It took Ortega Group less than 2 months to gain majority space in Uganda’s strategy industry. It could also be said that the industry didn’t exist and was created from scratch by the work we did in those two months. History will judge this risky move better, but it had to be done. Somebody had to be there to create the industry and define its direction. But how was that done?
The answer is simple, we offered predictability. Early on, we knew that what lacked most, and the ultimate consumer need is predictability. How do you ensure that from Day One, strategy would be the deliverable? That in everything we wrote, in every insight we offered, strategy would be that underlying deliverable.
We are predictable in one thing, that we shall always be about strategy. It is always Strategy and something. But strategy will always be there. And from this phenomenal growth in 2 months, we learned that consumers are looking for one thing, that insatiable need for predictable things.
All systems are as good as their predictability. All investment is about predictable returns. Anything without predictability is unreliable. Great brands are built first and foremost for predictability. No one wants a pain killer that works one Monday morning but then fails the next morning. In Kenya, people speak of ‘Mara Moja’, there’s a guarantee it works. It leaves up to its billing of predictability.
You could say the same of other brands such as Café Javas, they are built on this ethos of predictability. All systems must optimize for predictability, the ability to return the same results every time. No one desires an errant system, one with some upsides and downsides. It’s better to know that this system will always return upsides in such a moment.
Why is predictability important? Because human’s greatest need is to have some control of the future. Risk is what drives and scares us. And the only way risk is reduced is through predictability. The higher the predictability, the less the risk. All humans are in that same quest for predictability and those that fill this gap, will always win the love of humans.
Strategy ultimately is a game of producing predictability in outcomes. Your strategy is only as good as its predictability, to deliver what it promised to deliver. Without predictability, there’s no strategy. And that should be a rule somewhere in the Ugandan Excellence playbook. We could also state it another way: Predictability is a pillar of Ugandan Excellence.