South Africa entered 2026 with cautious optimism, with 47% of business leaders reporting satisfactory conditions, the highest proportion in over a decade. Vehicle sales recorded their best February figures since 2013, and headline inflation dipped to 3,5%.

Then the context shifted. From surging global energy costs to supply chain rerouting and changing interest rate expectations, the stable start to the year has given way to complexity.

While these shifts are disruptive, they also provide a unique stress test for organisational strategy.

For Richard Perez, Founding Director of the Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika at the University of Cape Town, the disconnect between January’s plans and March’s reality is a productive place to look for insight. “The natural response to volatility is to rush toward a fix. But there is a step that often gets skipped: sense-making. We need to slow down long enough to examine what the friction is revealing about how our organisations actually work, versus how we think they work.”

Reframing Q1 as a Prototype

He suggests that leadership applies a core principle of design practice: treating early iterations not as a test to pass, but as a way to surface assumptions and insights.

“In design, you build something, put it into the world, and watch how it and the system around it behaves,” Perez explains. “When the environment pushes back, that isn’t necessarily a failure of planning. It is data. The most useful information often lives in the variance between what we expected and what happened.”

For South African businesses, the first quarter has acted as a rapid prototype. Logistics assumptions, pricing models, and budget forecasts have all been tested by real-world pressure. The design challenge now is not just to update the numbers, but to interrogate the logic that produced them.

“When something does not go according to expectation, rather than classifying it as a failure, it should rather be seen as an invitation to look more closely at the ‘why’ from a systems perspective. That could include people, process and product,” says Perez. “Those conversations tend to reveal the organisation’s actual architecture, which is often more instructive than assumptions on paper.”

Three Questions for Sense-Making

Rather than offering conclusions, he outlines three areas where a design-led lens can help leadership navigate the current tension:

1. Are we confusing intent with capacity? Headline sentiment improved meaningfully in Q1, yet operational confidence in manufacturing told a different story. In human-centred design, this highlights the difference between what users (or businesses) need and what the system allows them to do. Leadership needs to ask what systems (hard and soft) need to be redesigned to accommodate delivery in a more volatile environment.
2. Is the unevenness structural or emergent? The recovery is diverging, with export-heavy sectors absorbing different pressures than domestic ones. Food cost data shows a similar split between staples and protein-rich goods. A systems thinking approach asks: Is this unevenness a temporary bug, or a feature of how our value chains are built? If the volatility is structural, the solution isn’t to wait for prices to drop, but to redesign the supply model.
3. What are the successful iterations teaching us? Vehicle sales and specific retail segments showed unusual momentum in the opening months. These are the ‘bright spots’ - the prototypes that worked. Businesses that stay curious about why these segments adapted better to the pressure are likely to find replicable lessons. Adapting to Q2 requires studying what is working just as closely as we study what is broken.

From Defending to Learning

The first quarter has tested assumptions that seemed reasonable just ninety days ago. Perez notes that while there is a strong pull to move quickly to new targets, the most resilient organisations are pausing to learn.

“The opportunity now is to ask a fundamentally different question: what has this quarter taught us about our ability to adapt?” reflects Perez. “That shift, from defending a fixed strategy into building organisational capacity where we ask ourselves, what worked, what didn’t, what questions do we have, and what ideas do we have, is where the real competitive advantage lies in the months ahead,” he concludes.