The cliff has not moved

Something extraordinary and deeply unsettling happened in 2005 in the Turkish village of Gevas. One sheep walked off a cliff, and then 1,499 others followed. The shepherds had stepped away for breakfast. In their brief absence, a single animal moved toward danger, and the rest instinctively followed. By the time the movement became visible, it was already too late. More than 450 sheep died, while those behind survived only because the growing pile of bodies broke their fall.

At first glance, it sounds like the kind of story so absurd that it belongs in folklore. Yet biologists and animal behaviourists were not surprised. Sheep are wired to follow the movement of those nearest to them rather than independently assess the terrain ahead. In most circumstances, this instinct is highly effective. It keeps the flock together and protects individuals from external threats. The tragedy is that the very behaviour that had ensured survival for generations became fatal in the wrong environment.

It is tempting to laugh at the sheep.

But many organisations operate in exactly the same way.

The Gevas incident is not merely a story about animal behaviour. It is a powerful lesson about leadership, management, organisational culture, and the risks of collective decision-making when critical thinking disappears.

Most organisational decisions are not made in isolation. Employees watch managers. Managers watch executives. Executives watch competitors, consultants, donors, industry trends, and peer organisations. Learning from others is often sensible and efficient. The danger emerges when organisations stop asking whether the direction is right and focus only on whether everyone else is moving in the same direction.

How many organisations adopt new management frameworks because they are fashionable rather than effective? How many strategic plans are copied from competitors? How many initiatives are launched because they are popular in boardrooms rather than because they solve a genuine organisational problem?

When conformity replaces critical thinking, organisations begin to mistake consensus for wisdom. The sheep did not evaluate the cliff. They evaluated the movement of the flock. Many organisations do the same.

The most important detail in the Gevas story is not that the sheep followed one another. It is that the shepherds were absent.

Leadership is often misunderstood as authority. In reality, leadership is the continuous process of observing, guiding, correcting, and anticipating risk. When leadership becomes distracted, disengaged, or complacent, organisations create a vacuum.

Vacuums rarely remain empty for long. In the absence of active leadership, the loudest voice often becomes the dominant voice. The most confident opinion becomes the accepted opinion. Assumptions go unchallenged. Weak decisions gain momentum simply because nobody intervenes early enough.

Many organisational failures do not begin with bad intentions. As the saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." More often, however, they begin with absent attention. The challenge for leaders is not simply to set direction. It is to remain sufficiently engaged to recognise when the organisation is drifting toward danger.

 

One consequence of disengaged leadership is the emergence of groupthink, one of the greatest threats to organisational performance. In many organisations, people quickly learn that challenging prevailing opinions carries risk. They remain silent in meetings. They suppress concerns. They nod in agreement despite privately recognising flaws in a proposal. Over time, this creates an illusion of consensus.

Healthy organisations understand that disagreement is not a threat to unity; it is often a prerequisite for sound decision-making.

As one of my former lecturers used to say, if two people agree on everything, only one of them is doing the thinking.

Strong leaders deliberately create environments where dissent is welcomed, assumptions are tested, and uncomfortable questions are encouraged. They understand that constructive disagreement improves decisions long before problems become crises.

The first sheep paid the highest price. In organisations, the equivalent individuals are often whistle-blowers, innovators, risk officers, auditors, and employees who raise concerns before others recognise a problem.

These people rarely receive immediate praise. Instead, they are frequently viewed as difficult, disruptive, or pessimistic. Yet organisational history repeatedly demonstrates that many major failures were preceded by warnings that leaders chose to ignore.

The organisations that thrive are not those that eliminate criticism. They are those that listen to it. An employee who identifies a risk early is not undermining the organisation. They are helping to protect it. Effective leaders recognise this distinction.

The sheep's instinct to stay together was not a flaw. It was a strength operating in the wrong environment. The same principle applies to organisations. Processes, cultures, and management practices that deliver success under one set of conditions may become liabilities when circumstances change. A culture built on loyalty can become resistant to accountability. A culture built on stability can become hostile to innovation. A culture built on efficiency can become incapable of adaptation.

The challenge of leadership is not simply preserving organisational strengths. It is recognising when those strengths are becoming obstacles to future success. Effective leaders continually ask a difficult question: what worked yesterday, but may not work tomorrow?

Organisations often become vulnerable when they rely too heavily on systems, routines, and established ways of thinking. Systems are valuable because they create consistency and efficiency. Yet no system can anticipate every change in its environment. There are moments when circumstances shift faster than procedures can adapt. In those moments, success depends on individuals who are willing to question assumptions, recognise emerging risks, and act before the rest of the organisation catches up. The ability to think independently is not a threat to organisational cohesion. It is one of the conditions that makes long-term resilience possible.

Once the sheep began falling, intervention was almost impossible. The opportunity to prevent disaster existed before the first movement occurred. This is perhaps the most important leadership lesson of all. Management is often associated with solving problems. Leadership is about preventing problems from becoming crises.

The best leaders spend less time reacting and more time anticipating. They monitor emerging risks, encourage difficult conversations, challenge assumptions, and build systems that detect weak signals before those signals become emergencies.

Most organisational disasters do not occur without warning. The warnings are usually present. They are simply ignored until the consequences become impossible to overlook.

The sheep of Gevas were not stupid. They were operating within a system that rewarded following, lacked active oversight, and failed to recognise danger early enough.

Many organisations face the same risk. Talented employees can still make poor collective decisions. Capable teams can still drift into failure. Strong institutions can still walk over cliffs if leadership is absent, dissent is discouraged, and risks are ignored.

The lesson is not that organisations should avoid collaboration or consensus. The lesson is that leaders must actively read the terrain ahead. Because by the time everyone agrees on the direction, it may already be too late.

The cliff rarely appears without warning.

The real question is whether anyone is watching for it.

As the Climate Changes, Zambia Must Redefine Sanitation

Every rainy season, cholera claims lives in Zambia, lives that could be saved by something as simple as a toilet. As the world marks World Toilet Day for 2025, Zambia finds itself confronting a crisis that is as familiar as it is urgent. The annual event, established by the United Nations to inspire action toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 (clean water and sanitation for all by 2030), reminds us that sanitation is not merely an issue of comfort; it is about public health, human dignity and climate resilience.

This year’s theme, “Sanitation in a Changing World”, carries the tagline “We’ll Always Need the Toilet.” It highlights the unchanging importance of sanitation even as the world around us transforms under the pressures of climate change, ageing infrastructure and underinvestment. To meet the global sanitation goal, the world must move five times faster than it is doing today. That statistic alone should jolt us into action.

For Zambia, the message could not be timelier. Each rainy season brings with it the spectre of cholera outbreaks and other waterborne diseases, particularly in densely populated urban settlements where toilets are inadequate, waste management is poor, and drainage systems fail under heavy rains. The situation reflects not only infrastructural gaps but also deep-seated inequalities in access to basic services. The link between sanitation and health could not be clearer: without safe toilets and clean water, cholera will continue to resurface, undermining decades of public health progress.

Yet the sanitation challenge is no longer just about hygiene, it is also about climate change. Floods, unpredictable rainfall, and prolonged droughts are making it harder to maintain safe and sustainable sanitation systems. Floodwaters can contaminate wells and pit latrines, spreading disease, while droughts reduce the water available for hygiene. Climate variability is also compromising the durability and quality of sanitation infrastructure, particularly in resource-limited settings where systems are already fragile. In short, climate change is making it harder to keep toilets functional and safe.

As global leaders gather for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, Zambia and other developing nations must ensure that sanitation is not sidelined in climate negotiations. Sanitation and climate change are intimately linked in two directions. On one hand, poor sanitation contributes to climate change: the unsafe disposal of faecal matter produces greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, adding to global emissions. On the other hand, climate variability: floods, rising temperatures and extreme weather, erodes the very sanitation systems needed to contain those emissions and protect human health.

Therefore, the outcomes of COP30 should include stronger recognition of sanitation as part of the climate–health–resilience agenda. Climate adaptation frameworks must support countries like Zambia to build resilient, low-emission, and future-ready toilets that can withstand floods, droughts and population pressures. These solutions are not just technical, they are moral imperatives that address both environmental integrity and human dignity.

Encouragingly, there are funding mechanisms that can help. The Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Adaptation Fund, and emerging loss and damage finance instruments offer opportunities to channel resources towards water and sanitation projects that are both climate-smart and community-driven. Zambia’s policymakers should seize these opportunities to develop proposals that integrate sanitation into climate action plans, ensuring that access to safe toilets becomes part of the broader narrative on resilience and sustainable development.

Globally, momentum is building. As of early November 2025, about 64 countries have submitted their nationally determined contributions (NDC) 3.0, the “2035-aligned” NDCs under the Paris Agreement, demonstrating growing ambition to address climate change. Zambia can follow suit by embedding sanitation and hygiene priorities within its own climate commitments, recognising that a clean toilet is also a climate solution.

