Signals > Symbols

(Notes from the field)

I watched a video of a watch collector talking about the Omega x Swatch Mission to the Moon series the other day.

He called it a wealth signal, not a status symbol.

That stuck with me.

Because the thing most people miss is that Swatch owns Omega.

So this wasn’t two brands meeting halfway, it was a quiet distortion inside one ecosystem.

Luxury and accessibility were calibrating each other.

Because good strategy bends the system just enough to stay alive without breaking it.

And I think the same applies in social investment. By the time something becomes a symbol: a policy, a buzzword, a neat framework - the real signal has already shifted.

We saw it with BBBEE, then MDGs, then SDGs, and now ESG.

Each started as a signal, full of intent and possibility.And each eventually hardened into compliance theatre.

Meanwhile, the deeper shift from charity to system design kept moving underneath.

That’s the space GrowZA stepped into. When we started building white-labelled service suites for NGOs, it wasn’t to make them corporate, it was to make them legible in a changing world.

We could see that legitimacy was migrating from conviction to capability. But a lot of the sector read that as betrayal. They saw corporatisation; we saw translation.

Because the truth is, power speaks in a different language now and someone has to interpret it before the next signal hardens into another symbol.

So we took what we’d learned and started presenting it to global sustainability offices inside multinationals. And they are listening. Not because we spoke their jargon, but because we were early but because we built the connective tissue they were just beginning to look for.

Now that work shows up in our think tanks, policy projects, and accelerator programmes. The quiet, deliberate plumbing for a civic economy that actually works.

I know it can look confusing from the outside. Sometimes we get accused of trying to corporatise NGOs.But what we’re really doing is this controlled distortion I spoke about earlier - bending systems that no longer serve their purpose. Not to erase the soul of the sector, but to help it survive the next wave of reality.

Because this work is realpolitik. It’s about reading power, understanding ownership, and designing for the world as it is - not as it used to be.

Our job as nation builders isn’t to react; it’s to interpret, influence, and respond.

Beat the traffic.

This is how we GrowZA.