I have to do is wait for people to get past what they see when they look at me. Not what I know. What I look like.
I do not argue with it. I have learned that. You do not argue your way through that door. You work your way through it. You ask the questions that prove you already understand more than they expected. You stay in the room when they want you to leave. You show up consistently, day after day, until the resistance runs out of reasons to hold.
But I will not pretend it does not cost something. It does.
I walked the site. I sat in the rooms. I listened to the people. I noted what was present and what was absent, what was said and what went carefully unsaid.
I made my assessment.
And then I had to decide where to begin — because where you begin in a crisis like this determines whether the organisation comes through it changed, or simply recovers and returns to exactly the blindness that brought it here.
The Reflections (STILL TO DECIDE FOR THIS) - We need to carry the pillars and values with every Chapter
Courage to do what is right.
What Phalaborwa confirmed for me is this. The risk that breaks a business is almost never the risk on the register. It is the risk nobody named, because naming it would have meant admitting there was a gap. And admitting a gap requires a culture where honesty is safe. Where a junior engineer can stand up in a room full of senior people and say we have not planned for this and not lose his job for saying it. Where people trust that telling the truth will not be used against them.
The seventeen engineers were not dishonest people. I want to be clear about that. But they worked in a system where the documents were the evidence of preparation, and nobody had built a culture where someone could stand up and say, we have a gap here. We have not planned for the one thing that would stop everything.
That culture has to be built long before the crisis arrives. You cannot install it during the fire. You build it in the ordinary days, through consistent behaviour, through leaders who model honesty not just when it is comfortable but specifically when it is not.
Janine to add the relevant quote, thinker, or legislation that shaped her approach to this specific crisis whether from labour law, a leader she admires, or a philosopher of organisational risk whose thinking she carried into that mine.
When I left Phalaborwa, the rail line was running. The trucks were gone. The operational plans had been rebuilt with the gaps not just acknowledged but written in, documented, named. The community impact protocols were no longer absent from the framework. They were a column in it.
None of it was complicated once the organisation decided to be honest about what it had not done.
That is always where it starts. Not with the plan. Honesty is not a value you display on a wall. It is the decision you make at the table when everything is on fire and telling the truth is the hardest thing in the room.