“The Congo River can power all of Africa and a third of Europe.”

Brett Bowes is talking about electricity. Or at least that is where he starts.

The river has carried this potential for decades, he explains. People know it is there. The calculations have been done. The opportunity is visible to anyone willing to look. Yet almost none of that potential has been realised.

“It’s latent,”

he says.

“It’s sitting there waiting.”

As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that he is no longer talking about the river. He is talking about communities. Organisations. Economies. People.

Again and again, he returns to the same idea. Some of the most significant opportunities around us are not hidden. They are simply unseen.

Meeting Brett

We are speaking with Brett Bowes from Karongwe Private Game Reserve in Limpopo, South Africa. Over the next few years, the reserve will undergo a significant transformation. Additional land is being incorporated. New lodges are being developed. The reserve is expected to grow from approximately 8,700 hectares to more than 16,000 hectares. Alongside this expansion, new educational initiatives, local enterprise projects, infrastructure developments, and community partnerships at scale are emerging.

Yet what occupies Brett's attention is not growth itself.

It is possibility.

Throughout our conversation, he repeatedly returns to a simple observation:

“Many of the things we need already exist. The challenge is recognising how to achieve them.”

This way of seeing appears to shape how he thinks about leadership, conservation, business, and the future.

The unexpected turning point

The roots of this perspective seem to go back much further than Karongwe. Years ago, Brett had built one of South Africa’s largest independent advertising and marketing businesses. The company was growing rapidly. International firms were making acquisition offers. By most conventional measures, he was successful.

Then one of the company’s largest clients collapsed. The consequences were immediate and severe. Staff jobs were at risk. The future of the business became uncertain. Suddenly much of what had seemed stable no longer was. In the middle of this crisis, a colleague approached him with a request. A suicide support organisation called Lifeline was struggling and needed help.

He remembers thinking that he was already carrying more than enough of his own problems. Yet he agreed to meet them. What surprised him was not the work itself. It was what happened afterwards.

Driving home from the meetings, he found himself singing along to the radio. He looked forward to those conversations more than almost anything else in his diary. For the first time, he realised there was a difference between success and meaning.

“I realised there was something missing,” he tells us.

The experience did not lead him to reject business. If anything, it led him to rethink what business could be used for beyond creating a return for investors. A sentence he shares later in the conversation feels connected to that moment:

“If every person in the world who could do something for the people they could afford to help actually did it, the world would be a completely different place.”

A different understanding of value

Throughout the interview, Brett repeatedly challenges assumptions about capitalism, development, and value creation. What interested us was that he does not reject markets or entrepreneurship. Instead, he questions the short-term logic that often dominates, and in his view, limits them.

At one point he describes a conversation with a forestry executive in Indonesia. The discussion centred on community investment and why companies often treat social spending as a cost rather than as part of the business itself.

What if, Brett wondered, the timeline was wrong?

What if community upliftment, education, environmental restoration, and local economic development were not acts of generosity but investments in the long-term conditions that allow business to thrive at an even greater rate? The idea surfaces repeatedly in different forms throughout the conversation.

A local community is not a stakeholder to be managed. It is part of the system that creates value. Education is not philanthropy. It is an investment in future capability. Environmental restoration is not separate from economic performance. It is part of sustaining it. The boundaries that traditionally separate these things begin to feel less clear the longer the conversation continues.

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The job creation zone

Nowhere is this more visible than in the vision Brett describes for the land surrounding Karongwe. Using a map shared on his screen, he walks us through plans for a kilometre-wide development corridor running alongside the reserve.

Part of it will act as a buffer between neighbouring communities and the reserve itself. Beyond that, however, sits a different ambition.

• A technical college.
• Hospitality training.
• Conservation education.
• Solar infrastructure.
• Water systems.
• Local enterprise development.
• New industries.
• Employment opportunities.

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The vision is ambitious, but what stood out was how often Brett described these initiatives not as inventions but as discoveries. The opportunities, he believes, are already present. The land is there. The people are there. The need is there. The potential is there. The challenge is seeing it and then  creating the conditions for those elements to connect. Its synchronicity

In this sense, leadership becomes less about imposing solutions and more about recognising possibilities that have been waiting in plain sight.

Learning to see

A similar pattern appears in one of the technologies Brett describes. For years, large amounts of non recyclable plastic have ended up in landfills because they could not be economically recycled. The technology to convert that plastic into fuel has existed for some time, but the economics rarely worked to create investment at scale.

Now, through a different approach, the same technology is becoming not only financially viable - but really attractive.  Again, Brett describes it as latent potential. Not something newly invented. Something newly recognised.

The same pattern appears whether he is talking about communities, businesses, technology, education, or conservation. The possibility already exists. Someone simply needs to notice it and do something about it.

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Beyond transition as crisis

As part of the Leading through Transitions inquiry, we have spoken with leaders navigating uncertainty, disruption, instability, and loss. Those themes are present here too. Yet Brett introduces a slightly different perspective.

Throughout the conversation, he returns repeatedly to opportunities hidden inside existing systems, relationships, technologies, and places. The future, in his telling, does not always arrive through invention. Sometimes it emerges when we finally recognise what has been there all along.

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The Congo River.
A struggling community.
A piece of land beside a reserve.
A technology that already exists.
A relationship that has not yet been fully explored.

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Again and again, Brett points not towards scarcity but towards possibility. Not towards what is missing, but towards what remains unseen. Listening to him, we found ourselves wondering whether one of the leadership capacities most needed during transition may be attention itself.

The ability to notice.
The ability to connect seemingly unrelated possibilities.
The ability to see value where others see limitation.

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Perhaps transition is not only asking leaders to respond to what is breaking down. Perhaps it is also inviting them to recognise what is waiting to emerge.

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If so, what latent possibilities might already exist within the organisations, communities, and systems we are trying to change?