In October 2016, I wrote an article recalling the 2013 apocalyptic movie World War Z, which is not a movie for the faint hearted. The movie is about a fast moving infectious disease that turns people into zombies once bitten by another zombie. So how does a country protect itself from a contagion in this highly interconnected world? The main character in the movie travels to Israel, which he had been reliably informed had prepared itself for a contagion by building a wall around Jerusalem ten days before the contagion struck, wiping out cities around the world. He meets with an Israeli government official who explains why they had taken the pre-emptive strike of building a wall. Following Hitler’s Jewish concentration camps, the 1972 kidnapping and massacre of 16 athletes at the Munich Olympics as well as witnessing and ignoring the Arab troop movement October 1973 that eventually led to the Yom Kippur War, they decided to make a change. If nine people came to the same conclusion about a strategy, it was the duty of the tenth person to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man had to start working off the assumption that the other nine are wrong. Having discussed the possibility of a contagion at a council meeting and dismissing its probability of reaching Israel, the government official was the tenth man who put in place the wall to prevent zombies from coming in. You have to watch the movie to see if his strategy worked and parental advisory is strongly advised!

Yosef Kuperwasser, who used to head the Research Division of the Israeli Intelligence Directorate, provides insights into this critical Israeli way of strategic thinking in his 2007 Analysis Paper titled Lessons From Israel’s Intelligence Reforms:

“The devil’s advocate office ensures that AMAN’s intelligence assessments are creative and do not fall prey to group think. The office regularly criticizes products coming from the analysis and production divisions, and writes opinion papers that counter these departments’ assessments. The devil’s advocate office also proactively combats group think and conventional wisdom by writing papers that examine the possibility of a radical and negative change occurring within the security environment. This is done even when the defense establishment does not think that such a development is likely, precisely to explore alternative assumptions and worst-case scenarios.”

When I wrote that piece, Covid-19 was not even a concept but the world had witnessed SARS and Ebola. The silver lining in the horrific Covid-19 cloud is that we now have a real life experience to base any strategic discussions we make in our board rooms. “What can go wrong” are four words that must emerge from the designated contrarian in the room. The contrarian or “black hat” wearer plays an important role in strategy discussions because they are given the task of deliberately poking holes in such a way as to force management to not only articulate the possible risks in a strategy, but to conceptualize the mitigations that should be put in place. The string of moribund, crumbling hotel skeletons in Kenya’s north and south coast beaches are a sad reminder of a hospitality industry that once looked to the global north for tourists.

Following the Likoni clashes in 1997 and the bombing of a south coast hotel favored by Israeli tourists, not to mention the 2007 post-election violence, foreign tourists slowly petered out. It took these systemic shocks for the few “woke” hotels to realize that an increasing middle class base in Kenya would be the perfect steady and reliable tourist choice all year round. Business, conferencing and leisure tourists from Kenya and Uganda were always under the coastal hotel industry’s nose, but had been studiously ignored as they didn’t carry the much cherished dollar bill. The hotel owners had simply never asked: what could go wrong?

Today, a visit to some of the popular resorts tells a different story. The hotels are full of locals, who have been afforded the luxury of an affordable experience packaged exclusively for them using a variety of affordable road, rail and air transport options. A new zombie though has emerged in the name of Air BnB and its attendant cousins. You see, the zombies never end. What’s happening in the coastal hotel industry must always be a reminder to the rest of us in other industries to stay woke. When contagions or business disruptors come, they never send an advance calling card.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka