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THE BEAUTY OF BELONGING TO THE POOLING OF IDEAS PLATFORM; AND RISKS

       The era of thinking in South Africa is not returning, it never left, and only its activists stopped their noble role. The arc of ignorance bends away from national competitiveness. As individuals, we easily believe our thoughts are the context of all contexts, and yet our collective thoughts are in fact what has endured for the entire history of humanity. In reality, ideas that are needed in society rarely find the requisite attention, yet they compete to rise. How ideas find their way to influence the direction of society, is a function of the arrangements thinkers devise to be heard. To understand this phenomenon, the BPI platform, as a beautiful minds space, will be navigated as an abstraction of the general beauty of belonging to the pooling of ideas platform.

The BPI boldly declares its mission as “to consolidate a strategic network of South Africans to build an African Business Excellence Solidarity Platform, thereby restoring the African into the centre of the economy". Though not yet formally reviewed, this mission mutated to include the creation of an ideas ecosystem with which opportunities, challenges in society, and patrons’ general well-being would be funnelled into recognition systems and procurement by society. Essential to the establishment of the BPI was pooling what would otherwise have been stand-alone ideas into a format that creates maximised impact and reach beyond the individual and organisation.

Positioned as a platform which brokers knowledge, expertise, networks, and capability; the BPI, anchored by its founding research centres and individuals of impeccable backgrounds, has to date, mutated into an incubator of all variants, forms, and strands of ideas to meet what it considers to be needs of society. The brute truth is that as complexity, ambiguity, volatility, and uncertainty rises in all aspect of human life, as BPIans, lingering around the edges of what is to be done is not an option. Still, its everywhereness calls for a redefinition of how we think about what is to be thought about. The era of generating ideas based only on what worked in the past has gone with the very past, save for reference and nostalgic returns.

To become relevant and taken seriously beyond being a photo opportunity fishing cohort of highly networked and skilled individuals, BPIans should define themselves as a centre known for thinking out of the park and proffering workable scenarios for consideration by society. The details of implementing such scenarios, and in the event these are proprietary to human nodes that are or were involved, would be commercialised accordingly at commercialisation gates presented by the opportunity to do so. This emerging responsibility and obligation to be a broadened pool of ideas can not flourish in conditions that do not embrace getting used to asking questions that are not only new and genuine but might be inconvenient to the establishment, and thus tinkering on being political.

Suppose there is a virtue that the BPI should be known for embracing. In that case, it should allow different questions from the mainstream and force itself to genuinely consider perspectives of the ‘other’, especially those conventions that may have unfairly defined as being different from ours. It is important to know that the people we hope to influence with or want our ideas to change their lives, including direction, believe in the truth and efficacy of their wisdom and ignorance. Our curiosity should be directed at their positions; otherwise, to what end are we pooling ideas? Boxing ourselves in discourses which only make us clear about what we are spending time on, even if there is no direction and destination, will result in us being a Broad Pool of Wingers or Winging.

Society desires arrangements such as the BPI Platform and Programs ideation direction and a sense of safety so that we can think and know where we are headed. This desire grows commensurate with society’s exposure to volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous contexts. South Africa is in that context in almost all the commanding heights of its economy and service delivery systems and a notable spike of its beyond-narrow politicking leadership. The courage to talk about the problems far outpaces the courage to do something about them; this is where THE BEAUTY OF BELONGING TO A POOLING OF IDEAS PLATFORM should mean something. CUT!!!

🤷🏿‍♂️Wa twa!!

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