Most businesses operate as if they live in a deterministic world. Strategy is mapped out in bullet points, budgets, and timelines; as if outcomes naturally follow from inputs, like clockwork. If we invest X, we’ll get Y. If we optimise Z, growth will happen. But the real world doesn’t care about your models. The truth is that business is probabilistic. Outcomes are shaped not only by your actions, but by timing, randomness, path dependencies, and assumptions; especially the ones you don’t realise you’re making.
To Unpack This, Let’s Consider a Simple Question: Can 100 Men Beat 1 Gorilla?
At first glance, most people instinctively say yes. Surely 100 humans can overpower one animal, no matter how strong. But pause for a moment. Who are these men? Are they Navy SEALs or office workers? Are they armed, trained, coordinated? Are they attacking together, or one at a time? Is the gorilla calm or cornered? Now the answer isn’t so clear. And this is the point - risk assessment isn’t just about numbers; it’s about the assumptions and context we bring into the equation. Most of the time, our decisions are based on an incomplete picture, disguised as confident logic.
This is exactly how many businesses approach strategic planning. They build models and forecasts as if they exist in a controlled lab. But they don’t. Markets aren’t test tubes, customers don’t behave in linear patterns, and plans don’t unfold in sterile environments. The risk models we build often ignore how fragile they are to changing inputs. We treat risk as a line item; manageable, measurable, even containable. But in practice, risk is dynamic. It’s rarely about what’s visible on the dashboard; it’s about what’s quietly assumed to be true.
A South African Case Study
We saw this play out not long ago in South Africa’s mobile and infrastructure sectors. A major operator had spent years building out resilient systems, backed by sound commercial logic and solid forecasting. On paper, everything was heading in the right direction. Load shedding quietly escalated from an inconvenience to a full-blown operational threat.
Backup batteries and generators that were budgeted for a few hours a day, suddenly had to run nonstop. Towers went down. Network stability wavered. Customer frustration grew. The business hadn’t failed in strategy; no, it had failed in assumptions. It had planned for manageable disruption, but not for upstream power generation. It missed the gorilla: The poor operations of the utility provider, not the market, were the real risk factor.
At the same time, that volatility created a gold rush in backup power and solar energy. Entrepreneurs, financiers, and Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) contractors scrambled to meet a booming demand. Whole business models were built on the idea that load shedding was the new normal. Some of those bets paid off leading to fast margins and huge uptake.
But then the Energy Availability Factor (EAF) improved. Eskom stabilised generation in turn, load shedding dropped. As De Wet Taljaard from SAPVIA put it: “On the residential sector market segment, absolutely, the rate of installations has decreased significantly compared to the same period last year when we were experiencing stage 3 or 4 of load shedding at this time of year… the frequency and intensity of load shedding really is the biggest driver on the residential side. What forces people to put solar on their roof or a battery in their garage is they just reach a point where they can’t stand load shedding anymore.”
That one observation captures it all: demand wasn’t just about energy, it was about emotion, frustration, and pressure. The moment that pressure dropped, so did the urgency. And for businesses that had scaled fast on the back of that sentiment, the slowdown wasn’t just operational; it was total collapse. When the crisis eased, the story fell apart. They weren’t wrong to plan for risk, but they assumed it was permanent; and that was the mistake.
The randomness cuts both ways. You can be punished for assuming the world will stay functional. But you can also be punished for assuming it won’t. And that’s where many get caught, not knowing which world they’re building for, and failing to design the flexibility to survive either. No model survives its first encounter with reality, and yet we keep planning as if they do.
Why Winning Today Doesn’t Mean You’re Safe Tomorrow
Now consider the concept of a random walk…a model from finance and physics where each step is unpredictable, and the next move depends entirely on where you are now, not where you started. In theory, you can go anywhere. In practice, over time, the path tends to converge toward the mean, no matter how wildly it swings in the short term. It’s a model for how noise overwhelms precision, and how luck, even when it runs hot, rarely sustains forever. That’s business strategy in the real world: messy, frustrating, and completely unpredictable.
You can ride a wave of success; land a few deals, catch a trend, raise capital at just the right moment, but if the fundamentals don’t hold, or if you mistake volatility for skill, the path will eventually pull you back down. Your success today might open new opportunities, but it also introduces new exposure. Your position might improve or be knocked off course by a platform change, a new competitor, a shift in regulation, or a reputational knock you didn’t see coming.
You can make all the “right” moves and still lose. You can make reckless moves and appear to win…for a while at least. That’s the trap. Random walks feel like momentum when you're lucky, but over time, they remind you that structure and adaptability matter more than streaks. The path isn't linear, and it's certainly not fair. It’s jagged, reactive, and self-correcting. Eventually, gravity catches up.
Back to the 100 men. This isn’t just a metaphor about brute force, it’s a lens for understanding risk perception. The fight's outcome depends entirely on the details. Are the men aligned? Do they understand the gorilla? Do they underestimate it?
In business, we build for the 100 men; designing systems to manage operational risk, optimise for efficiency, and deliver against forecasts. But we rarely stop to ask the more important question: are we actually facing the gorilla? A rare, high-impact threat that those systems were never built to withstand? Worse still, we assume we understand the nature of the fight, without ever confirming what kind of opponent we’re up against.
The Hidden Fragility in Business Planning, and What to Do Next
Risk isn’t just the chance that something goes wrong; it’s the hidden uncertainty baked into the model itself. You can map out best-case and worst-case scenarios all day, but if your assumptions are fragile, the whole structure can collapse under even slight pressure. Real strategic advantage doesn’t come from predicting the future; it comes from being ready for a range of futures. That means thinking in scenarios, modelling uncertainty with ranges instead of fixed points, and stress-testing your assumptions like they’re points of failure — because they often are. It means building for resilience, not just optimisation. It means staying adaptive when the environment shifts or when the gorilla changes form.
Because here’s the thing: most businesses fail not from a single blow, but from a series of misread risks and unchallenged assumptions. They plan for the predictable and get blindsided by the improbable. And when it happens, the question isn’t “why didn’t we see it coming?”, it’s “why did we assume it wouldn’t?”
So next time you’re mapping out a strategy, ask yourself: am I planning for the 100 men? Am I ignoring the gorilla? And more importantly…am I even sure which fight I’m in?
We talk a lot about de-risking, but let’s be honest, most companies are just hoping the gorilla doesn’t wake up. Ultimately, risk isn’t about control. It’s about awareness. In a probabilistic world, the only strategy that endures is one built for change.
At Africa International Advisors (AIA), we work with teams to de-risk projects and company decisions; not by chasing certainty, but by building strategies that can handle uncertainty. We help leaders make smarter bets, uncover hidden assumptions, and create resilient paths forward, even when the terrain is shifting beneath them.
Ready to explore how to de-risk your projects and organisation?
Reach out to me at Joseph.K@africaia.com
Jun 2025 Risk Africa Investment
