Outside In: The GrowZA Playbook

Penned by GrowZA ED - Craig Kensley

Yesterday I found myself sitting in a room at the Mercedes‑Benz factory in East London, invited to speak to the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation. Just being in that room was an honour, not because of the brand names, but because it signalled something important about how GrowZA has been growing up.

If you’re reading this next to the glossy photo of a tuxedoed champion holding two Laureus statuettes in front of a G‑Wagon: no, that’s not the event I attended, and no, he definitely wasn’t in East London with us. BUT, the brands in that image are the ecosystem we’re moving through, and we don’t get to pretend they’re not part of the story.

Our work lives in that intersection between global logos, local realities, and the slow, unglamorous work of making impact legible and believable.

Ours isn't a story about a miracle breakthrough it's simply an outside‑in reflection on how we’ve tried to build a social investment agency that can survive, contribute, and keep its integrity in a real, often unforgiving development market.

How realpolitik entered the room

My relationship with realpolitik started as frustration. In the early days, I kept bumping into the same wall: the distance between what we said we wanted (transformation, equity, long‑term social impact) and how decisions were actually being made (year‑to‑year budgets, risk committees, shifting corporate priorities).

Over time, “realpolitik” became a useful word for naming that gap. It pushed me to stop designing for the development market I wished existed and start designing for the one that actually does.

It meant:

• Paying attention to where budgets really sit, not where we’d like them to sit.

• Understanding who actually has power to decide, and what they are accountable for.

• Accepting that some things will not move, no matter how beautiful the slide deck.

Realpolitik turned “impact” from a moral mood into a practice that had to survive procurement policies, board packs, and cash‑flow spreadsheets.

From ideals to anchors

Once you start taking realpolitik seriously, another question appears: how do you make your work legible to the systems you’re trying to move?

That’s where the idea of anchors became central. An anchor is a way of making our work graspable from the outside. Effectively a language, framework, or category that already exists in someone else’s head.

It forced us to ask:

• What are we called in their system?

• Where do we sit on their organisational chart or dashboards?

• Which number moves when we do our job well?

This is part of why we leaned so deliberately into shared frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals and national reporting processes.

If you want the work to be taken seriously by decision‑makers, it has to show up in the spaces where their responsibilities live: indicators, scorecards, submissions, strategy documents.

Slowly, GrowZA became easier to place. Not just “good people doing good things”, but: development consulting, impact accelerator, think tank, policy shop. Work that can be explained to a CFO, a country director, or a board chair without losing its soul.

Credibility as a survival discipline

The third piece of the playbook is credibility. For us, that is not about polish; it’s about competence and consistency over time.

We use a simple test: if all our marketing disappeared tomorrow, would our work still send us work?

That question has shaped almost everything: how we staff, how we scope, how we manage expectations, how we say no.

In a small ecosystem, you don’t have to be the loudest voice; you have to be the one that is still there, doing solid work, when the noise has moved on.

Credibility has been the quiet engine behind invitations we never would have “networked” our way into: national advisory processes, cross‑border programmes, collaborations with public institutions and private funds. It’s rarely glamorous day‑to‑day, but it’s what allows our mission to survive contact with reality.

Landing in East London

So when I walked into the Laureus Sport for Good gathering at the Mercedes‑Benz factory in East London, I wasn’t there as a founder with a heroic origin story. I was there as someone who has spent years working to see the world as it is, give it a way to hold our work, and stay long enough to be believed.

Laureus is a global NGO with a serious track record and a demanding remit: using sport to drive social change at scale. To be invited into that room, in that context, felt significant. It was a signal that this outside‑in discipline we’ve been refining at GrowZA is legible and valuable beyond our immediate networks.

As I shared the three pillars (realpolitik, anchors, credibility) I realised the room already understood them in their own language. They know what it means to make programmes work in tough environments, to translate ideals into line items, to show impact to boards and communities at the same time.

What moved me most was the sense that our small, deliberate practice in South Africa sits inside a much larger global conversation about how to do social investment in a way that is honest, grounded and sustainable.

A quiet kind of honour

For me, the honour of being in that Mercedes‑Benz factory with Laureus was like a quiet confirmation: this outside‑in playbook we’ve been building travels.

It can sit inside a local NGO conversation, a national policy process, or a global sport‑for‑good platform and still make sense.

And that, more than any single project, is what sustainability looks like to me now: a way of working that can move across rooms, adapt to context, and still remain recognisably itself.

This is how we GrowZA, and yesterday, in East London, I was reminded that we’re not doing it alone.

Thanks to Keuen Roberts and Marlene Coetzee for believing in the value of our story. On to the next.