This Slideshare presentation is a partial preview of the full business document. To view and download the full document, please go here https://flevy.com/browse/business-document/south-africa-and-the-butterfly-effect-3634 DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION This document was written in 2016. It remains valid for the SA landscape. It illustrates how the butterfly effect can manifest in virtually any country.

1. 1
outh Africa and the Butterfly
Effect – Some Potential
Scenarios for the Tourism
Industry
by Ian van Vuuren
ntroduction – The Wings are
Fluttering Louder and Louder
In 1961 Edward Lorenz, an MIT
meteorologist, developed a model
(illustrations of which visually resembled a
butterfly) which eventually came to be
known as the butterfly effect1
. Lorenz
postulated that an apparently insignificant
occurrence, such as a butterfly flapping its
wings in the Amazon, could hypothetically
set in motion a chain of events that could
cause tornadoes to occur in Texas a few days
later.
1
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/
422809/when-the-butterfly-effect-took-flight/
Figure 1: The Butterfly Effect
So, as a metaphor, the butterfly effect
signifies a series of seemingly small and
unrelated events that collectively have an
eventual massive impact, whether in causing
storms or impacting the economy, to name
only two examples.
While scientifically it may be impossible to
actually predict whether a butterfly in the
Amazon will ultimately cause a tornado to
touch down in Texas, the social impact of
the butterfly-effect theory is without doubt
in today’s super-connected and data-driven
world. As an example - the Arab Spring was
basically started by an unknown Tunisian
street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set
himself on fire as protest against police
brutality. His death was able to accomplish
what large military forces and decades of
western influence had been unable to do:
S
I

2. 4
estimates about what could happen, not
forecasts of what will happen. In our
example we take a time frame of only six
months to one year into the future. Most
futurists would argue that this is too short a
time period.
However, in the South African case one could
raise a very cogent argument that
developments over the next twelve months
are likely to set the stage for the longer term
future of the country, present developments
considered3
. The scenario development
process is depicted in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The Scenario Development Process
3
Based on inter alia the looming local elections,
present court cases and draft legislation etc.
A scenario framing exercise always starts by
listing the Relevant Developments – this was
done previously, and as indicated there, that
list is by no means exhaustive.
The next step is to formulate the Key
Question - what is it that we want to focus
on/provide answers to? It must be a question
that has no immediate apparent answer. For
our purposes we framed it as follows:
What are the Twelve Month Strategic
Scenarios for South Africa (and Associated
Risk Implications for the Tourism
Industry)?
Next one identifies the Key Drivers. These
are the main factors that influence the
environment. The ones that seem to stand
out are:
 Lack of jointness4
in decision-making
and action. The Public-Private-
Partnership (PPP) in South Africa, it
could be argued, consists of just so
many words. There exist PPP forums to
address inter alia tourism crime in
many areas, but by and large these
have been reduced to talk-shops.
4
Jointness is not simply cooperation. It
encompasses a fusion of resources and minds
around the pursuit of a common goal. It takes
the best of whatever capability each organisation
can offer for the achievement of specific
operational goals. It involves inter alia planning
together, identifying objectives together, and
employing and tasking mission-specific resources.
It is an approach to achieve synergy in a resource
constrained environment - Pendall, D.
“Scenarios are a combination of
estimates about what could happen,
not forecasts of what will happen”
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3. 7
xplaining the Axes and Related
Decision Implications
X-axis - Degree of Integration: According to
Söderbaum and Hettne8
, regionalisation
refers to a complex process of forming
regions “… that leads to patterns of
cooperation, integration, complementarity
and convergence within a particular cross-
national geographical space.” A region can
be more or less coherent, leading to the
notion of “region-ness”: a high degree of
region-ness and regional identity implies the
capacity to act, or “actorness”, while a
lower degree of region-ness implies a greater
impact on the region from the outside.
One could argue that the same applies to a
country which has so many diverse racial,
geographic and demographic characteristics
as does South Africa. In this case the degree
of integration, or then “actorness”, has four
main ingredients:
 A shared commitment to a set of
overarching values;
 The domestic legitimisation of deci-
sion-making processes and priorities
relating to policy;
8
Van Nieuwkerk, Anthoni. Towards Peace and
Security in Southern Africa. A critical analysis of
the revised Strategic Indicative Plan for the Organ
on Politics, Defence and Security Co-operation
(SIPO) of the Southern African Development
Community. Friedrich Ebert Stieftung. Africa
Peace and Security Series no 6. January 2012.
 The ability to identify priorities, and
formulate consistent and coherent
policies; and
 The availability of and capacity
to utilise policy instruments – diplo-
macy/negotiation, economic tools, and
security means.
A country like South Africa is not a natural
phenomenon – it is a social construct, and
therefore politically contestable, as is being
illustrated by present events. A low degree
of integration therefore means that the four
ingredients as indicated above are largely
missing, whereas a medium degree of
integration means that they are largely
present – note that there is no “high degree
of integration” specified. It is this author’s
opinion that such an option is not
realistically feasible in the time span under
consideration.
Y-axis - Levels of Service Delivery: This refers
to the extent to which all citizens have
access to running water, power, basic local
government services of all kinds, and
whether the infrastructure is maintained at
least to present standards, if not upgraded.
A low level indicates serious deficiencies in
this regard with regular outages (sometimes
for days if not weeks) and uncertainty about
future delivery; poor response to requests for
assistance; long lead times to respond, if at
all. A medium level indicates that the norm
is more or less on par with the rest of sub-
Saharan Africa, with outages only from time
E
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4. 1
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