14 minutes agoWhat a baboon taught me about reading the room

It was an ordinary afternoon in Botswana, the kind that makes you forget you are working. My colleagues and I had just finished lunch and were walking back toward our workstation, still laughing about something said over the meal, when a baboon appeared on the path ahead of us. At first it seemed curious, watching us the way wildlife often does when it has grown used to human visitors.

Then, without warning, it charged. I did not have time to think through a plan. I only had time to notice what the baboon was fixated on, the ice cream cone I was carrying.

So, I dropped it, stepped back, and created space for my colleagues and myself to move away. The baboon stopped for the ice cream. We kept walking, hearts racing, laughing again within minutes, this time from relief rather than lunch conversation.

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It would have been easy to file that moment away as nothing more than a travel story, the sort one repeats at dinner tables for years. But the longer I sat with it, the more I understood that something more important had happened on that path. An entire exchange, a negotiation even, had taken place between me and that animal, and not a single word had been spoken.

The baboon communicated. It communicated need, frustration, and perhaps even scarcity, through its charge. I communicated too, through the ice cream I let go of and the distance I put between us.

Neither of us said anything, yet the message on both sides was received clearly enough to avoid harm. Much of what researchers understand about human and wildlife conflict points back to resources, land, food, water, and space that both people and animals depend on and increasingly compete for. The baboon was not being difficult for its own sake.

It was communicating a need it could not express in any language I would recognise, through the only means available to it, which was action. I have thought about that afternoon often since, mostly because I have come to recognise the same pattern inside institutions, boardrooms, and communities across the continent I work in every day. We are trained to think of organisational communication as something that lives in memos, strategy documents, town hall speeches, and press statements.

Words we can quote, minute, and file. But some of the most honest signals an institution sends never make it into a document at all. They show up in how a team behaves when resources tighten.

They show up in how leadership carries itself when pressure builds. They show up in how quickly trust erodes when people feel that no one is actually listening to them. Reading the room is often spoken about as a soft skill, something pleasant to have rather than something essential to lead well.

I would argue the opposite. Leaders who cannot read their institutions, who cannot sense friction building before it turns into crisis, end up applying the wrong solutions to the wrong problems. They draft policy for a disagreement that was never really about policy at all.

It was about who feels seen, who feels heard, and who feels that their share of a limited resource is fair. Had I not read what that baboon was actually asking for that afternoon, I would not have understood that the situation was not personal aggression but a request rooted in scarcity. I would not have known that offering something and stepping back, rather than standing my ground or shouting, was the way to open an escape route for all of us.

Reading the moment correctly changed how I responded to it, and how I responded determined whether the encounter ended safely. That same principle scales far beyond a footpath in Botswana. Across the continent, as urban development pushes further into what was once open habitat, communities and wildlife authorities are constantly negotiating shared space, often without either side fully understanding what the other is signalling.

And the truth is, this pattern repeats itself well beyond conservation. Communities in conflict with governments, employees in conflict with employers, citizens in conflict with the institutions meant to serve them, are frequently expressing needs through action because they either could not, or felt they would not, be heard through words. This is precisely the thinking that will sit at the centre of the Africa Roundtable Cape Town Annual Conference, taking place from 6 to 10 October under the themeThe Future of Africa: Innovate, Trade and Grow.

Our mandate this year moves beyond the usual expectation that leaders understand policy and know how to discuss it competently. We are asking leaders to go further, to genuinely comprehend the environment in which their policies land, and to understand how those policies are felt by the people living inside them.

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