Edition #19: Are We Reacting, Or Are We Thinking?

Home • Edition #19: Are We Reacting, Or Are We Thinking?

March 3, 2026

How to ‘keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs’ (with apologies to Rudyard Kipling!)

Those that work closely with me have at times characterized me as ‘volcanic’ – I can erupt with irritation in the moment. I’m not proud of this, but parachute me into a real crisis and my overwhelming reaction is that of calm.

In boardrooms, during strikes, through commodity crashes and political madness, I have usually felt… calm. Sometimes disconcertingly so. Let me not pretend that it is always easy. The disruption caused by the current political elites, the geopolitical re-alignment, a strengthening Rand whilst nothing but sentiment has improved in South Africa, all means that I must regularly remind myself, calmness is a deliberate choice.

Over time I have come to understand something that sounds simple, but is not:

Emotions, good and bad are contagious. Rationality is intentional. It is a decision to practice emotional regulation – for the greater good.

And in industries measured in billions, employing thousands, and operating in jurisdictions that test your resilience daily, the difference is not academic, it is existential. Passion is required. Unregulated emotion is risky.

Let me draw a distinction that is often blurred.

Passion is essential. You cannot build a mine, a company, or an industry without it. Passion sustains you when the orebody is more complex than expected, when permits stall, when markets turn against you. Passion gives you stamina. It creates belief and followership. I would love to be known for my passion for South Africa, for Joburg, for mining, and of course especially for gold mining.

Reactive emotion, however, is different. It makes one mistake urgency for importance. That is when it is easy to confuse in-the-moment activity with long-term strategy.

Passion feels like long-term conviction: We will build this company for the next generation., as opposed to a short term impulse: Let’s do something to impact on this quarter’s results.

Over decades, I have sat in rooms where intelligent, experienced professionals have become visibly euphoric when prices have risen and deeply anxious when they’ve fallen. I have watched strategy being rewritten because sentiment shifted. I have seen capital allocation frameworks being abandoned because a quarter disappointed.

The orebody, however, did not change. Geology is gloriously indifferent to sentiment.

Cost curves do not rearrange themselves because of a new Executive Order. Long-life assets do not become bad assets because an analyst changes their recommendation. . Structural disadvantage does not disappear because government policy becomes creative.

Yet unregulated, capricious emotion compresses time horizons. The ‘activator’ in me doesn’t think this is always a bad thing, but I am old enough to have learned that it is a potentially dangerous thing.

Five-year plans become five-week reactions.

Reversible decisions become irreversible ones.

Optionality is sacrificed to satisfy the appetite for decisiveness.

I have yet to see empty announcements improve free cash flow.

When Urgency Replaces Clarity

We are again in one of those moments. Geopolitics is top of mind. Capital decisions are easier delayed than executed. Commodity markets are volatile. The commentators are (too) loud, (too) confident (too) certain and expect every company to align with their view of the world.

Urgency, in my experience, is often a substitute for clarity. Or to put it bluntly, an excuse to avoid facing and dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty with calm, calculated rationality.

There is something about falling prices that convinces intelligent people that structural reality has changed overnight. Behavioural finance has long shown that investors overreact to short-term shocks and underweight long-term fundamentals. Boards and policymakers are not magically immune to the same cognitive distortions. My favorite however is when we are in a cyclical bull market. That’s when we argue that it is different this time, it is a super cycle, the world is a different place and therefore we will never repeat the mistakes of the past.

When volatility abounds, I deliberately move in the opposite direction of panic.

At least, I try. Sometimes I need time, or someone to kick me out of my temporary self-pity. I know that when I start to feel sorry for myself that I’m allowing panic to blunt my rational mind.

That is when I lengthen the timeline. I revisit first principles. Has the orebody changed? Has our structural position deteriorated? Has demand permanently shifted, or are we witnessing cyclical pessimism masquerading as disruption?

Which decisions are reversible — and which will lock in consequences long after sentiment normalises?

Then I ask the deeply unfashionable question: What if nothing fundamental has changed at all?

That is not complacency. It is discipline.

The South African Reflex

If I may be blunt, South Africa has developed a reflex for emotional, capricious governance. We oscillate between exuberant optimism and performative outrage. We debate beneficiation, sovereignty, transformation, and growth as moral contests rather than capital allocation problems.

Investors do not price outrage, they price predictability. Employees cannot build careers on volatility. Communities do not benefit sustainably from policy whiplash.

Passion for transformation is necessary. Passion for inclusive growth is non-negotiable. But emotional policymaking, which is reactive, headline-driven and impatient destroys precisely the stability that long-term investment requires. Whether it is South Africa, or the mighty USA, policy uncertainty is the killer of rational and long-term capital allocation decision making.

If our regulatory frameworks change more frequently than commodity prices, hesitation from capital allocators should surprise no one.

Calm as Competitive Advantage

Remaining rational does not mean being indifferent. It means recognising that anger does not improve ore grades and anxiety does not lower unit costs. If outrage were a productive input, South Africa would be the most competitive mining jurisdiction on earth.

Calm is not passivity; it is a competitive advantage.

In emotional times, rational leaders:

Stretch time horizons when others compress them.
Separate reversible from irreversible decisions.
Interrogate assumptions when others rush to align with them.
Resist applause when applause is premature.

The Discipline of Thinking

In a world increasingly addicted to outrage, where speed is rewarded more than logic, rationality feels almost rebellious. But real leadership is not about mirroring the mood of the moment. It is about absorbing it without being governed by it.