Kykie, it's 04:30 in the morning and I'm 16 years old bra. I need to go from Second Avenue in Lotus River to Cape Town CBD. I need to get to my first proper job, which was a shelf packer at Woolworths in the Waterfront which was their flagship store. At the time, this was the most premium retail address in South Africa.
Getting there meant taking three different minibus taxis. From Lotus to Wynberg, from Wynberg to the CBD. And then finally from the CBD to the Waterfront. Each leg had its own rules, its own power dynamics and its own unspoken codes. Each taxi had a gaadjie, who controlled the pace, the stops, and ultimately whether you got to where you needed to go.
The gaadjie could read you instantly. How you dressed, how you spoke, how you carried yourself and whether you had coins in your pocket. He might ask you, "Brutjie, what's the time?" If you could actually answer by looking at a watch, that was a signal you had money. If you looked too presentable or too relaxed, you might be asked for some "odds" or change to buy the gaadjie a coke.
"Code switching wasn't a skill I chose to develop. It was a survival skill I was born into. But this ability, when refined over twenty years in different settings and contexts, becomes something else entirely…"
By the time I walked through the Waterfront doors to start my shift, I had navigated three different contexts, and was ready to interface with a completely different demographic of shopper at the storefront.
What I didn't know then, and what took me twenty years to articulate, is that I was running a framework on autopilot.
I call this framework +RSE. It is still the instrument I use, in boardrooms, inside delivery programmes, and in the companies I have helped build. It's the articulation of how I go about doing my thing. Only now, I have a set of tools and the language to be able to share it.
See how I deliver →