World Toilet Day is a call to rethink how we approach one of humanity’s oldest and most basic needs. Toilets symbolise civilisation, dignity, and progress, but in a changing climate, they also represent resilience and adaptation. For Zambia, the path forward demands more than commemorations; it requires investment, innovation, and political will.

As the climate changes, we must redefine sanitation, not as a peripheral concern, but as a central pillar of sustainable development. Because, indeed, we’ll always need the toilet.

Silhouette of a Woman

The rain fell in steady iron sheets, turning the familiar streets into mirrors of gray. She stood at the threshold of the Chilenje house she had called home for the last three years of her marriage, a suitcase in one hand and the weight of a thousand unsaid words in the other. She didn’t slam the door. She simply pulled it shut with a quiet click that felt louder than any argument she had ever had.

Her mother named her Towera, the shiny and beautiful one! 

Inside the house and after what felt like 40 days and 40 nights, Andrew would wake eventually to an empty bed and a note she hadn’t bothered to write. 

"What new things were left to say?" she thought. "Every road that we knew doesn’t lead me home anymore."

She had tried. God, how she had tried. Late-night talks that dissolved into gaslighting and blackmailing or promises whispered in the dark that evaporated by morning. The relationship which had started with a barrage of love bombings, had quickly become controlling. 

The slow erosion of trust created a chasm that even brushing past each other in the kitchen felt like colliding with a stranger. The love that once filled the rooms had thinned into echoes, hollow repetitions of old conversations that no longer reached either of them.

She had become, somewhere along the way, an outline. A shape Andrew could recognize from a distance and command without ever having to see her face. A silhouette didn't argue. A silhouette had no inside to bruise. He had loved her edges and never once asked what was inside them.

In the beginning, she thought marriage was a destination. Well, at least that's how she was socialised. Now she understood it had only ever been a path, and theirs had cracked beyond repair. 

She packed what she could: clothes, two of her favourite books that still brought her comfort and the small bundle of savings she had quietly set aside for rainy days. 

And it was raining.

She left behind what she should: the wedding photos, the shared dreams and the version of herself that had shrunk to fit inside Andrew's expectations.

The Nyati and Muramba Roads were empty as she walked, drizzles soaking through her coat. Here was the X Factor Bar at Chris Corner where they used to meet after work, laughing over bottles of Mosi. Just across the Mosi-o-tunya Road, there was the park bench where he once proposed with nervous hands and hopeful eyes. Now it all felt so cold, like mendacious tales of adventure that her grandfather used to tell. The memories played in her mind but no longer ached. They simply existed, detached, like scenes from someone else’s life.

"I don’t feel regret," she thought, pulling her collar higher. "Just a silhouette of the woman I was before all of this."

She had spent years trying to fix what was broken, believing that enough love, enough patience, enough sacrifice could mend the fractures. But some things don’t mend. They only teach you how to stop bleeding. Every word they said now just echoed instead of connecting. Andrew's little games marinated in the silences used as weapons, the promises that never materialized and the way he made her doubt her own worth. They all now held no power anymore. She didn’t need his name. She didn’t need the role she had played for so long.

Her footsteps carried her toward the bus station at the corner of Chilimbulu and Mosi-o-tunya Road, opposite Lewanika Mall. With each step, the broken track of their marriage stretched behind her. She wasn’t looking back. Something’s never last, and theirs had reached its end.

As the first bus pulled away from the curb, Towera pressed her forehead against the cool window. The street lights along the Burma Road blurred into streaks of silver as the bus started its journey towards town. 

"I’m gone without a trace," she realized. "No time to replace what we lost." 

If Andrew called her name tomorrow. Or next month. Or years from now, it wouldn’t be the same woman who would answer. That woman had already begun to unfold.

The rain continued to fall as the bus carried her into the shades of gray beyond the city limits. For the first time in years, Towera breathed deeply. The shiny and beautiful one was learning how to glint again. And today, she had chosen survival.

"Till death do us part," she sighed. It had taken her years to hear the line for what it was. A slogan. And no one should ever die or sacrifice their happiness for a slogan.

She was finally walking away from her childhood dream, terminating her membership from the 'Shipikisha Club.' She had left as a silhouette. Somewhere between Chilenje and the City Centre, she was beginning to take shape again. And for the first time in three years, restarting her life didn't feel like exile. It felt like beginning.