When Visibility Disappears
On fire, leadership, and staying calm when no one can see what comes next
It’s January and I wake up in the middle of the night and notice it is very warm.
It is summer in South Africa.
The air conditioning is off. I try to turn it back on. Nothing happens.
I check my phone. It has not been charging.
It feels annoying, but not important. I will look into it in the morning.
But when I wake up again in the morning, nothing is working yet.
No electricity. No internet. No connection to anything outside the room.
I walk into the village and quickly realize it is not just us. Everyone is talking about the same thing. There was no electricity during the night because of heavy bush fires nearby.
Franschhoek is small. Usually that feels calm. Today it feels exposed.
We want to leave. Finding a taxi without internet turns out to be harder than expected. I walk around, ask a few people, and eventually end up in a local store. One of the few places where the WiFi still works. I connect quickly and manage to find a driver.
When she picks us up, she looks relieved.
“I wasn’t sure how I would get out of here,” she says. “Or if I would even find people.”
It is a one and a half hour drive to our next location, far away from the fires. We talk almost the entire way.
We start with the fire. The size of it. The damage. We talk about the people and animals that were not able to get out. About the kind of prayers you say when you feel powerless. About how unfair it feels that not everyone makes it.
During the ride, we can still see fires burning in the distance. Small lines of orange against the hills. Under control now, she says. But still there.
Then she tells me about the night before.
About evacuating people in her taxi while not being able to see anything. Smoke everywhere. Darkness. No visibility at all. That was what made her panic. Not seeing where she was going. Not knowing how close the fire really was.
People in the backseat were panicking too. Asking questions. Looking at her for reassurance.
She was scared as well. She just could not show it.
She needed to look composed. Capable. Someone who had control. Someone her clients could trust. It’s not hard to miss how uncomfortable that feels for her.
Now, in the morning, everything looks different. The sky is clear. You can see the hills. You can see where the fire has been. But during the night there was nothing to see. Only decisions to make.
“You still have to deliver,” she says. “You still have to get people out. You can’t panic along with them, that would only make things worse.”
“There is no training for moments like these.”
I think about how familiar that sounds. At work, too.
We prepare, plan, train. And then something unexpected happens. Visibility disappears. Information is missing. People look at you and expect leadership anyway.
You step up. You do the best you can. And yet, there’s this nagging feeling that you don’t know if will work out. And it’s your call to make it work. You want to do right, you just not always know how. But the world watches, and it’s game time.
As we reach the highway, our phones come back to life. Messages arrive. The world continues as if nothing happened.
Weeks later, the conversation is still with me.
Not because of the fire itself, but because of what it asked of her.
How often work looks like this. Moving without visibility.
Staying calm so others can feel safe.
Doing what needs to be done, without knowing if it is enough.
I guess we learn as we go and stay flexible where it requires us to be..
